III. Theories opposing the Doctrine of Providence.1. Fatalism.Fatalism maintains the certainty, but denies the freedom, of human self-determination,—thus substituting fate for providence.To this view we object that (a) it contradicts consciousness, which testifies that we are free; (b) it exalts the divine power at the expense of God's truth, wisdom, holiness, love; (c) it destroys all evidence of the personality and freedom of God; (d) it practically makes necessity the only God, and leaves the imperatives of our moral nature without present validity or future vindication.The Mohammedans have frequently been called fatalists, and the practical effect of the teachings of the Koran upon the masses is to make them so. The ordinary Mohammedan will have no physician or medicine, because everything happens as God has before appointed. Smith, however, in his Mohammed and Mohammedanism, denies that fatalism is essential to the system.Islam=“submission,”and the participleMoslem=“submitted,”i. e., to God. Turkish proverb:“A man cannot escape what is written on his forehead.”The Mohammedan thinks of God's dominant attribute as being greatness rather than righteousness, power rather than purity. God is the personification of arbitrary will, not the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. But there is in the system an absence of sacerdotalism, a jealousy for the honor of God, a brotherhood of believers, a reverence for what is considered the word of God, and a bold and habitual devotion of its adherents to their faith.Stanley, Life and Letters, 1:489, refers to the Mussulman tradition existing in Egypt that the fate of Islam requires that it should at last be superseded by Christianity. F. W. Sanders denies that the Koran is peculiarlysensual.“The Christian and Jewish religions,”he says,“have their paradise also. The Koran makes this the reward, but not the ideal, of conduct;‘Grace from thy Lord—that is the grand bliss.’The emphasis of the Koran is upon right living. The Koran does not teach the propagation of religion byforce. It declares that there shall be no compulsion in religion. The practice of converting by the sword is to be distinguished from the teaching of Mohammed, just as the Inquisition and the slave-trade in Christendom do not prove that Jesus taught them. The Koran did not institutepolygamy. It found unlimited polygamy, divorce, and infanticide. The last it prohibited; the two former it restricted and ameliorated, just as Moses found polygamy, but brought it within bounds. The Koran is not hostile tosecular learning. Learning flourished under the Bagdad and Spanish Caliphates. When Moslems oppose learning, they do so without authority from the Koran. The Roman Catholic church has opposed schools, but we do not attribute this to the gospel.”See Zwemer, Moslem Doctrine of God.Calvinists can assert freedom, since man's will finds its highest freedom only in submission to God. Islam also cultivates submission, but it is the submission not of love but of fear. The essential difference between Mohammedanism and Christianity is found in the revelation which the latter gives of the love of God in Christ—a revelation which secures from free moral agents the submission of love; see page 186. On fatalism, see McCosh, Intuitions, 266; Kant, Metaphysic of Ethics, 52-74, 98-108; Mill, Autobiography, 168-170, and System of Logic, 521-526; Hamilton, Metaphysics, 692; Stewart, Active and Moral Powers of Man, ed. Walker, 268-324.2. Casualism.Casualism transfers the freedom of mind to nature, as fatalism transfers the fixity of nature to mind. It thus exchanges providence for chance.[pg 428]Upon this view we remark:(a) If chance be only another name for human ignorance, a name for the fact that there are trivial occurrences in life which have no meaning or relation to us,—we may acknowledge this, and still hold that providence arranges every so-called chance, for purposes beyond our knowledge. Chance, in this sense, is providential coincidence which we cannot understand, and do not need to trouble ourselves about.Not all chances are of equal importance. The casual meeting of a stranger in the street need not bring God's providence before me, although I know that God arranges it. Yet I can conceive of that meeting as leading to religious conversation and to the stranger's conversion. When we are prepared for them, we shall see many opportunities which are now as unmeaning to us as the gold in the river-beds was to the early Indians in California. I should be an ingrate, if I escaped a lightning-stroke, and did not thank God; yet Dr. Arnold's saying that every school boy should put on his hat for God's glory, and with a high moral purpose, seems morbid. There is a certain room for the play of arbitrariness. We must not afflict ourselves or the church of God by requiring a Pharisaic punctiliousness in minutiæ. Life is too short to debate the question which shoe we shall put on first.“Love God and do what you will,”said Augustine; that is, Love God, and act out that love in a simple and natural way. Be free in your service, yet be always on the watch for indications of God's will.(b) If chance be taken in the sense of utter absence of all causal connections in the phenomena of matter and mind,—we oppose to this notion the fact that the causal judgment is formed in accordance with a fundamental and necessary law of human thought, and that no science or knowledge is possible without the assumption of its validity.InLuke 10:31, our Savior says:“By chance a certain priest was going down that way.”Janet:“Chance is not a cause, but a coincidence of causes.”Bowne, Theory of Thought and Knowledge, 197—“By chance is not meant lack of causation, but the coincidence in an event of mutually independent series of causation. Thus the unpurposed meeting of two persons is spoken of as a chance one, when the movement of neither implies that of the other. Here the antithesis of chance is purpose.”(c) If chance be used in the sense of undesigning cause,—it is evidently insufficient to explain the regular and uniform sequences of nature, or the moral progress of the human race. These things argue a superintending and designing mind—in other words, a providence. Since reason demands not only a cause, but a sufficient cause, for the order of the physical and moral world, casualism must be ruled out.The observer at the signal station was asked what was the climate of Rochester.“Climate?”he replied;“Rochester has no climate,—only weather!”So Chauncey Wright spoke of the ups and downs of human affairs as simply“cosmical weather.”But our intuition of design compels us to see mind and purpose in individual and national history, as well as in the physical universe. The same argument which proves the existence of God proves also the existence of a providence. See Farrar, Life of Christ, 1:155, note.3. Theory of a merely general providence.Many who acknowledge God's control over the movements of planets and the destinies of nations deny any divine arrangement of particular events. Most of the arguments against deism are equally valid against the theory of a merely general providence. This view is indeed only a form of deism, which holds that God has not wholly withdrawn himself from the universe, but that his activity within it is limited to the maintenance of general laws.[pg 429]This appears to have been the view of most of the heathen philosophers. Cicero:“Magna dii curant; parva negligunt.”“Even in kingdoms among men,”he says,“kings do not trouble themselves with insignificant affairs.”Fullerton, Conceptions of the Infinite, 9—“Plutarch thought there could not be an infinity of worlds,—Providence could not possibly take charge of so many.‘Troublesome and boundless infinity’could be grasped by no consciousness.”The ancient Cretans made an image of Jove without ears, for they said:“It is a shame to believe that God would hear the talk of men.”So Jerome, the church Father, thought it absurd that God should know just how many gnats and cockroaches there were in the world. David Harum is wiser when he expresses the belief that there is nothing wholly bad or useless in the world:“A reasonable amount of fleas is good for a dog,—they keep him from broodin' on bein' a dog.”This has been paraphrased:“A reasonable number of beaux are good for a girl,—they keep her from brooding over her being a girl.”In addition to the arguments above alluded to, we may urge against this theory that:(a) General control over the course of nature and of history is impossible without control over the smallest particulars which affect the course of nature and of history. Incidents so slight as well-nigh to escape observation at the time of their occurrence are frequently found to determine the whole future of a human life, and through that life the fortunes of a whole empire and of a whole age.“Nothing great has great beginnings.”“Take care of the pence, and the pounds will take care of themselves.”“Care for the chain is care for the links of the chain.”Instances in point are the sleeplessness of King Ahasuerus (Esther 6:1), and the seeming chance that led to the reading of the record of Mordecai's service and to the salvation of the Jews in Persia; the spider's web spun across the entrance to the cave in which Mohammed had taken refuge, which so deceived his pursuers that they passed on In a bootless chase, leaving to the world the religion and the empire of the Moslems; the preaching of Peter the Hermit, which occasioned the first Crusade; the chance shot of an archer, which pierced the right eye of Harold, the last of the purely English kings, gained the battle of Hastings for William the Conqueror, and secured the throne of England for the Normans; the flight of pigeons to the south-west, which changed the course of Columbus, hitherto directed towards Virginia, to the West Indies, and so prevented the dominion of Spain over North America; the storm that dispersed the Spanish Armada and saved England from the Papacy, and the storm that dispersed the French fleet gathered for the conquest of New England—the latter on a day of fasting and prayer appointed by the Puritans to avert the calamity; the settling of New England by the Puritans, rather than by French Jesuits; the order of Council restraining Cromwell and his friends from sailing to America; Major André's lack of self-possession in presence of his captors, which led him to ask an improper question instead of showing his passport, and which saved the American cause; the unusually early commencement of cold weather, which frustrated the plans of Napoleon and destroyed his army in Russia; the fatal shot at Fort Sumter, which precipitated the war of secession and resulted in the abolition of American slavery. Nature is linked to history; the breeze warps the course of the bullet; the worm perforates the plank of the ship. God must care for the least, or he cannot care for the greatest.“Large doors swing on small hinges.”The barking of a dog determined F. W. Robertson to be a preacher rather than a soldier. Robert Browning, Mr. Sludge the Medium:“We find great things are made of little things, And little things go lessening till at last Comes God behind them.”E. G. Robinson:“We cannot suppose only a general outline to have been in the mind of God, while the filling-up is left to be done in some other way. The general includes the special.”Dr. Lloyd, one of the Oxford Professors, said to Pusey,“I wish you would learn something about those German critics.”“In the obedient spirit of those times,”writes Pusey,“I set myself at once to learn German, and I went to Göttingen, to study at once the language and the theology. My life turned on that hint of Dr. Lloyd's.”Goldwin Smith:“Had a bullet entered the brain of Cromwell or of William III in his first battle, or had Gustavus not fallen at Lützen, the course of history apparently would have been changed. The course even of science would have been changed, if there had not been a Newton and a Darwin.”The annexation of Corsica to France[pg 430]gave to France a Napoleon, and to Europe a conqueror. Martineau, Seat of Authority, 101—“Had the monastery at Erfurt deputed another than young Luther on its errand to paganized Rome, or had Leo X sent a less scandalous agent than Tetzel on his business to Germany, the seeds of the Reformation might have fallen by the wayside where they had no deepness of earth, and the Western revolt of the human mind might have taken another date and another form.”See Appleton, Works, 1:149sq.; Lecky, England in the Eighteenth Century, chap. I.(b) The love of God which prompts a general care for the universe must also prompt a particular care for the smallest events which affect the happiness of his creatures. It belongs to love to regard nothing as trifling or beneath its notice which has to do with the interests of the object of its affection. Infinite love may therefore be expected to provide for all, even the minutest things in the creation. Without belief in this particular care, men cannot long believe in God's general care. Faith in a particular providence is indispensable to the very existence of practical religion; for men will not worship or recognize a God who has no direct relation to them.Man's care for his own body involves care for the least important members of it. A lover's devotion is known by his interest in the minutest concerns of his beloved. So all our affairs are matters of interest to God. Pope's Essay on Man:“All nature is but art unknown to thee; All chance, direction which thou canst not see; All discord, harmony not understood; All partial evil, universal good.”If harvests may be labored for and lost without any agency of God; if rain or sun may act like fate, sweeping away the results of years, and God have no hand in it all; if wind and storm may wreck the ship and drown our dearest friends, and God not care for us or for our loss, then all possibility of general trust in God will disappear also.God's care is shown in the least things as well as in the greatest. In Gethsemane Christ says:“Let these go their way: that the word might be fulfilled which he spake, Of those whom thou hast given me I lost not one”(John 18:8, 9). It is the same spirit as that of his intercessory prayer:“I guarded them, and not one of them perished, but the son of perdition”(John 17:12). Christ gives himself as a prisoner that his disciples may go free, even as he redeems us from the curse of the law by being made a curse for us (Gal. 3:13). The dewdrop is moulded by the same law that rounds the planets into spheres. Gen. Grant said he had never but once sought a place for himself, and in that place he was a comparative failure; he had been an instrument in God's hand for the accomplishing of God's purposes, apart from any plan or thought or hope of his own.Of his journey through the dark continent in search of David Livingston, Henry M. Stanley wrote in Scribner's Monthly for June, 1890:“Constrained at the darkest hour humbly to confess that without God's help I was helpless, I vowed a vow in the forest solitudes that I would confess his aid before men. Silence as of death was around me; it was midnight; I was weakened by illness, prostrated with fatigue, and wan with anxiety for my white and black companions, whose fate was a mystery. In this physical and mental distress I besought God to give me back my people. Nine hours later we were exulting with a rapturous joy. In full view of all was the crimson flag with the crescent, and beneath its waving folds was the long-lost rear column.... My own designs were frustrated constantly by unhappy circumstances. I endeavored to steer my course as direct as possible, but there was an unaccountable influence at the helm.... I have been conscious that the issues of every effort were in other hands.... Divinity seems to have hedged us while we journeyed, impelling us whither it would, effecting its own will, but constantly guiding and protecting us.”He refuses to believe that it is all the result of“luck”, and he closes with a doxology which we should expect from Livingston but not from him:“Thanks be to God, forever and ever!”