child of the devil, however potentially capable of being translated
from death into life."

Such teaching is so horrible and abominable that it is hard to find
words to express one's sense of its shamefulness. To attribute it
to the Christ, who came to seek and save what is lost, is an act of
traitorous wickedness. If Christ had made it His business to
thunder into the ears of the outcasts, whom He preferred to the
Scribes and Pharisees, this appalling message, where would His
teaching be? What message of hope would it hold for the soul? Such
a view of Christianity as this insults alike the soul and the mind
and the heart; it deliberately insults God; the message of Christ
to the vilest human spirit is that it is indeed, in spite of all
its corruption, its falls, its shame, in very truth God's own
child; it calls upon the sinner to recognise it, it takes for
granted that he feels it. The people whom Christ denounced with
indignation so fiery, so blasting, that it even seems inconsistent
with His perfect gentleness, were the people who thus professed to
know and interpret the mind of God, who bade the sinner believe
that He was a merciless judge, extreme to mark what is done amiss,
when the one secret was that He was the tenderest and most loving
of Fathers. But according to this preacher's terrible doctrine God
pours into the world a stream of millions of human beings, all
children of the devil, with instincts of a corrupt kind, hampered
by dreadful inheritances, doomed, from their helpless and reluctant
birth, to be sinful here and lost hereafter, and then prescribes to
them a hard and difficult path, beset by clamorous guides, pointing
in a hundred different directions, bidding them find the intricate
way to His Heart, or perish. The truth is the precise opposite. The
divine voice says to every man: "Hampered and sore hindered as you