Page:Three Thousand Selected Quotations from Brilliant Writers.djvu/268

260 Fatherhood! what does that word itself teach us? It speaks of the communication of a life, and the reciprocity of love. It rests upon a Divine act, and it involves a human emotion. It involves that the Father and the child shall have kindred life—the Father bestowing, and the child possessing a life which is derived; and because derived, kindred; and because kindred, unfolding itself in likeness to the Father that gave it. And it requires that between the Father's heart and the child's eartheart [sic] there shall pass, in blessed interchange and quick correspondence, answering love, flashing backwards and forwards, like the lightning that touches the earth, and rises from it again. —.

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There is all the difference in the world between searching for evidences of my sonship, and seeking to get the conviction of God's fatherhood. The one is an endless, profitless, soul-tormenting task; the other is the light and liberty, the glorious liberty of the children on God.

What another being is life when we have found out our Father; and if we work, it is beneath His eye, and if we play, it is in the light and encouragement of His smile. Earth's sunshine is heaven's radiance, and the stars of night as if the beginning of the beatific vision; so soft, so sweet, so gentle, so resposeful, so almost infinite have all things become, because we have found our Father in our God. —.

When we come to tell the completed story of our lives, we shall have to record the fulfillment of all God's promises, and the accomplishment of all our prayers that were built on them.