(c) In times of personal danger, and in remarkable conjunctures of public affairs, men instinctively attribute to God a control of the events which take place around them. The prayers which such startling emergencies force from men's lips are proof that God is present and active in human affairs. This testimony of our mental constitution must be regarded as virtually the testimony of him who framed this constitution.[pg 431]No advance of science can rid us of this conviction, since it comes from a deeper source than mere reasoning. The intuition of design is awakened by the connection of events in our daily life, as much as by the useful adaptations which we see in nature.Ps. 107:23-28—“They that go down to the sea in ships ... mount up to the heavens, they go down again to the depths ... And are at their wits' end. Then they cry unto Jehovah in their trouble.”A narrow escape from death shows us a present God and Deliverer. Instance the general feeling throughout the land, expressed by the press as well as by the pulpit, at the breaking out of our rebellion and at the President's subsequent Proclamation of Emancipation.“Est deus in nobis; agitante calescimus illo.”For contrast between Nansen's ignoring of God in his polar journey and Dr. Jacob Chamberlain's calling upon God in his strait in India, see Missionary Review, May, 1898. Sunday School Times, March 4, 1893—“Benjamin Franklin became a deist at the age of fifteen. Before the Revolutionary War he was merely a shrewd and pushing business man. He had public spirit, and he made one happy discovery in science. But‘Poor Richard's’sayings express his mind at that time. The perils and anxieties of the great war gave him a deeper insight. He and others entered upon it‘with a rope around their necks.’As he told the Constitutional Convention of 1787, when he proposed that its daily sessions be opened with prayer, the experiences of that war showed him that‘God verily rules in the affairs of men.’And when the designs for an American coinage were under discussion, Franklin proposed to stamp on them, not‘A Penny Saved is a Penny Earned,’or any other piece of worldly prudence, but‘The Fear of the Lord is the Beginning of Wisdom.’”(d) Christian experience confirms the declarations of Scripture that particular events are brought about by God with special reference to the good or ill of the individual. Such events occur at times in such direct connection with the Christian's prayers that no doubt remains with regard to the providential arrangement of them. The possibility of such divine agency in natural events cannot be questioned by one who, like the Christian, has had experience of the greater wonders of regeneration and daily intercourse with God, and who believes in the reality of creation, incarnation, and miracles.Providence prepares the way for men's conversion, sometimes by their own partial reformation, sometimes by the sudden death of others near them. Instance Luther and Judson. The Christian learns that the same Providence that led him before his conversion is busy after his conversion in directing his steps and in supplying his wants. Daniel Defoe:“I have been fed more by miracle than Elijah when the angels were his purveyors.”InPsalm 32, David celebrates not only God's pardoning mercy but his subsequent providential leading:“I will counsel thee with mine eye upon thee”(verse 8). It may be objected that we often mistake the meaning of events. We answer that, as in nature, so in providence, we are compelled to believe, not that weknowthe design, but that thereisa design. Instance Shelley's drowning, and Jacob Knapp's prayer that his opponent might be stricken dumb. Lyman Beecher's attributing the burning of the Unitarian church to God's judgment upon false doctrine was invalidated a little later by the burning of his own church.Job 23:10—“He knoweth the way that is mine,”or“the way that is with me,”i. e., my inmost way, life, character;“When he hath tried me, I shall come forth as gold.”1 Cor. 19:4—“and the rock was Christ”—Christ was the ever present source of their refreshment and life, both physical and spiritual. God's providence is all exercised through Christ.2 Cor. 2:14—“But thanks be unto God, who always leadeth us in triumph in Christ”; not, as in A. V.,“causeth us to triumph.”Paul glories, not in conquering, but in being conquered. Let Christ triumph, not Paul.“Great King of grace, my heart subdue; I would be led in triumph too. A willing captive to my Lord, To own the conquests of his word.”Therefore Paul can call himself“the prisoner of Christ Jesus”(Eph. 3:1). It was Christ who had shut him up two years in Cæsarea, and then two succeeding years in Rome.
III. Theories opposing the Doctrine of Providence.1. Fatalism.Fatalism maintains the certainty, but denies the freedom, of human self-determination,—thus substituting fate for providence.To this view we object that (a) it contradicts consciousness, which testifies that we are free; (b) it exalts the divine power at the expense of God's truth, wisdom, holiness, love; (c) it destroys all evidence of the personality and freedom of God; (d) it practically makes necessity the only God, and leaves the imperatives of our moral nature without present validity or future vindication.The Mohammedans have frequently been called fatalists, and the practical effect of the teachings of the Koran upon the masses is to make them so. The ordinary Mohammedan will have no physician or medicine, because everything happens as God has before appointed. Smith, however, in his Mohammed and Mohammedanism, denies that fatalism is essential to the system.Islam=“submission,”and the participleMoslem=“submitted,”i. e., to God. Turkish proverb:“A man cannot escape what is written on his forehead.”The Mohammedan thinks of God's dominant attribute as being greatness rather than righteousness, power rather than purity. God is the personification of arbitrary will, not the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. But there is in the system an absence of sacerdotalism, a jealousy for the honor of God, a brotherhood of believers, a reverence for what is considered the word of God, and a bold and habitual devotion of its adherents to their faith.Stanley, Life and Letters, 1:489, refers to the Mussulman tradition existing in Egypt that the fate of Islam requires that it should at last be superseded by Christianity. F. W. Sanders denies that the Koran is peculiarlysensual.“The Christian and Jewish religions,”he says,“have their paradise also. The Koran makes this the reward, but not the ideal, of conduct;‘Grace from thy Lord—that is the grand bliss.’The emphasis of the Koran is upon right living. The Koran does not teach the propagation of religion byforce. It declares that there shall be no compulsion in religion. The practice of converting by the sword is to be distinguished from the teaching of Mohammed, just as the Inquisition and the slave-trade in Christendom do not prove that Jesus taught them. The Koran did not institutepolygamy. It found unlimited polygamy, divorce, and infanticide. The last it prohibited; the two former it restricted and ameliorated, just as Moses found polygamy, but brought it within bounds. The Koran is not hostile tosecular learning. Learning flourished under the Bagdad and Spanish Caliphates. When Moslems oppose learning, they do so without authority from the Koran. The Roman Catholic church has opposed schools, but we do not attribute this to the gospel.”See Zwemer, Moslem Doctrine of God.Calvinists can assert freedom, since man's will finds its highest freedom only in submission to God. Islam also cultivates submission, but it is the submission not of love but of fear. The essential difference between Mohammedanism and Christianity is found in the revelation which the latter gives of the love of God in Christ—a revelation which secures from free moral agents the submission of love; see page 186. On fatalism, see McCosh, Intuitions, 266; Kant, Metaphysic of Ethics, 52-74, 98-108; Mill, Autobiography, 168-170, and System of Logic, 521-526; Hamilton, Metaphysics, 692; Stewart, Active and Moral Powers of Man, ed. Walker, 268-324.2. Casualism.Casualism transfers the freedom of mind to nature, as fatalism transfers the fixity of nature to mind. It thus exchanges providence for chance.[pg 428]Upon this view we remark:(a) If chance be only another name for human ignorance, a name for the fact that there are trivial occurrences in life which have no meaning or relation to us,—we may acknowledge this, and still hold that providence arranges every so-called chance, for purposes beyond our knowledge. Chance, in this sense, is providential coincidence which we cannot understand, and do not need to trouble ourselves about.Not all chances are of equal importance. The casual meeting of a stranger in the street need not bring God's providence before me, although I know that God arranges it. Yet I can conceive of that meeting as leading to religious conversation and to the stranger's conversion. When we are prepared for them, we shall see many opportunities which are now as unmeaning to us as the gold in the river-beds was to the early Indians in California. I should be an ingrate, if I escaped a lightning-stroke, and did not thank God; yet Dr. Arnold's saying that every school boy should put on his hat for God's glory, and with a high moral purpose, seems morbid. There is a certain room for the play of arbitrariness. We must not afflict ourselves or the church of God by requiring a Pharisaic punctiliousness in minutiæ. Life is too short to debate the question which shoe we shall put on first.“Love God and do what you will,”said Augustine; that is, Love God, and act out that love in a simple and natural way. Be free in your service, yet be always on the watch for indications of God's will.(b) If chance be taken in the sense of utter absence of all causal connections in the phenomena of matter and mind,—we oppose to this notion the fact that the causal judgment is formed in accordance with a fundamental and necessary law of human thought, and that no science or knowledge is possible without the assumption of its validity.InLuke 10:31, our Savior says:“By chance a certain priest was going down that way.”Janet:“Chance is not a cause, but a coincidence of causes.”Bowne, Theory of Thought and Knowledge, 197—“By chance is not meant lack of causation, but the coincidence in an event of mutually independent series of causation. Thus the unpurposed meeting of two persons is spoken of as a chance one, when the movement of neither implies that of the other. Here the antithesis of chance is purpose.”(c) If chance be used in the sense of undesigning cause,—it is evidently insufficient to explain the regular and uniform sequences of nature, or the moral progress of the human race. These things argue a superintending and designing mind—in other words, a providence. Since reason demands not only a cause, but a sufficient cause, for the order of the physical and moral world, casualism must be ruled out.The observer at the signal station was asked what was the climate of Rochester.“Climate?”he replied;“Rochester has no climate,—only weather!”So Chauncey Wright spoke of the ups and downs of human affairs as simply“cosmical weather.”But our intuition of design compels us to see mind and purpose in individual and national history, as well as in the physical universe. The same argument which proves the existence of God proves also the existence of a providence. See Farrar, Life of Christ, 1:155, note.3. Theory of a merely general providence.Many who acknowledge God's control over the movements of planets and the destinies of nations deny any divine arrangement of particular events. Most of the arguments against deism are equally valid against the theory of a merely general providence. This view is indeed only a form of deism, which holds that God has not wholly withdrawn himself from the universe, but that his activity within it is limited to the maintenance of general laws.[pg 429]This appears to have been the view of most of the heathen philosophers. Cicero:“Magna dii curant; parva negligunt.”“Even in kingdoms among men,”he says,“kings do not trouble themselves with insignificant affairs.”Fullerton, Conceptions of the Infinite, 9—“Plutarch thought there could not be an infinity of worlds,—Providence could not possibly take charge of so many.‘Troublesome and boundless infinity’could be grasped by no consciousness.”The ancient Cretans made an image of Jove without ears, for they said:“It is a shame to believe that God would hear the talk of men.”So Jerome, the church Father, thought it absurd that God should know just how many gnats and cockroaches there were in the world. David Harum is wiser when he expresses the belief that there is nothing wholly bad or useless in the world:“A reasonable amount of fleas is good for a dog,—they keep him from broodin' on bein' a dog.”This has been paraphrased:“A reasonable number of beaux are good for a girl,—they keep her from brooding over her being a girl.”In addition to the arguments above alluded to, we may urge against this theory that:(a) General control over the course of nature and of history is impossible without control over the smallest particulars which affect the course of nature and of history. Incidents so slight as well-nigh to escape observation at the time of their occurrence are frequently found to determine the whole future of a human life, and through that life the fortunes of a whole empire and of a whole age.“Nothing great has great beginnings.”“Take care of the pence, and the pounds will take care of themselves.”“Care for the chain is care for the links of the chain.”Instances in point are the sleeplessness of King Ahasuerus (Esther 6:1), and the seeming chance that led to the reading of the record of Mordecai's service and to the salvation of the Jews in Persia; the spider's web spun across the entrance to the cave in which Mohammed had taken refuge, which so deceived his pursuers that they passed on In a bootless chase, leaving to the world the religion and the empire of the Moslems; the preaching of Peter the Hermit, which occasioned the first Crusade; the chance shot of an archer, which pierced the right eye of Harold, the last of the purely English kings, gained the battle of Hastings for William the Conqueror, and secured the throne of England for the Normans; the flight of pigeons to the south-west, which changed the course of Columbus, hitherto directed towards Virginia, to the West Indies, and so prevented the dominion of Spain over North America; the storm that dispersed the Spanish Armada and saved England from the Papacy, and the storm that dispersed the French fleet gathered for the conquest of New England—the latter on a day of fasting and prayer appointed by the Puritans to avert the calamity; the settling of New England by the Puritans, rather than by French Jesuits; the order of Council restraining Cromwell and his friends from sailing to America; Major André's lack of self-possession in presence of his captors, which led him to ask an improper question instead of showing his passport, and which saved the American cause; the unusually early commencement of cold weather, which frustrated the plans of Napoleon and destroyed his army in Russia; the fatal shot at Fort Sumter, which precipitated the war of secession and resulted in the abolition of American slavery. Nature is linked to history; the breeze warps the course of the bullet; the worm perforates the plank of the ship. God must care for the least, or he cannot care for the greatest.