A Good Conscience.
These words are very wide words, too wide to please most people. They preach a very free grace, too free to please most people. Man preaches his own notions of God's forgiveness, his notions of what he thinks God ought to do; but when God proclaims His own forgiveness, and tells men what He has actually done, and bids His Apostle declare boldly that baptism doth now save us, then man is frightened at the vastness of God's generosity, and thinks God's grace too free, His forgiveness too complete.
I. What hinders a little child, from the very moment that it can think or speak, from entering into God's salvation? I know one hindrance at least, and that is when the parents' harshness or neglect tempts the child to fancy that God the Father is such a father to him as his parents are, and that to be a child of God is to look up to his heavenly Father with dread and suspicion as to a hard taskmaster whose anger has to be turned away, and not with that perfect love, and trust, and respect, and self-sacrifice with which the Lord Jesus fulfilled His Father's will and proclaimed His Father's glory.
II. The catechism of our Church does not begin by telling children they are sinners; they will find that out soon enough for themselves from their own wayward and self-willed hearts. It begins by teaching the child the name of God. It is so careful of God's honour, so careful that the child should learn from the first to look up to God with love and trust, that it dare not tell the child that God can destroy and punish before it has told him that God is a Father and a Maker, the Father of spirits, who has made him and all the world. It dare not tell him that mankind is fallen before it has told him that all the world is redeemed. It tells him of the name of God, and tells him that God is with him, and he with God, and bids him believe that and be saved from his birth-hour to endless ages. It does not tell him to pray that he may become God's child, but to pray because he is God's child already. It tells him that he is safe and saved, even as David, and Isaiah, and all holy men who ever lived have been, as long as he trusts in God, and clings to God, and obeys God; and that only when he forsakes God and follows his own selfishness and pride can any thing or being in earth or hell harm him.
C. Kingsley, Sermons for the Times,p. 29.
References: 1 Peter 3:22. J. Keble, Sermons from Ascension to Trinity,p. 1; Spurgeon, Sermons,vol. xxxii., No. 1928. 1 Peter 4:1-3. H. W. Beecher, Christian World Pulpit,vol. xxv., p. 51; A. Rowland, Ibid.,vol. xxxvi., p. 225; F. D. Maurice, Sermons,vol. i., p. 333. 1 Peter 4:3. Homilist,3rd series, vol. ix., p. 24. 1 Peter 4:4. Homiletic Magazine,vol. vii., p. 82. 1 Peter 4:4; 1 Peter 4:5. E. Cooper, Practical Sermons,vol. iii., p. 160. 1 Peter 4:6. F. W. Farrar. Christian World Pulpit,vol. xii., p. 353.