But while thus, on the one hand, we use Christ's doctrine of God to our comfort, let us take care lest, on the other hand, we abuse it to our hurt and undoing. There has scarcely ever been a time when the Church has not suffered through "disproportioned thoughts" of God. To-day our peril is lest, in emphasizing the Divine Fatherhood, we ignore the Divine Sovereignty, and make of God a weak, indulgent Eli, without either purpose or power to chastise His wilful and disobedient children. "God is good; God is love; why then should we fear? Will He not deal tenderly with us and with all men, forgiving us even unto seventy times seven?" The argument is true--and it is false. As an assurance to the penitent and to the broken in heart, it is true, blessedly true; in any other sense it is false as hell. He whom Christ called, and taught us to call "Father," He also called "Holy Father" and "Righteous Father." Have we forgotten Peter's warning--we do not need to ask at whose lips he learned it--"If ye call on Him as Father ... pass the time of your sojourning in fear." This is no contradiction of the doctrine of Fatherhood; strictly speaking, it is not even a modification of it; rather is it an essential part of any true and complete statement of it. Peter does not mean God is a Father, and He is also to be feared; that is to miss the whole point of his words; what he means is, God is a Father, and, therefore, He is to be feared; the fear follows necessarily on the true idea of Fatherhood. Ah, brethren, if we understood Peter and Peter's Lord aright, we should be not the less, but the more anxious about our sins, because we have learnt to call God "Father." "Evil," it has been well said, "is a more terrible thing to the family than to the state."[12] Acts which the law takes no cognizance of a father dare not, and cannot, pass by; what the magistrate may dismiss with light censure he must search out to its depths. The judgment of a father--there is no judgment like that. And if it is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God, for him who all his life through has set himself against the Divine law and love, it is a still more fearful thing because those hands are the hands of a Father.