“Large doors swing on small hinges.”The barking of a dog determined F. W. Robertson to be a preacher rather than a soldier. Robert Browning, Mr. Sludge the Medium:“We find great things are made of little things, And little things go lessening till at last Comes God behind them.”E. G. Robinson:“We cannot suppose only a general outline to have been in the mind of God, while the filling-up is left to be done in some other way. The general includes the special.”Dr. Lloyd, one of the Oxford Professors, said to Pusey,“I wish you would learn something about those German critics.”“In the obedient spirit of those times,”writes Pusey,“I set myself at once to learn German, and I went to Göttingen, to study at once the language and the theology. My life turned on that hint of Dr. Lloyd's.”Goldwin Smith:“Had a bullet entered the brain of Cromwell or of William III in his first battle, or had Gustavus not fallen at Lützen, the course of history apparently would have been changed. The course even of science would have been changed, if there had not been a Newton and a Darwin.”The annexation of Corsica to France[pg 430]gave to France a Napoleon, and to Europe a conqueror. Martineau, Seat of Authority, 101—“Had the monastery at Erfurt deputed another than young Luther on its errand to paganized Rome, or had Leo X sent a less scandalous agent than Tetzel on his business to Germany, the seeds of the Reformation might have fallen by the wayside where they had no deepness of earth, and the Western revolt of the human mind might have taken another date and another form.”See Appleton, Works, 1:149sq.; Lecky, England in the Eighteenth Century, chap. I.(b) The love of God which prompts a general care for the universe must also prompt a particular care for the smallest events which affect the happiness of his creatures. It belongs to love to regard nothing as trifling or beneath its notice which has to do with the interests of the object of its affection. Infinite love may therefore be expected to provide for all, even the minutest things in the creation. Without belief in this particular care, men cannot long believe in God's general care. Faith in a particular providence is indispensable to the very existence of practical religion; for men will not worship or recognize a God who has no direct relation to them.Man's care for his own body involves care for the least important members of it. A lover's devotion is known by his interest in the minutest concerns of his beloved. So all our affairs are matters of interest to God. Pope's Essay on Man:“All nature is but art unknown to thee; All chance, direction which thou canst not see; All discord, harmony not understood; All partial evil, universal good.”If harvests may be labored for and lost without any agency of God; if rain or sun may act like fate, sweeping away the results of years, and God have no hand in it all; if wind and storm may wreck the ship and drown our dearest friends, and God not care for us or for our loss, then all possibility of general trust in God will disappear also.God's care is shown in the least things as well as in the greatest. In Gethsemane Christ says:“Let these go their way: that the word might be fulfilled which he spake, Of those whom thou hast given me I lost not one”(John 18:8, 9). It is the same spirit as that of his intercessory prayer:“I guarded them, and not one of them perished, but the son of perdition”(John 17:12). Christ gives himself as a prisoner that his disciples may go free, even as he redeems us from the curse of the law by being made a curse for us (Gal. 3:13). The dewdrop is moulded by the same law that rounds the planets into spheres. Gen. Grant said he had never but once sought a place for himself, and in that place he was a comparative failure; he had been an instrument in God's hand for the accomplishing of God's purposes, apart from any plan or thought or hope of his own.Of his journey through the dark continent in search of David Livingston, Henry M. Stanley wrote in Scribner's Monthly for June, 1890:“Constrained at the darkest hour humbly to confess that without God's help I was helpless, I vowed a vow in the forest solitudes that I would confess his aid before men. Silence as of death was around me; it was midnight; I was weakened by illness, prostrated with fatigue, and wan with anxiety for my white and black companions, whose fate was a mystery. In this physical and mental distress I besought God to give me back my people. Nine hours later we were exulting with a rapturous joy. In full view of all was the crimson flag with the crescent, and beneath its waving folds was the long-lost rear column.... My own designs were frustrated constantly by unhappy circumstances. I endeavored to steer my course as direct as possible, but there was an unaccountable influence at the helm.... I have been conscious that the issues of every effort were in other hands.... Divinity seems to have hedged us while we journeyed, impelling us whither it would, effecting its own will, but constantly guiding and protecting us.”He refuses to believe that it is all the result of“luck”, and he closes with a doxology which we should expect from Livingston but not from him:“Thanks be to God, forever and ever!”(c) In times of personal danger, and in remarkable conjunctures of public affairs, men instinctively attribute to God a control of the events which take place around them. The prayers which such startling emergencies force from men's lips are proof that God is present and active in human affairs. This testimony of our mental constitution must be regarded as virtually the testimony of him who framed this constitution.[pg 431]No advance of science can rid us of this conviction, since it comes from a deeper source than mere reasoning. The intuition of design is awakened by the connection of events in our daily life, as much as by the useful adaptations which we see in nature.Ps. 107:23-28—“They that go down to the sea in ships ... mount up to the heavens, they go down again to the depths ... And are at their wits' end. Then they cry unto Jehovah in their trouble.”A narrow escape from death shows us a present God and Deliverer. Instance the general feeling throughout the land, expressed by the press as well as by the pulpit, at the breaking out of our rebellion and at the President's subsequent Proclamation of Emancipation.“Est deus in nobis; agitante calescimus illo.”For contrast between Nansen's ignoring of God in his polar journey and Dr. Jacob Chamberlain's calling upon God in his strait in India, see Missionary Review, May, 1898. Sunday School Times, March 4, 1893—“Benjamin Franklin became a deist at the age of fifteen. Before the Revolutionary War he was merely a shrewd and pushing business man. He had public spirit, and he made one happy discovery in science. But‘Poor Richard's’sayings express his mind at that time. The perils and anxieties of the great war gave him a deeper insight. He and others entered upon it‘with a rope around their necks.’As he told the Constitutional Convention of 1787, when he proposed that its daily sessions be opened with prayer, the experiences of that war showed him that‘God verily rules in the affairs of men.’And when the designs for an American coinage were under discussion, Franklin proposed to stamp on them, not‘A Penny Saved is a Penny Earned,’or any other piece of worldly prudence, but‘The Fear of the Lord is the Beginning of Wisdom.’”(d) Christian experience confirms the declarations of Scripture that particular events are brought about by God with special reference to the good or ill of the individual. Such events occur at times in such direct connection with the Christian's prayers that no doubt remains with regard to the providential arrangement of them. The possibility of such divine agency in natural events cannot be questioned by one who, like the Christian, has had experience of the greater wonders of regeneration and daily intercourse with God, and who believes in the reality of creation, incarnation, and miracles.Providence prepares the way for men's conversion, sometimes by their own partial reformation, sometimes by the sudden death of others near them. Instance Luther and Judson. The Christian learns that the same Providence that led him before his conversion is busy after his conversion in directing his steps and in supplying his wants. Daniel Defoe:“I have been fed more by miracle than Elijah when the angels were his purveyors.”InPsalm 32, David celebrates not only God's pardoning mercy but his subsequent providential leading:“I will counsel thee with mine eye upon thee”(verse 8). It may be objected that we often mistake the meaning of events. We answer that, as in nature, so in providence, we are compelled to believe, not that weknowthe design, but that thereisa design. Instance Shelley's drowning, and Jacob Knapp's prayer that his opponent might be stricken dumb. Lyman Beecher's attributing the burning of the Unitarian church to God's judgment upon false doctrine was invalidated a little later by the burning of his own church.Job 23:10—“He knoweth the way that is mine,”or“the way that is with me,”i. e., my inmost way, life, character;“When he hath tried me, I shall come forth as gold.”1 Cor. 19:4—“and the rock was Christ”—Christ was the ever present source of their refreshment and life, both physical and spiritual. God's providence is all exercised through Christ.2 Cor. 2:14—“But thanks be unto God, who always leadeth us in triumph in Christ”; not, as in A. V.,“causeth us to triumph.”Paul glories, not in conquering, but in being conquered. Let Christ triumph, not Paul.“Great King of grace, my heart subdue; I would be led in triumph too. A willing captive to my Lord, To own the conquests of his word.”Therefore Paul can call himself“the prisoner of Christ Jesus”(Eph. 3:1). It was Christ who had shut him up two years in Cæsarea, and then two succeeding years in Rome.
III. Theories opposing the Doctrine of Providence.1. Fatalism.Fatalism maintains the certainty, but denies the freedom, of human self-determination,—thus substituting fate for providence.To this view we object that (a) it contradicts consciousness, which testifies that we are free; (b) it exalts the divine power at the expense of God's truth, wisdom, holiness, love; (c) it destroys all evidence of the personality and freedom of God; (d) it practically makes necessity the only God, and leaves the imperatives of our moral nature without present validity or future vindication.The Mohammedans have frequently been called fatalists, and the practical effect of the teachings of the Koran upon the masses is to make them so. The ordinary Mohammedan will have no physician or medicine, because everything happens as God has before appointed. Smith, however, in his Mohammed and Mohammedanism, denies that fatalism is essential to the system.Islam=“submission,”and the participleMoslem=“submitted,”i. e., to God. Turkish proverb:“A man cannot escape what is written on his forehead.”The Mohammedan thinks of God's dominant attribute as being greatness rather than righteousness, power rather than purity. God is the personification of arbitrary will, not the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. But there is in the system an absence of sacerdotalism, a jealousy for the honor of God, a brotherhood of believers, a reverence for what is considered the word of God, and a bold and habitual devotion of its adherents to their faith.Stanley, Life and Letters, 1:489, refers to the Mussulman tradition existing in Egypt that the fate of Islam requires that it should at last be superseded by Christianity. F. W. Sanders denies that the Koran is peculiarlysensual.“The Christian and Jewish religions,”he says,“have their paradise also. The Koran makes this the reward, but not the ideal, of conduct;‘Grace from thy Lord—that is the grand bliss.’The emphasis of the Koran is upon right living. The Koran does not teach the propagation of religion byforce. It declares that there shall be no compulsion in religion. The practice of converting by the sword is to be distinguished from the teaching of Mohammed, just as the Inquisition and the slave-trade in Christendom do not prove that Jesus taught them. The Koran did not institutepolygamy. It found unlimited polygamy, divorce, and infanticide. The last it prohibited; the two former it restricted and ameliorated, just as Moses found polygamy, but brought it within bounds. The Koran is not hostile tosecular learning. Learning flourished under the Bagdad and Spanish Caliphates. When Moslems oppose learning, they do so without authority from the Koran. The Roman Catholic church has opposed schools, but we do not attribute this to the gospel.”See Zwemer, Moslem Doctrine of God.Calvinists can assert freedom, since man's will finds its highest freedom only in submission to God. Islam also cultivates submission, but it is the submission not of love but of fear. The essential difference between Mohammedanism and Christianity is found in the revelation which the latter gives of the love of God in Christ—a revelation which secures from free moral agents the submission of love; see page 186. On fatalism, see McCosh, Intuitions, 266; Kant, Metaphysic of Ethics, 52-74, 98-108; Mill, Autobiography, 168-170, and System of Logic, 521-526; Hamilton, Metaphysics, 692; Stewart, Active and Moral Powers of Man, ed. Walker, 268-324.2. Casualism.Casualism transfers the freedom of mind to nature, as fatalism transfers the fixity of nature to mind. It thus exchanges providence for chance.[pg 428]Upon this view we remark:(a) If chance be only another name for human ignorance, a name for the fact that there are trivial occurrences in life which have no meaning or relation to us,—we may acknowledge this, and still hold that providence arranges every so-called chance, for purposes beyond our knowledge. Chance, in this sense, is providential coincidence which we cannot understand, and do not need to trouble ourselves about.Not all chances are of equal importance. The casual meeting of a stranger in the street need not bring God's providence before me, although I know that God arranges it. Yet I can conceive of that meeting as leading to religious conversation and to the stranger's conversion. When we are prepared for them, we shall see many opportunities which are now as unmeaning to us as the gold in the river-beds was to the early Indians in California. I should be an ingrate, if I escaped a lightning-stroke, and did not thank God; yet Dr. Arnold's saying that every school boy should put on his hat for God's glory, and with a high moral purpose, seems morbid. There is a certain room for the play of arbitrariness. We must not afflict ourselves or the church of God by requiring a Pharisaic punctiliousness in minutiæ. Life is too short to debate the question which shoe we shall put on first.