And Christ's own thought of God as Father must be our key here. And the matter may well be counted worth a more careful analysis than it often gets. How does a father distinguish between what he calls an obedient and a disobedient child? Both are faulty. How in any fair sense may one be called obedient? To the earthly father, that child is called an obedient child, not who is deliberately setting his will against his father's with no intention to coöperate with the father's purpose for him, but whose loyal intention is to do the father's will, really to coöperate with the father in the father's own purpose for the child's life. When, now, this child is carried away by some gust of temptation and disobeys, and then returns in penitence to the father, evidently viewing the sin, so far as his experience allows, as the father views it, and heartily putting it away, the father, _either with or without penalty_, restores the child to full personal relation to himself; and that is the vital point. And, though he neither judges the past life as without failure, nor expects the future to be without failure, he approves the child, as in a true sense obedient. He is an approved child. What is it that satisfies the father in such a case? Upon what does he rely in his hope for matured character in the child? What, in biblical language, "covers" for the father the actual disobediences of the past and the certain disobediences of the future, and enables him in a sense to ignore both in his approval of the child? Certainly, the present purpose of the child, the child's honest intention to coöperate with the father in the father's purpose for him. Yes; but as certainly, it seems to the writer, _not that alone_. The father's hope for his child's steady growth in righteousness depends not only on the child's present intention, but much more upon the father's own intention never to give up in his attempt at any cost to help that child to conquer himself.[86] The father may be said here in a true sense to propitiate himself; and his own fixed purpose has become a partial substitute for the wavering purpose of the child. And the child's full righteousness is seen, not merely in an attitude of immediate present obedience, but especially in his loyal acceptance of his filial relation--in his honest surrender to his father's influence. And the father can now say, Because my child accepts heartily his relation to me, and honestly throws himself open to it to let it be to him all it can and work its own work in him, I may approve him; for this relation to me which he so takes has only to go on, to work out its complete results in a matured character. In the hearty acceptance of this filial relation to me, there is contained the promise of the end.