One of our present recollections of childhood is that it was a time when we were confident of being taken care of. We took no thought for raiment, but to wear it when it was provided. We went to sleep without anxiety. No distraction came into our dreams. We did not spend our dream-hours in carrying impossible burdens up interminable hills. It was but a moment from Goodnight to Good-morning, and the new days always blossomed out in original freshness and sparkle.
The quietude of our young years was due, more than we thought of then, to the fact that we had a father and mother to go to when in trouble. They used always to help us out of our little difficulties. When the child comes in from outside, the first question he is likely to ask is, "Where's mother?" He may not want her for anything particular, but he wants to know she is there. Having father and mother under the same roof makes the child sleep more quietly at night.
And so among the larger difficulties, that throng and swarm around us as we move along into older years, there is nothing we need so much as to feel that there is someone who stands to us in the same relation now as father and mother used to years ago. That is the first idea of God we want to have formed in us when we are little, and the last idea we want to have of Him as we move out and up into the place prepared for us in the Father's house on high. The first recorded sentence that Jesus spoke called God his Father, and his last recorded sentence on the cross called God his Father.