“Love God and do what you will,”said Augustine; that is, Love God, and act out that love in a simple and natural way. Be free in your service, yet be always on the watch for indications of God's will.(b) If chance be taken in the sense of utter absence of all causal connections in the phenomena of matter and mind,—we oppose to this notion the fact that the causal judgment is formed in accordance with a fundamental and necessary law of human thought, and that no science or knowledge is possible without the assumption of its validity.InLuke 10:31, our Savior says:“By chance a certain priest was going down that way.”Janet:“Chance is not a cause, but a coincidence of causes.”Bowne, Theory of Thought and Knowledge, 197—“By chance is not meant lack of causation, but the coincidence in an event of mutually independent series of causation. Thus the unpurposed meeting of two persons is spoken of as a chance one, when the movement of neither implies that of the other. Here the antithesis of chance is purpose.”(c) If chance be used in the sense of undesigning cause,—it is evidently insufficient to explain the regular and uniform sequences of nature, or the moral progress of the human race. These things argue a superintending and designing mind—in other words, a providence. Since reason demands not only a cause, but a sufficient cause, for the order of the physical and moral world, casualism must be ruled out.The observer at the signal station was asked what was the climate of Rochester.“Climate?”he replied;“Rochester has no climate,—only weather!”So Chauncey Wright spoke of the ups and downs of human affairs as simply“cosmical weather.”But our intuition of design compels us to see mind and purpose in individual and national history, as well as in the physical universe. The same argument which proves the existence of God proves also the existence of a providence. See Farrar, Life of Christ, 1:155, note.3. Theory of a merely general providence.Many who acknowledge God's control over the movements of planets and the destinies of nations deny any divine arrangement of particular events. Most of the arguments against deism are equally valid against the theory of a merely general providence. This view is indeed only a form of deism, which holds that God has not wholly withdrawn himself from the universe, but that his activity within it is limited to the maintenance of general laws.[pg 429]This appears to have been the view of most of the heathen philosophers. Cicero:“Magna dii curant; parva negligunt.”“Even in kingdoms among men,”he says,“kings do not trouble themselves with insignificant affairs.”Fullerton, Conceptions of the Infinite, 9—“Plutarch thought there could not be an infinity of worlds,—Providence could not possibly take charge of so many.‘Troublesome and boundless infinity’could be grasped by no consciousness.”The ancient Cretans made an image of Jove without ears, for they said:“It is a shame to believe that God would hear the talk of men.”So Jerome, the church Father, thought it absurd that God should know just how many gnats and cockroaches there were in the world. David Harum is wiser when he expresses the belief that there is nothing wholly bad or useless in the world:“A reasonable amount of fleas is good for a dog,—they keep him from broodin' on bein' a dog.”This has been paraphrased:“A reasonable number of beaux are good for a girl,—they keep her from brooding over her being a girl.”In addition to the arguments above alluded to, we may urge against this theory that:(a) General control over the course of nature and of history is impossible without control over the smallest particulars which affect the course of nature and of history. Incidents so slight as well-nigh to escape observation at the time of their occurrence are frequently found to determine the whole future of a human life, and through that life the fortunes of a whole empire and of a whole age.“Nothing great has great beginnings.”“Take care of the pence, and the pounds will take care of themselves.”“Care for the chain is care for the links of the chain.”Instances in point are the sleeplessness of King Ahasuerus (Esther 6:1), and the seeming chance that led to the reading of the record of Mordecai's service and to the salvation of the Jews in Persia; the spider's web spun across the entrance to the cave in which Mohammed had taken refuge, which so deceived his pursuers that they passed on In a bootless chase, leaving to the world the religion and the empire of the Moslems; the preaching of Peter the Hermit, which occasioned the first Crusade; the chance shot of an archer, which pierced the right eye of Harold, the last of the purely English kings, gained the battle of Hastings for William the Conqueror, and secured the throne of England for the Normans; the flight of pigeons to the south-west, which changed the course of Columbus, hitherto directed towards Virginia, to the West Indies, and so prevented the dominion of Spain over North America; the storm that dispersed the Spanish Armada and saved England from the Papacy, and the storm that dispersed the French fleet gathered for the conquest of New England—the latter on a day of fasting and prayer appointed by the Puritans to avert the calamity; the settling of New England by the Puritans, rather than by French Jesuits; the order of Council restraining Cromwell and his friends from sailing to America; Major André's lack of self-possession in presence of his captors, which led him to ask an improper question instead of showing his passport, and which saved the American cause; the unusually early commencement of cold weather, which frustrated the plans of Napoleon and destroyed his army in Russia; the fatal shot at Fort Sumter, which precipitated the war of secession and resulted in the abolition of American slavery. Nature is linked to history; the breeze warps the course of the bullet; the worm perforates the plank of the ship. God must care for the least, or he cannot care for the greatest.“Large doors swing on small hinges.”The barking of a dog determined F. W. Robertson to be a preacher rather than a soldier. Robert Browning, Mr. Sludge the Medium:“We find great things are made of little things, And little things go lessening till at last Comes God behind them.”E. G. Robinson:“We cannot suppose only a general outline to have been in the mind of God, while the filling-up is left to be done in some other way. The general includes the special.”Dr. Lloyd, one of the Oxford Professors, said to Pusey,“I wish you would learn something about those German critics.”“In the obedient spirit of those times,”writes Pusey,“I set myself at once to learn German, and I went to Göttingen, to study at once the language and the theology. My life turned on that hint of Dr. Lloyd's.”Goldwin Smith:“Had a bullet entered the brain of Cromwell or of William III in his first battle, or had Gustavus not fallen at Lützen, the course of history apparently would have been changed. The course even of science would have been changed, if there had not been a Newton and a Darwin.”The annexation of Corsica to France[pg 430]gave to France a Napoleon, and to Europe a conqueror. Martineau, Seat of Authority, 101—“Had the monastery at Erfurt deputed another than young Luther on its errand to paganized Rome, or had Leo X sent a less scandalous agent than Tetzel on his business to Germany, the seeds of the Reformation might have fallen by the wayside where they had no deepness of earth, and the Western revolt of the human mind might have taken another date and another form.”See Appleton, Works, 1:149sq.; Lecky, England in the Eighteenth Century, chap. I.(b) The love of God which prompts a general care for the universe must also prompt a particular care for the smallest events which affect the happiness of his creatures. It belongs to love to regard nothing as trifling or beneath its notice which has to do with the interests of the object of its affection. Infinite love may therefore be expected to provide for all, even the minutest things in the creation. Without belief in this particular care, men cannot long believe in God's general care. Faith in a particular providence is indispensable to the very existence of practical religion; for men will not worship or recognize a God who has no direct relation to them.Man's care for his own body involves care for the least important members of it. A lover's devotion is known by his interest in the minutest concerns of his beloved. So all our affairs are matters of interest to God. Pope's Essay on Man:“All nature is but art unknown to thee; All chance, direction which thou canst not see; All discord, harmony not understood; All partial evil, universal good.”If harvests may be labored for and lost without any agency of God; if rain or sun may act like fate, sweeping away the results of years, and God have no hand in it all; if wind and storm may wreck the ship and drown our dearest friends, and God not care for us or for our loss, then all possibility of general trust in God will disappear also.God's care is shown in the least things as well as in the greatest. In Gethsemane Christ says:“Let these go their way: that the word might be fulfilled which he spake, Of those whom thou hast given me I lost not one”(John 18:8, 9). It is the same spirit as that of his intercessory prayer:“I guarded them, and not one of them perished, but the son of perdition”(John 17:12). Christ gives himself as a prisoner that his disciples may go free, even as he redeems us from the curse of the law by being made a curse for us (Gal. 3:13). The dewdrop is moulded by the same law that rounds the planets into spheres. Gen. Grant said he had never but once sought a place for himself, and in that place he was a comparative failure; he had been an instrument in God's hand for the accomplishing of God's purposes, apart from any plan or thought or hope of his own.Of his journey through the dark continent in search of David Livingston, Henry M. Stanley wrote in Scribner's Monthly for June, 1890:“Constrained at the darkest hour humbly to confess that without God's help I was helpless, I vowed a vow in the forest solitudes that I would confess his aid before men. Silence as of death was around me; it was midnight; I was weakened by illness, prostrated with fatigue, and wan with anxiety for my white and black companions, whose fate was a mystery. In this physical and mental distress I besought God to give me back my people. Nine hours later we were exulting with a rapturous joy. In full view of all was the crimson flag with the crescent, and beneath its waving folds was the long-lost rear column.... My own designs were frustrated constantly by unhappy circumstances. I endeavored to steer my course as direct as possible, but there was an unaccountable influence at the helm.... I have been conscious that the issues of every effort were in other hands.... Divinity seems to have hedged us while we journeyed, impelling us whither it would, effecting its own will, but constantly guiding and protecting us.”He refuses to believe that it is all the result of“luck”, and he closes with a doxology which we should expect from Livingston but not from him:“Thanks be to God, forever and ever!”(c) In times of personal danger, and in remarkable conjunctures of public affairs, men instinctively attribute to God a control of the events which take place around them. The prayers which such startling emergencies force from men's lips are proof that God is present and active in human affairs. This testimony of our mental constitution must be regarded as virtually the testimony of him who framed this constitution.[pg 431]No advance of science can rid us of this conviction, since it comes from a deeper source than mere reasoning. The intuition of design is awakened by the connection of events in our daily life, as much as by the useful adaptations which we see in nature.Ps. 107:23-28—“They that go down to the sea in ships ... mount up to the heavens, they go down again to the depths ... And are at their wits' end. Then they cry unto Jehovah in their trouble.”A narrow escape from death shows us a present God and Deliverer. Instance the general feeling throughout the land, expressed by the press as well as by the pulpit, at the breaking out of our rebellion and at the President's subsequent Proclamation of Emancipation.“Est deus in nobis; agitante calescimus illo.”For contrast between Nansen's ignoring of God in his polar journey and Dr. Jacob Chamberlain's calling upon God in his strait in India, see Missionary Review, May, 1898. Sunday School Times, March 4, 1893—“Benjamin Franklin became a deist at the age of fifteen. Before the Revolutionary War he was merely a shrewd and pushing business man. He had public spirit, and he made one happy discovery in science. But‘Poor Richard's’sayings express his mind at that time. The perils and anxieties of the great war gave him a deeper insight. He and others entered upon it‘with a rope around their necks.’As he told the Constitutional Convention of 1787, when he proposed that its daily sessions be opened with prayer, the experiences of that war showed him that‘God verily rules in the affairs of men.’And when the designs for an American coinage were under discussion, Franklin proposed to stamp on them, not‘A Penny Saved is a Penny Earned,’or any other piece of worldly prudence, but‘The Fear of the Lord is the Beginning of Wisdom.’”(d) Christian experience confirms the declarations of Scripture that particular events are brought about by God with special reference to the good or ill of the individual. Such events occur at times in such direct connection with the Christian's prayers that no doubt remains with regard to the providential arrangement of them. The possibility of such divine agency in natural events cannot be questioned by one who, like the Christian, has had experience of the greater wonders of regeneration and daily intercourse with God, and who believes in the reality of creation, incarnation, and miracles.Providence prepares the way for men's conversion, sometimes by their own partial reformation, sometimes by the sudden death of others near them. Instance Luther and Judson. The Christian learns that the same Providence that led him before his conversion is busy after his conversion in directing his steps and in supplying his wants. Daniel Defoe:“I have been fed more by miracle than Elijah when the angels were his purveyors.”InPsalm 32, David celebrates not only God's pardoning mercy but his subsequent providential leading:“I will counsel thee with mine eye upon thee”(verse 8). It may be objected that we often mistake the meaning of events. We answer that, as in nature, so in providence, we are compelled to believe, not that weknowthe design, but that thereisa design. Instance Shelley's drowning, and Jacob Knapp's prayer that his opponent might be stricken dumb. Lyman Beecher's attributing the burning of the Unitarian church to God's judgment upon false doctrine was invalidated a little later by the burning of his own church.Job 23:10—“He knoweth the way that is mine,”or“the way that is with me,”i. e., my inmost way, life, character;“When he hath tried me, I shall come forth as gold.”1 Cor. 19:4—“and the rock was Christ”—Christ was the ever present source of their refreshment and life, both physical and spiritual. God's providence is all exercised through Christ.2 Cor. 2:14—“But thanks be unto God, who always leadeth us in triumph in Christ”; not, as in A. V.,“causeth us to triumph.”Paul glories, not in conquering, but in being conquered. Let Christ triumph, not Paul.“Great King of grace, my heart subdue; I would be led in triumph too. A willing captive to my Lord, To own the conquests of his word.”Therefore Paul can call himself“the prisoner of Christ Jesus”(Eph. 3:1). It was Christ who had shut him up two years in Cæsarea, and then two succeeding years in Rome.
