69 Revelation of the Fatherhood of God so that we understand both aspects of our human life. We turn to Rabbi Ben Ezra and see the mystery wrought out there: “He fixed thee mid this dance Of plastic circumstance, This Present, thou, forsooth, wouldst fain arrest: Machinery just meant To give thy soul its bent. Try thee and turn thee forth, sufficiently impressed.” When the wheel moves fast, and the hand of the Potter seems cruel upon the clay,.and the friction is full of terrible heat, we begin to understand something of it all in realizing that the Potter’s hand is the hand of a Father shaping in fatherly discipline the life of His son. “If ye endure chast ening, God dealeth with you as sons.” . OUR IDEALS Or think, in the second place, how this conception of God inspires and rectifies the ideals of our lives. It was this that suggested the idea to Jesus here. He saw that there was absolutely no guarantee of right standards of life in a mere theistic faith, and there are none. We cannot morally trust Unitarianism if we take it away from living contact with the evangelical tradition. There is too much loose, subjective caprice in i t ; there is not enough firm and unassailable anchor age in the objective realities of a revelation of the character of God made known to us in His divine Son. We have no guarantee whatever of just and perfect moral ideals that we do not get from the exposure of the father-character of God in the person of Jesus Christ and from personal union with God in Him. As a simple matter of fact the best ideals of our life we all ovfe to just that revelation. The ideal of purity—the Jews never had it. They had an ideal of ritual cleanliness, but they had no Christian ideal of moral purity. You cannot find
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