THE FATHERHOOD OF GOD. BY ROBERT MITCHELL, Pastor of the E.U. Church, Queen's Park, Manchester. BIBLIOTHECA AUQ 80 BODLEIA LONDON: HAMILTON, ADAMS, & CO. GLASGOW: THOMAS D. MORISON. PREFACE. "EVER in my distresses and my loneliness," writes Carlyle, "has fantasy turned, full of longing, to that unknown Father, who perhaps far from me, perhaps near, either way invisible, might have taken me to his paternal bosom, there to lie screened from many a woe. Thou beloved Father, dost thou still, shut out from me only by these penetrable curtains of earthly space, wend to and fro in the crowd of the living? Or art thou hidden by those far thicker curtains of the Everlasting Night, or rather of the Everlasting Day, through which my mortal eye and outstretched arms need not strive to reach ?" It is so a human heart works along the lines of the lower and the higher relations. It feels its way to a |