III. Theories opposing the Doctrine of Providence.1. Fatalism.Fatalism maintains the certainty, but denies the freedom, of human self-determination,—thus substituting fate for providence.To this view we object that (a) it contradicts consciousness, which testifies that we are free; (b) it exalts the divine power at the expense of God's truth, wisdom, holiness, love; (c) it destroys all evidence of the personality and freedom of God; (d) it practically makes necessity the only God, and leaves the imperatives of our moral nature without present validity or future vindication.The Mohammedans have frequently been called fatalists, and the practical effect of the teachings of the Koran upon the masses is to make them so. The ordinary Mohammedan will have no physician or medicine, because everything happens as God has before appointed. Smith, however, in his Mohammed and Mohammedanism, denies that fatalism is essential to the system.Islam=“submission,”and the participleMoslem=“submitted,”i. e., to God. Turkish proverb:“A man cannot escape what is written on his forehead.”The Mohammedan thinks of God's dominant attribute as being greatness rather than righteousness, power rather than purity. God is the personification of arbitrary will, not the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. But there is in the system an absence of sacerdotalism, a jealousy for the honor of God, a brotherhood of believers, a reverence for what is considered the word of God, and a bold and habitual devotion of its adherents to their faith.Stanley, Life and Letters, 1:489, refers to the Mussulman tradition existing in Egypt that the fate of Islam requires that it should at last be superseded by Christianity. F. W. Sanders denies that the Koran is peculiarlysensual.“The Christian and Jewish religions,”he says,“have their paradise also. The Koran makes this the reward, but not the ideal, of conduct;‘Grace from thy Lord—that is the grand bliss.’The emphasis of the Koran is upon right living. The Koran does not teach the propagation of religion byforce. It declares that there shall be no compulsion in religion. The practice of converting by the sword is to be distinguished from the teaching of Mohammed, just as the Inquisition and the slave-trade in Christendom do not prove that Jesus taught them. The Koran did not institutepolygamy. It found unlimited polygamy, divorce, and infanticide. The last it prohibited; the two former it restricted and ameliorated, just as Moses found polygamy, but brought it within bounds. The Koran is not hostile tosecular learning. Learning flourished under the Bagdad and Spanish Caliphates. When Moslems oppose learning, they do so without authority from the Koran. The Roman Catholic church has opposed schools, but we do not attribute this to the gospel.”See Zwemer, Moslem Doctrine of God.Calvinists can assert freedom, since man's will finds its highest freedom only in submission to God. Islam also cultivates submission, but it is the submission not of love but of fear. The essential difference between Mohammedanism and Christianity is found in the revelation which the latter gives of the love of God in Christ—a revelation which secures from free moral agents the submission of love; see page 186. On fatalism, see McCosh, Intuitions, 266; Kant, Metaphysic of Ethics, 52-74, 98-108; Mill, Autobiography, 168-170, and System of Logic, 521-526; Hamilton, Metaphysics, 692; Stewart, Active and Moral Powers of Man, ed. Walker, 268-324.2. Casualism.Casualism transfers the freedom of mind to nature, as fatalism transfers the fixity of nature to mind. It thus exchanges providence for chance.[pg 428]Upon this view we remark:(a) If chance be only another name for human ignorance, a name for the fact that there are trivial occurrences in life which have no meaning or relation to us,—we may acknowledge this, and still hold that providence arranges every so-called chance, for purposes beyond our knowledge. Chance, in this sense, is providential coincidence which we cannot understand, and do not need to trouble ourselves about.Not all chances are of equal importance. The casual meeting of a stranger in the street need not bring God's providence before me, although I know that God arranges it. Yet I can conceive of that meeting as leading to religious conversation and to the stranger's conversion. When we are prepared for them, we shall see many opportunities which are now as unmeaning to us as the gold in the river-beds was to the early Indians in California. I should be an ingrate, if I escaped a lightning-stroke, and did not thank God; yet Dr. Arnold's saying that every school boy should put on his hat for God's glory, and with a high moral purpose, seems morbid. There is a certain room for the play of arbitrariness. We must not afflict ourselves or the church of God by requiring a Pharisaic punctiliousness in minutiæ. Life is too short to debate the question which shoe we shall put on first.“Love God and do what you will,”said Augustine; that is, Love God, and act out that love in a simple and natural way. Be free in your service, yet be always on the watch for indications of God's will.(b) If chance be taken in the sense of utter absence of all causal connections in the phenomena of matter and mind,—we oppose to this notion the fact that the causal judgment is formed in accordance with a fundamental and necessary law of human thought, and that no science or knowledge is possible without the assumption of its validity.InLuke 10:31, our Savior says:“By chance a certain priest was going down that way.”Janet:“Chance is not a cause, but a coincidence of causes.”Bowne, Theory of Thought and Knowledge, 197—“By chance is not meant lack of causation, but the coincidence in an event of mutually independent series of causation. Thus the unpurposed meeting of two persons is spoken of as a chance one, when the movement of neither implies that of the other. Here the antithesis of chance is purpose.”(c) If chance be used in the sense of undesigning cause,—it is evidently insufficient to explain the regular and uniform sequences of nature, or the moral progress of the human race. These things argue a superintending and designing mind—in other words, a providence. Since reason demands not only a cause, but a sufficient cause, for the order of the physical and moral world, casualism must be ruled out.The observer at the signal station was asked what was the climate of Rochester.“Climate?”he replied;“Rochester has no climate,—only weather!”So Chauncey Wright spoke of the ups and downs of human affairs as simply“cosmical weather.”But our intuition of design compels us to see mind and purpose in individual and national history, as well as in the physical universe. The same argument which proves the existence of God proves also the existence of a providence. See Farrar, Life of Christ, 1:155, note.3. Theory of a merely general providence.Many who acknowledge God's control over the movements of planets and the destinies of nations deny any divine arrangement of particular events. Most of the arguments against deism are equally valid against the theory of a merely general providence. This view is indeed only a form of deism, which holds that God has not wholly withdrawn himself from the universe, but that his activity within it is limited to the maintenance of general laws.[pg 429]This appears to have been the view of most of the heathen philosophers. Cicero:“Magna dii curant; parva negligunt.”“Even in kingdoms among men,”he says,“kings do not trouble themselves with insignificant affairs.”Fullerton, Conceptions of the Infinite, 9—“Plutarch thought there could not be an infinity of worlds,—Providence could not possibly take charge of so many.‘Troublesome and boundless infinity’could be grasped by no consciousness.”The ancient Cretans made an image of Jove without ears, for they said:“It is a shame to believe that God would hear the talk of men.”So Jerome, the church Father, thought it absurd that God should know just how many gnats and cockroaches there were in the world. David Harum is wiser when he expresses the belief that there is nothing wholly bad or useless in the world:“A reasonable amount of fleas is good for a dog,—they keep him from broodin' on bein' a dog.”This has been paraphrased:“A reasonable number of beaux are good for a girl,—they keep her from brooding over her being a girl.”In addition to the arguments above alluded to, we may urge against this theory that:(a) General control over the course of nature and of history is impossible without control over the smallest particulars which affect the course of nature and of history. Incidents so slight as well-nigh to escape observation at the time of their occurrence are frequently found to determine the whole future of a human life, and through that life the fortunes of a whole empire and of a whole age.“Nothing great has great beginnings.”“Take care of the pence, and the pounds will take care of themselves.”“Care for the chain is care for the links of the chain.”Instances in point are the sleeplessness of King Ahasuerus (Esther 6:1), and the seeming chance that led to the reading of the record of Mordecai's service and to the salvation of the Jews in Persia; the spider's web spun across the entrance to the cave in which Mohammed had taken refuge, which so deceived his pursuers that they passed on In a bootless chase, leaving to the world the religion and the empire of the Moslems; the preaching of Peter the Hermit, which occasioned the first Crusade; the chance shot of an archer, which pierced the right eye of Harold, the last of the purely English kings, gained the battle of Hastings for William the Conqueror, and secured the throne of England for the Normans; the flight of pigeons to the south-west, which changed the course of Columbus, hitherto directed towards Virginia, to the West Indies, and so prevented the dominion of Spain over North America; the storm that dispersed the Spanish Armada and saved England from the Papacy, and the storm that dispersed the French fleet gathered for the conquest of New England—the latter on a day of fasting and prayer appointed by the Puritans to avert the calamity; the settling of New England by the Puritans, rather than by French Jesuits; the order of Council restraining Cromwell and his friends from sailing to America; Major André's lack of self-possession in presence of his captors, which led him to ask an improper question instead of showing his passport, and which saved the American cause; the unusually early commencement of cold weather, which frustrated the plans of Napoleon and destroyed his army in Russia; the fatal shot at Fort Sumter, which precipitated the war of secession and resulted in the abolition of American slavery. Nature is linked to history; the breeze warps the course of the bullet; the worm perforates the plank of the ship. God must care for the least, or he cannot care for the greatest.“Large doors swing on small hinges.”The barking of a dog determined F. W. Robertson to be a preacher rather than a soldier. Robert Browning, Mr. Sludge the Medium:“We find great things are made of little things, And little things go lessening till at last Comes God behind them.”E. G. Robinson:“We cannot suppose only a general outline to have been in the mind of God, while the filling-up is left to be done in some other way. The general includes the special.”Dr. Lloyd, one of the Oxford Professors, said to Pusey,“I wish you would learn something about those German critics.”“In the obedient spirit of those times,”writes Pusey,“I set myself at once to learn German, and I went to Göttingen, to study at once the language and the theology. My life turned on that hint of Dr. Lloyd's.”Goldwin Smith:“Had a bullet entered the brain of Cromwell or of William III in his first battle, or had Gustavus not fallen at Lützen, the course of history apparently would have been changed. The course even of science would have been changed, if there had not been a Newton and a Darwin.”The annexation of Corsica to France[pg 430]gave to France a Napoleon, and to Europe a conqueror. Martineau, Seat of Authority, 101—“Had the monastery at Erfurt deputed another than young Luther on its errand to paganized Rome, or had Leo X sent a less scandalous agent than Tetzel on his business to Germany, the seeds of the Reformation might have fallen by the wayside where they had no deepness of earth, and the Western revolt of the human mind might have taken another date and another form.”See Appleton, Works, 1:149sq.; Lecky, England in the Eighteenth Century, chap. I.(b) The love of God which prompts a general care for the universe must also prompt a particular care for the smallest events which affect the happiness of his creatures. It belongs to love to regard nothing as trifling or beneath its notice which has to do with the interests of the object of its affection. Infinite love may therefore be expected to provide for all, even the minutest things in the creation. Without belief in this particular care, men cannot long believe in God's general care. Faith in a particular providence is indispensable to the very existence of practical religion; for men will not worship or recognize a God who has no direct relation to them.Man's care for his own body involves care for the least important members of it. A lover's devotion is known by his interest in the minutest concerns of his beloved. So all our affairs are matters of interest to God. Pope's Essay on Man:“All nature is but art unknown to thee; All chance, direction which thou canst not see; All discord, harmony not understood; All partial evil, universal good.”If harvests may be labored for and lost without any agency of God; if rain or sun may act like fate, sweeping away the results of years, and God have no hand in it all; if wind and storm may wreck the ship and drown our dearest friends, and God not care for us or for our loss, then all possibility of general trust in God will disappear also.God's care is shown in the least things as well as in the greatest. In Gethsemane Christ says:“Let these go their way: that the word might be fulfilled which he spake, Of those whom thou hast given me I lost not one”(John 18:8, 9). It is the same spirit as that of his intercessory prayer:“I guarded them, and not one of them perished, but the son of perdition”(John 17:12). Christ gives himself as a prisoner that his disciples may go free, even as he redeems us from the curse of the law by being made a curse for us (Gal. 3:13). The dewdrop is moulded by the same law that rounds the planets into spheres. Gen. Grant said he had never but once sought a place for himself, and in that place he was a comparative failure; he had been an instrument in God's hand for the accomplishing of God's purposes, apart from any plan or thought or hope of his own.Of his journey through the dark continent in search of David Livingston, Henry M. Stanley wrote in Scribner's Monthly for June, 1890:“Constrained at the darkest hour humbly to confess that without God's help I was helpless, I vowed a vow in the forest solitudes that I would confess his aid before men. Silence as of death was around me; it was midnight; I was weakened by illness, prostrated with fatigue, and wan with anxiety for my white and black companions, whose fate was a mystery. In this physical and mental distress I besought God to give me back my people. Nine hours later we were exulting with a rapturous joy. In full view of all was the crimson flag with the crescent, and beneath its waving folds was the long-lost rear column.... My own designs were frustrated constantly by unhappy circumstances. I endeavored to steer my course as direct as possible, but there was an unaccountable influence at the helm.... I have been conscious that the issues of every effort were in other hands.... Divinity seems to have hedged us while we journeyed, impelling us whither it would, effecting its own will, but constantly guiding and protecting us.”He refuses to believe that it is all the result of“luck”, and he closes with a doxology which we should expect from Livingston but not from him:“Thanks be to God, forever and ever!”(c) In times of personal danger, and in remarkable conjunctures of public affairs, men instinctively attribute to God a control of the events which take place around them. The prayers which such startling emergencies force from men's lips are proof that God is present and active in human affairs. This testimony of our mental constitution must be regarded as virtually the testimony of him who framed this constitution.[pg 431]No advance of science can rid us of this conviction, since it comes from a deeper source than mere reasoning. The intuition of design is awakened by the connection of events in our daily life, as much as by the useful adaptations which we see in nature.Ps. 107:23-28—“They that go down to the sea in ships ... mount up to the heavens, they go down again to the depths ... And are at their wits' end. Then they cry unto Jehovah in their trouble.”A narrow escape from death shows us a present God and Deliverer. Instance the general feeling throughout the land, expressed by the press as well as by the pulpit, at the breaking out of our rebellion and at the President's subsequent Proclamation of Emancipation.“Est deus in nobis; agitante calescimus illo.”For contrast between Nansen's ignoring of God in his polar journey and Dr. Jacob Chamberlain's calling upon God in his strait in India, see Missionary Review, May, 1898. Sunday School Times, March 4, 1893—“Benjamin Franklin became a deist at the age of fifteen. Before the Revolutionary War he was merely a shrewd and pushing business man. He had public spirit, and he made one happy discovery in science. But‘Poor Richard's’sayings express his mind at that time. The perils and anxieties of the great war gave him a deeper insight. He and others entered upon it‘with a rope around their necks.’As he told the Constitutional Convention of 1787, when he proposed that its daily sessions be opened with prayer, the experiences of that war showed him that‘God verily rules in the affairs of men.’And when the designs for an American coinage were under discussion, Franklin proposed to stamp on them, not‘A Penny Saved is a Penny Earned,’or any other piece of worldly prudence, but‘The Fear of the Lord is the Beginning of Wisdom.’”(d) Christian experience confirms the declarations of Scripture that particular events are brought about by God with special reference to the good or ill of the individual. Such events occur at times in such direct connection with the Christian's prayers that no doubt remains with regard to the providential arrangement of them. The possibility of such divine agency in natural events cannot be questioned by one who, like the Christian, has had experience of the greater wonders of regeneration and daily intercourse with God, and who believes in the reality of creation, incarnation, and miracles.Providence prepares the way for men's conversion, sometimes by their own partial reformation, sometimes by the sudden death of others near them. Instance Luther and Judson. The Christian learns that the same Providence that led him before his conversion is busy after his conversion in directing his steps and in supplying his wants. Daniel Defoe:“I have been fed more by miracle than Elijah when the angels were his purveyors.”InPsalm 32, David celebrates not only God's pardoning mercy but his subsequent providential leading:“I will counsel thee with mine eye upon thee”(verse 8). It may be objected that we often mistake the meaning of events. We answer that, as in nature, so in providence, we are compelled to believe, not that weknowthe design, but that thereisa design. Instance Shelley's drowning, and Jacob Knapp's prayer that his opponent might be stricken dumb. Lyman Beecher's attributing the burning of the Unitarian church to God's judgment upon false doctrine was invalidated a little later by the burning of his own church.Job 23:10—“He knoweth the way that is mine,”or“the way that is with me,”i. e., my inmost way, life, character;“When he hath tried me, I shall come forth as gold.”1 Cor. 19:4—“and the rock was Christ”—Christ was the ever present source of their refreshment and life, both physical and spiritual. God's providence is all exercised through Christ.2 Cor. 2:14—“But thanks be unto God, who always leadeth us in triumph in Christ”; not, as in A. V.,“causeth us to triumph.”Paul glories, not in conquering, but in being conquered. Let Christ triumph, not Paul.“Great King of grace, my heart subdue; I would be led in triumph too. A willing captive to my Lord, To own the conquests of his word.”Therefore Paul can call himself“the prisoner of Christ Jesus”(Eph. 3:1). It was Christ who had shut him up two years in Cæsarea, and then two succeeding years in Rome.
III. Theories opposing the Doctrine of Providence.1. Fatalism.Fatalism maintains the certainty, but denies the freedom, of human self-determination,—thus substituting fate for providence.To this view we object that (a) it contradicts consciousness, which testifies that we are free; (b) it exalts the divine power at the expense of God's truth, wisdom, holiness, love; (c) it destroys all evidence of the personality and freedom of God; (d) it practically makes necessity the only God, and leaves the imperatives of our moral nature without present validity or future vindication.The Mohammedans have frequently been called fatalists, and the practical effect of the teachings of the Koran upon the masses is to make them so. The ordinary Mohammedan will have no physician or medicine, because everything happens as God has before appointed. Smith, however, in his Mohammed and Mohammedanism, denies that fatalism is essential to the system.Islam=“submission,”and the participleMoslem=“submitted,”i. e., to God. Turkish proverb:“A man cannot escape what is written on his forehead.”The Mohammedan thinks of God's dominant attribute as being greatness rather than righteousness, power rather than purity. God is the personification of arbitrary will, not the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. But there is in the system an absence of sacerdotalism, a jealousy for the honor of God, a brotherhood of believers, a reverence for what is considered the word of God, and a bold and habitual devotion of its adherents to their faith.Stanley, Life and Letters, 1:489, refers to the Mussulman tradition existing in Egypt that the fate of Islam requires that it should at last be superseded by Christianity. F. W. Sanders denies that the Koran is peculiarlysensual.“The Christian and Jewish religions,”he says,“have their paradise also. The Koran makes this the reward, but not the ideal, of conduct;‘Grace from thy Lord—that is the grand bliss.’The emphasis of the Koran is upon right living. The Koran does not teach the propagation of religion byforce. It declares that there shall be no compulsion in religion. The practice of converting by the sword is to be distinguished from the teaching of Mohammed, just as the Inquisition and the slave-trade in Christendom do not prove that Jesus taught them. The Koran did not institutepolygamy. It found unlimited polygamy, divorce, and infanticide. The last it prohibited; the two former it restricted and ameliorated, just as Moses found polygamy, but brought it within bounds. The Koran is not hostile tosecular learning. Learning flourished under the Bagdad and Spanish Caliphates. When Moslems oppose learning, they do so without authority from the Koran. The Roman Catholic church has opposed schools, but we do not attribute this to the gospel.”See Zwemer, Moslem Doctrine of God.Calvinists can assert freedom, since man's will finds its highest freedom only in submission to God. Islam also cultivates submission, but it is the submission not of love but of fear. The essential difference between Mohammedanism and Christianity is found in the revelation which the latter gives of the love of God in Christ—a revelation which secures from free moral agents the submission of love; see page 186. On fatalism, see McCosh, Intuitions, 266; Kant, Metaphysic of Ethics, 52-74, 98-108; Mill, Autobiography, 168-170, and System of Logic, 521-526; Hamilton, Metaphysics, 692; Stewart, Active and Moral Powers of Man, ed. Walker, 268-324.2. Casualism.Casualism transfers the freedom of mind to nature, as fatalism transfers the fixity of nature to mind. It thus exchanges providence for chance.[pg 428]Upon this view we remark:(a) If chance be only another name for human ignorance, a name for the fact that there are trivial occurrences in life which have no meaning or relation to us,—we may acknowledge this, and still hold that providence arranges every so-called chance, for purposes beyond our knowledge. Chance, in this sense, is providential coincidence which we cannot understand, and do not need to trouble ourselves about.Not all chances are of equal importance. The casual meeting of a stranger in the street need not bring God's providence before me, although I know that God arranges it. Yet I can conceive of that meeting as leading to religious conversation and to the stranger's conversion. When we are prepared for them, we shall see many opportunities which are now as unmeaning to us as the gold in the river-beds was to the early Indians in California. I should be an ingrate, if I escaped a lightning-stroke, and did not thank God; yet Dr. Arnold's saying that every school boy should put on his hat for God's glory, and with a high moral purpose, seems morbid. There is a certain room for the play of arbitrariness. We must not afflict ourselves or the church of God by requiring a Pharisaic punctiliousness in minutiæ. Life is too short to debate the question which shoe we shall put on first.“Love God and do what you will,”said Augustine; that is, Love God, and act out that love in a simple and natural way. Be free in your service, yet be always on the watch for indications of God's will.(b) If chance be taken in the sense of utter absence of all causal connections in the phenomena of matter and mind,—we oppose to this notion the fact that the causal judgment is formed in accordance with a fundamental and necessary law of human thought, and that no science or knowledge is possible without the assumption of its validity.InLuke 10:31, our Savior says:“By chance a certain priest was going down that way.”Janet:“Chance is not a cause, but a coincidence of causes.”Bowne, Theory of Thought and Knowledge, 197—“By chance is not meant lack of causation, but the coincidence in an event of mutually independent series of causation. Thus the unpurposed meeting of two persons is spoken of as a chance one, when the movement of neither implies that of the other. Here the antithesis of chance is purpose.”(c) If chance be used in the sense of undesigning cause,—it is evidently insufficient to explain the regular and uniform sequences of nature, or the moral progress of the human race. These things argue a superintending and designing mind—in other words, a providence. Since reason demands not only a cause, but a sufficient cause, for the order of the physical and moral world, casualism must be ruled out.The observer at the signal station was asked what was the climate of Rochester.“Climate?”he replied;“Rochester has no climate,—only weather!”So Chauncey Wright spoke of the ups and downs of human affairs as simply“cosmical weather.”But our intuition of design compels us to see mind and purpose in individual and national history, as well as in the physical universe. The same argument which proves the existence of God proves also the existence of a providence. See Farrar, Life of Christ, 1:155, note.3. Theory of a merely general providence.Many who acknowledge God's control over the movements of planets and the destinies of nations deny any divine arrangement of particular events. Most of the arguments against deism are equally valid against the theory of a merely general providence. This view is indeed only a form of deism, which holds that God has not wholly withdrawn himself from the universe, but that his activity within it is limited to the maintenance of general laws.[pg 429]This appears to have been the view of most of the heathen philosophers. Cicero:“Magna dii curant; parva negligunt.”“Even in kingdoms among men,”he says,“kings do not trouble themselves with insignificant affairs.”Fullerton, Conceptions of the Infinite, 9—“Plutarch thought there could not be an infinity of worlds,—Providence could not possibly take charge of so many.‘Troublesome and boundless infinity’could be grasped by no consciousness.”The ancient Cretans made an image of Jove without ears, for they said:“It is a shame to believe that God would hear the talk of men.”So Jerome, the church Father, thought it absurd that God should know just how many gnats and cockroaches there were in the world. David Harum is wiser when he expresses the belief that there is nothing wholly bad or useless in the world:“A reasonable amount of fleas is good for a dog,—they keep him from broodin' on bein' a dog.”This has been paraphrased:“A reasonable number of beaux are good for a girl,—they keep her from brooding over her being a girl.”In addition to the arguments above alluded to, we may urge against this theory that:(a) General control over the course of nature and of history is impossible without control over the smallest particulars which affect the course of nature and of history. Incidents so slight as well-nigh to escape observation at the time of their occurrence are frequently found to determine the whole future of a human life, and through that life the fortunes of a whole empire and of a whole age.“Nothing great has great beginnings.”“Take care of the pence, and the pounds will take care of themselves.”“Care for the chain is care for the links of the chain.”Instances in point are the sleeplessness of King Ahasuerus (Esther 6:1), and the seeming chance that led to the reading of the record of Mordecai's service and to the salvation of the Jews in Persia; the spider's web spun across the entrance to the cave in which Mohammed had taken refuge, which so deceived his pursuers that they passed on In a bootless chase, leaving to the world the religion and the empire of the Moslems; the preaching of Peter the Hermit, which occasioned the first Crusade; the chance shot of an archer, which pierced the right eye of Harold, the last of the purely English kings, gained the battle of Hastings for William the Conqueror, and secured the throne of England for the Normans; the flight of pigeons to the south-west, which changed the course of Columbus, hitherto directed towards Virginia, to the West Indies, and so prevented the dominion of Spain over North America; the storm that dispersed the Spanish Armada and saved England from the Papacy, and the storm that dispersed the French fleet gathered for the conquest of New England—the latter on a day of fasting and prayer appointed by the Puritans to avert the calamity; the settling of New England by the Puritans, rather than by French Jesuits; the order of Council restraining Cromwell and his friends from sailing to America; Major André's lack of self-possession in presence of his captors, which led him to ask an improper question instead of showing his passport, and which saved the American cause; the unusually early commencement of cold weather, which frustrated the plans of Napoleon and destroyed his army in Russia; the fatal shot at Fort Sumter, which precipitated the war of secession and resulted in the abolition of American slavery. Nature is linked to history; the breeze warps the course of the bullet; the worm perforates the plank of the ship. God must care for the least, or he cannot care for the greatest.“Large doors swing on small hinges.”The barking of a dog determined F. W. Robertson to be a preacher rather than a soldier. Robert Browning, Mr. Sludge the Medium:“We find great things are made of little things, And little things go lessening till at last Comes God behind them.”E. G. Robinson:“We cannot suppose only a general outline to have been in the mind of God, while the filling-up is left to be done in some other way. The general includes the special.”Dr. Lloyd, one of the Oxford Professors, said to Pusey,“I wish you would learn something about those German critics.”“In the obedient spirit of those times,”writes Pusey,“I set myself at once to learn German, and I went to Göttingen, to study at once the language and the theology. My life turned on that hint of Dr. Lloyd's.”Goldwin Smith:“Had a bullet entered the brain of Cromwell or of William III in his first battle, or had Gustavus not fallen at Lützen, the course of history apparently would have been changed. The course even of science would have been changed, if there had not been a Newton and a Darwin.”The annexation of Corsica to France[pg 430]gave to France a Napoleon, and to Europe a conqueror. Martineau, Seat of Authority, 101—“Had the monastery at Erfurt deputed another than young Luther on its errand to paganized Rome, or had Leo X sent a less scandalous agent than Tetzel on his business to Germany, the seeds of the Reformation might have fallen by the wayside where they had no deepness of earth, and the Western revolt of the human mind might have taken another date and another form.”See Appleton, Works, 1:149sq.; Lecky, England in the Eighteenth Century, chap. I.(b) The love of God which prompts a general care for the universe must also prompt a particular care for the smallest events which affect the happiness of his creatures. It belongs to love to regard nothing as trifling or beneath its notice which has to do with the interests of the object of its affection. Infinite love may therefore be expected to provide for all, even the minutest things in the creation. Without belief in this particular care, men cannot long believe in God's general care. Faith in a particular providence is indispensable to the very existence of practical religion; for men will not worship or recognize a God who has no direct relation to them.Man's care for his own body involves care for the least important members of it. A lover's devotion is known by his interest in the minutest concerns of his beloved. So all our affairs are matters of interest to God. Pope's Essay on Man:“All nature is but art unknown to thee; All chance, direction which thou canst not see; All discord, harmony not understood; All partial evil, universal good.”If harvests may be labored for and lost without any agency of God; if rain or sun may act like fate, sweeping away the results of years, and God have no hand in it all; if wind and storm may wreck the ship and drown our dearest friends, and God not care for us or for our loss, then all possibility of general trust in God will disappear also.God's care is shown in the least things as well as in the greatest. In Gethsemane Christ says:“Let these go their way: that the word might be fulfilled which he spake, Of those whom thou hast given me I lost not one”(John 18:8, 9). It is the same spirit as that of his intercessory prayer:“I guarded them, and not one of them perished, but the son of perdition”(John 17:12). Christ gives himself as a prisoner that his disciples may go free, even as he redeems us from the curse of the law by being made a curse for us (Gal. 3:13). The dewdrop is moulded by the same law that rounds the planets into spheres. Gen. Grant said he had never but once sought a place for himself, and in that place he was a comparative failure; he had been an instrument in God's hand for the accomplishing of God's purposes, apart from any plan or thought or hope of his own.Of his journey through the dark continent in search of David Livingston, Henry M. Stanley wrote in Scribner's Monthly for June, 1890:“Constrained at the darkest hour humbly to confess that without God's help I was helpless, I vowed a vow in the forest solitudes that I would confess his aid before men. Silence as of death was around me; it was midnight; I was weakened by illness, prostrated with fatigue, and wan with anxiety for my white and black companions, whose fate was a mystery. In this physical and mental distress I besought God to give me back my people. Nine hours later we were exulting with a rapturous joy. In full view of all was the crimson flag with the crescent, and beneath its waving folds was the long-lost rear column.... My own designs were frustrated constantly by unhappy circumstances. I endeavored to steer my course as direct as possible, but there was an unaccountable influence at the helm.... I have been conscious that the issues of every effort were in other hands.... Divinity seems to have hedged us while we journeyed, impelling us whither it would, effecting its own will, but constantly guiding and protecting us.”He refuses to believe that it is all the result of“luck”, and he closes with a doxology which we should expect from Livingston but not from him:“Thanks be to God, forever and ever!”(c) In times of personal danger, and in remarkable conjunctures of public affairs, men instinctively attribute to God a control of the events which take place around them. The prayers which such startling emergencies force from men's lips are proof that God is present and active in human affairs. This testimony of our mental constitution must be regarded as virtually the testimony of him who framed this constitution.[pg 431]No advance of science can rid us of this conviction, since it comes from a deeper source than mere reasoning. The intuition of design is awakened by the connection of events in our daily life, as much as by the useful adaptations which we see in nature.Ps. 107:23-28—“They that go down to the sea in ships ... mount up to the heavens, they go down again to the depths ... And are at their wits' end. Then they cry unto Jehovah in their trouble.”A narrow escape from death shows us a present God and Deliverer. Instance the general feeling throughout the land, expressed by the press as well as by the pulpit, at the breaking out of our rebellion and at the President's subsequent Proclamation of Emancipation.“Est deus in nobis; agitante calescimus illo.”For contrast between Nansen's ignoring of God in his polar journey and Dr. Jacob Chamberlain's calling upon God in his strait in India, see Missionary Review, May, 1898. Sunday School Times, March 4, 1893—“Benjamin Franklin became a deist at the age of fifteen. Before the Revolutionary War he was merely a shrewd and pushing business man. He had public spirit, and he made one happy discovery in science. But‘Poor Richard's’sayings express his mind at that time. The perils and anxieties of the great war gave him a deeper insight. He and others entered upon it‘with a rope around their necks.’As he told the Constitutional Convention of 1787, when he proposed that its daily sessions be opened with prayer, the experiences of that war showed him that‘God verily rules in the affairs of men.’And when the designs for an American coinage were under discussion, Franklin proposed to stamp on them, not‘A Penny Saved is a Penny Earned,’or any other piece of worldly prudence, but‘The Fear of the Lord is the Beginning of Wisdom.’”(d) Christian experience confirms the declarations of Scripture that particular events are brought about by God with special reference to the good or ill of the individual. Such events occur at times in such direct connection with the Christian's prayers that no doubt remains with regard to the providential arrangement of them. The possibility of such divine agency in natural events cannot be questioned by one who, like the Christian, has had experience of the greater wonders of regeneration and daily intercourse with God, and who believes in the reality of creation, incarnation, and miracles.Providence prepares the way for men's conversion, sometimes by their own partial reformation, sometimes by the sudden death of others near them. Instance Luther and Judson. The Christian learns that the same Providence that led him before his conversion is busy after his conversion in directing his steps and in supplying his wants. Daniel Defoe:“I have been fed more by miracle than Elijah when the angels were his purveyors.”InPsalm 32, David celebrates not only God's pardoning mercy but his subsequent providential leading:“I will counsel thee with mine eye upon thee”(verse 8). It may be objected that we often mistake the meaning of events. We answer that, as in nature, so in providence, we are compelled to believe, not that weknowthe design, but that thereisa design. Instance Shelley's drowning, and Jacob Knapp's prayer that his opponent might be stricken dumb. Lyman Beecher's attributing the burning of the Unitarian church to God's judgment upon false doctrine was invalidated a little later by the burning of his own church.Job 23:10—“He knoweth the way that is mine,”or“the way that is with me,”i. e., my inmost way, life, character;“When he hath tried me, I shall come forth as gold.”1 Cor. 19:4—“and the rock was Christ”—Christ was the ever present source of their refreshment and life, both physical and spiritual. God's providence is all exercised through Christ.2 Cor. 2:14—“But thanks be unto God, who always leadeth us in triumph in Christ”; not, as in A. V.,“causeth us to triumph.”Paul glories, not in conquering, but in being conquered. Let Christ triumph, not Paul.“Great King of grace, my heart subdue; I would be led in triumph too. A willing captive to my Lord, To own the conquests of his word.”Therefore Paul can call himself“the prisoner of Christ Jesus”(Eph. 3:1). It was Christ who had shut him up two years in Cæsarea, and then two succeeding years in Rome.
III. Theories opposing the Doctrine of Providence.1. Fatalism.Fatalism maintains the certainty, but denies the freedom, of human self-determination,—thus substituting fate for providence.To this view we object that (a) it contradicts consciousness, which testifies that we are free; (b) it exalts the divine power at the expense of God's truth, wisdom, holiness, love; (c) it destroys all evidence of the personality and freedom of God; (d) it practically makes necessity the only God, and leaves the imperatives of our moral nature without present validity or future vindication.The Mohammedans have frequently been called fatalists, and the practical effect of the teachings of the Koran upon the masses is to make them so. The ordinary Mohammedan will have no physician or medicine, because everything happens as God has before appointed. Smith, however, in his Mohammed and Mohammedanism, denies that fatalism is essential to the system.Islam=“submission,”and the participleMoslem=“submitted,”i. e., to God. Turkish proverb:“A man cannot escape what is written on his forehead.”The Mohammedan thinks of God's dominant attribute as being greatness rather than righteousness, power rather than purity. God is the personification of arbitrary will, not the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. But there is in the system an absence of sacerdotalism, a jealousy for the honor of God, a brotherhood of believers, a reverence for what is considered the word of God, and a bold and habitual devotion of its adherents to their faith.Stanley, Life and Letters, 1:489, refers to the Mussulman tradition existing in Egypt that the fate of Islam requires that it should at last be superseded by Christianity. F. W. Sanders denies that the Koran is peculiarlysensual.“The Christian and Jewish religions,”he says,“have their paradise also. The Koran makes this the reward, but not the ideal, of conduct;‘Grace from thy Lord—that is the grand bliss.’The emphasis of the Koran is upon right living. The Koran does not teach the propagation of religion byforce. It declares that there shall be no compulsion in religion. The practice of converting by the sword is to be distinguished from the teaching of Mohammed, just as the Inquisition and the slave-trade in Christendom do not prove that Jesus taught them. The Koran did not institutepolygamy. It found unlimited polygamy, divorce, and infanticide. The last it prohibited; the two former it restricted and ameliorated, just as Moses found polygamy, but brought it within bounds. The Koran is not hostile tosecular learning. Learning flourished under the Bagdad and Spanish Caliphates. When Moslems oppose learning, they do so without authority from the Koran. The Roman Catholic church has opposed schools, but we do not attribute this to the gospel.”See Zwemer, Moslem Doctrine of God.Calvinists can assert freedom, since man's will finds its highest freedom only in submission to God. Islam also cultivates submission, but it is the submission not of love but of fear. The essential difference between Mohammedanism and Christianity is found in the revelation which the latter gives of the love of God in Christ—a revelation which secures from free moral agents the submission of love; see page 186. On fatalism, see McCosh, Intuitions, 266; Kant, Metaphysic of Ethics, 52-74, 98-108; Mill, Autobiography, 168-170, and System of Logic, 521-526; Hamilton, Metaphysics, 692; Stewart, Active and Moral Powers of Man, ed. Walker, 268-324.2. Casualism.Casualism transfers the freedom of mind to nature, as fatalism transfers the fixity of nature to mind. It thus exchanges providence for chance.[pg 428]Upon this view we remark:(a) If chance be only another name for human ignorance, a name for the fact that there are trivial occurrences in life which have no meaning or relation to us,—we may acknowledge this, and still hold that providence arranges every so-called chance, for purposes beyond our knowledge. Chance, in this sense, is providential coincidence which we cannot understand, and do not need to trouble ourselves about.Not all chances are of equal importance. The casual meeting of a stranger in the street need not bring God's providence before me, although I know that God arranges it. Yet I can conceive of that meeting as leading to religious conversation and to the stranger's conversion. When we are prepared for them, we shall see many opportunities which are now as unmeaning to us as the gold in the river-beds was to the early Indians in California. I should be an ingrate, if I escaped a lightning-stroke, and did not thank God; yet Dr. Arnold's saying that every school boy should put on his hat for God's glory, and with a high moral purpose, seems morbid. There is a certain room for the play of arbitrariness. We must not afflict ourselves or the church of God by requiring a Pharisaic punctiliousness in minutiæ. Life is too short to debate the question which shoe we shall put on first.“Love God and do what you will,”said Augustine; that is, Love God, and act out that love in a simple and natural way. Be free in your service, yet be always on the watch for indications of God's will.(b) If chance be taken in the sense of utter absence of all causal connections in the phenomena of matter and mind,—we oppose to this notion the fact that the causal judgment is formed in accordance with a fundamental and necessary law of human thought, and that no science or knowledge is possible without the assumption of its validity.InLuke 10:31, our Savior says:“By chance a certain priest was going down that way.”Janet:“Chance is not a cause, but a coincidence of causes.”Bowne, Theory of Thought and Knowledge, 197—“By chance is not meant lack of causation, but the coincidence in an event of mutually independent series of causation. Thus the unpurposed meeting of two persons is spoken of as a chance one, when the movement of neither implies that of the other. Here the antithesis of chance is purpose.”(c) If chance be used in the sense of undesigning cause,—it is evidently insufficient to explain the regular and uniform sequences of nature, or the moral progress of the human race. These things argue a superintending and designing mind—in other words, a providence. Since reason demands not only a cause, but a sufficient cause, for the order of the physical and moral world, casualism must be ruled out.The observer at the signal station was asked what was the climate of Rochester.“Climate?”he replied;“Rochester has no climate,—only weather!”So Chauncey Wright spoke of the ups and downs of human affairs as simply“cosmical weather.”But our intuition of design compels us to see mind and purpose in individual and national history, as well as in the physical universe. The same argument which proves the existence of God proves also the existence of a providence. See Farrar, Life of Christ, 1:155, note.3. Theory of a merely general providence.Many who acknowledge God's control over the movements of planets and the destinies of nations deny any divine arrangement of particular events. Most of the arguments against deism are equally valid against the theory of a merely general providence. This view is indeed only a form of deism, which holds that God has not wholly withdrawn himself from the universe, but that his activity within it is limited to the maintenance of general laws.[pg 429]This appears to have been the view of most of the heathen philosophers. Cicero:“Magna dii curant; parva negligunt.”“Even in kingdoms among men,”he says,“kings do not trouble themselves with insignificant affairs.”Fullerton, Conceptions of the Infinite, 9—“Plutarch thought there could not be an infinity of worlds,—Providence could not possibly take charge of so many.‘Troublesome and boundless infinity’could be grasped by no consciousness.”The ancient Cretans made an image of Jove without ears, for they said:“It is a shame to believe that God would hear the talk of men.”So Jerome, the church Father, thought it absurd that God should know just how many gnats and cockroaches there were in the world. David Harum is wiser when he expresses the belief that there is nothing wholly bad or useless in the world:“A reasonable amount of fleas is good for a dog,—they keep him from broodin' on bein' a dog.”This has been paraphrased:“A reasonable number of beaux are good for a girl,—they keep her from brooding over her being a girl.”In addition to the arguments above alluded to, we may urge against this theory that:(a) General control over the course of nature and of history is impossible without control over the smallest particulars which affect the course of nature and of history. Incidents so slight as well-nigh to escape observation at the time of their occurrence are frequently found to determine the whole future of a human life, and through that life the fortunes of a whole empire and of a whole age.“Nothing great has great beginnings.”“Take care of the pence, and the pounds will take care of themselves.”“Care for the chain is care for the links of the chain.”Instances in point are the sleeplessness of King Ahasuerus (Esther 6:1), and the seeming chance that led to the reading of the record of Mordecai's service and to the salvation of the Jews in Persia; the spider's web spun across the entrance to the cave in which Mohammed had taken refuge, which so deceived his pursuers that they passed on In a bootless chase, leaving to the world the religion and the empire of the Moslems; the preaching of Peter the Hermit, which occasioned the first Crusade; the chance shot of an archer, which pierced the right eye of Harold, the last of the purely English kings, gained the battle of Hastings for William the Conqueror, and secured the throne of England for the Normans; the flight of pigeons to the south-west, which changed the course of Columbus, hitherto directed towards Virginia, to the West Indies, and so prevented the dominion of Spain over North America; the storm that dispersed the Spanish Armada and saved England from the Papacy, and the storm that dispersed the French fleet gathered for the conquest of New England—the latter on a day of fasting and prayer appointed by the Puritans to avert the calamity; the settling of New England by the Puritans, rather than by French Jesuits; the order of Council restraining Cromwell and his friends from sailing to America; Major André's lack of self-possession in presence of his captors, which led him to ask an improper question instead of showing his passport, and which saved the American cause; the unusually early commencement of cold weather, which frustrated the plans of Napoleon and destroyed his army in Russia; the fatal shot at Fort Sumter, which precipitated the war of secession and resulted in the abolition of American slavery. Nature is linked to history; the breeze warps the course of the bullet; the worm perforates the plank of the ship. God must care for the least, or he cannot care for the greatest.“Large doors swing on small hinges.”The barking of a dog determined F. W. Robertson to be a preacher rather than a soldier. Robert Browning, Mr. Sludge the Medium:“We find great things are made of little things, And little things go lessening till at last Comes God behind them.”E. G. Robinson:“We cannot suppose only a general outline to have been in the mind of God, while the filling-up is left to be done in some other way. The general includes the special.”Dr. Lloyd, one of the Oxford Professors, said to Pusey,“I wish you would learn something about those German critics.”“In the obedient spirit of those times,”writes Pusey,“I set myself at once to learn German, and I went to Göttingen, to study at once the language and the theology. My life turned on that hint of Dr. Lloyd's.”Goldwin Smith:“Had a bullet entered the brain of Cromwell or of William III in his first battle, or had Gustavus not fallen at Lützen, the course of history apparently would have been changed. The course even of science would have been changed, if there had not been a Newton and a Darwin.”The annexation of Corsica to France[pg 430]gave to France a Napoleon, and to Europe a conqueror. Martineau, Seat of Authority, 101—“Had the monastery at Erfurt deputed another than young Luther on its errand to paganized Rome, or had Leo X sent a less scandalous agent than Tetzel on his business to Germany, the seeds of the Reformation might have fallen by the wayside where they had no deepness of earth, and the Western revolt of the human mind might have taken another date and another form.”See Appleton, Works, 1:149sq.; Lecky, England in the Eighteenth Century, chap. I.(b) The love of God which prompts a general care for the universe must also prompt a particular care for the smallest events which affect the happiness of his creatures. It belongs to love to regard nothing as trifling or beneath its notice which has to do with the interests of the object of its affection. Infinite love may therefore be expected to provide for all, even the minutest things in the creation. Without belief in this particular care, men cannot long believe in God's general care. Faith in a particular providence is indispensable to the very existence of practical religion; for men will not worship or recognize a God who has no direct relation to them.Man's care for his own body involves care for the least important members of it. A lover's devotion is known by his interest in the minutest concerns of his beloved. So all our affairs are matters of interest to God. Pope's Essay on Man:“All nature is but art unknown to thee; All chance, direction which thou canst not see; All discord, harmony not understood; All partial evil, universal good.”If harvests may be labored for and lost without any agency of God; if rain or sun may act like fate, sweeping away the results of years, and God have no hand in it all; if wind and storm may wreck the ship and drown our dearest friends, and God not care for us or for our loss, then all possibility of general trust in God will disappear also.God's care is shown in the least things as well as in the greatest. In Gethsemane Christ says:“Let these go their way: that the word might be fulfilled which he spake, Of those whom thou hast given me I lost not one”(John 18:8, 9). It is the same spirit as that of his intercessory prayer:“I guarded them, and not one of them perished, but the son of perdition”(John 17:12). Christ gives himself as a prisoner that his disciples may go free, even as he redeems us from the curse of the law by being made a curse for us (Gal. 3:13). The dewdrop is moulded by the same law that rounds the planets into spheres. Gen. Grant said he had never but once sought a place for himself, and in that place he was a comparative failure; he had been an instrument in God's hand for the accomplishing of God's purposes, apart from any plan or thought or hope of his own.Of his journey through the dark continent in search of David Livingston, Henry M. Stanley wrote in Scribner's Monthly for June, 1890:“Constrained at the darkest hour humbly to confess that without God's help I was helpless, I vowed a vow in the forest solitudes that I would confess his aid before men. Silence as of death was around me; it was midnight; I was weakened by illness, prostrated with fatigue, and wan with anxiety for my white and black companions, whose fate was a mystery. In this physical and mental distress I besought God to give me back my people. Nine hours later we were exulting with a rapturous joy. In full view of all was the crimson flag with the crescent, and beneath its waving folds was the long-lost rear column.... My own designs were frustrated constantly by unhappy circumstances. I endeavored to steer my course as direct as possible, but there was an unaccountable influence at the helm.... I have been conscious that the issues of every effort were in other hands.... Divinity seems to have hedged us while we journeyed, impelling us whither it would, effecting its own will, but constantly guiding and protecting us.”He refuses to believe that it is all the result of“luck”, and he closes with a doxology which we should expect from Livingston but not from him:“Thanks be to God, forever and ever!”(c) In times of personal danger, and in remarkable conjunctures of public affairs, men instinctively attribute to God a control of the events which take place around them. The prayers which such startling emergencies force from men's lips are proof that God is present and active in human affairs. This testimony of our mental constitution must be regarded as virtually the testimony of him who framed this constitution.[pg 431]No advance of science can rid us of this conviction, since it comes from a deeper source than mere reasoning. The intuition of design is awakened by the connection of events in our daily life, as much as by the useful adaptations which we see in nature.Ps. 107:23-28—“They that go down to the sea in ships ... mount up to the heavens, they go down again to the depths ... And are at their wits' end. Then they cry unto Jehovah in their trouble.”A narrow escape from death shows us a present God and Deliverer. Instance the general feeling throughout the land, expressed by the press as well as by the pulpit, at the breaking out of our rebellion and at the President's subsequent Proclamation of Emancipation.“Est deus in nobis; agitante calescimus illo.”For contrast between Nansen's ignoring of God in his polar journey and Dr. Jacob Chamberlain's calling upon God in his strait in India, see Missionary Review, May, 1898. Sunday School Times, March 4, 1893—“Benjamin Franklin became a deist at the age of fifteen. Before the Revolutionary War he was merely a shrewd and pushing business man. He had public spirit, and he made one happy discovery in science. But‘Poor Richard's’sayings express his mind at that time. The perils and anxieties of the great war gave him a deeper insight. He and others entered upon it‘with a rope around their necks.’As he told the Constitutional Convention of 1787, when he proposed that its daily sessions be opened with prayer, the experiences of that war showed him that‘God verily rules in the affairs of men.’And when the designs for an American coinage were under discussion, Franklin proposed to stamp on them, not‘A Penny Saved is a Penny Earned,’or any other piece of worldly prudence, but‘The Fear of the Lord is the Beginning of Wisdom.’”(d) Christian experience confirms the declarations of Scripture that particular events are brought about by God with special reference to the good or ill of the individual. Such events occur at times in such direct connection with the Christian's prayers that no doubt remains with regard to the providential arrangement of them. The possibility of such divine agency in natural events cannot be questioned by one who, like the Christian, has had experience of the greater wonders of regeneration and daily intercourse with God, and who believes in the reality of creation, incarnation, and miracles.Providence prepares the way for men's conversion, sometimes by their own partial reformation, sometimes by the sudden death of others near them. Instance Luther and Judson. The Christian learns that the same Providence that led him before his conversion is busy after his conversion in directing his steps and in supplying his wants. Daniel Defoe:“I have been fed more by miracle than Elijah when the angels were his purveyors.”InPsalm 32, David celebrates not only God's pardoning mercy but his subsequent providential leading:“I will counsel thee with mine eye upon thee”(verse 8). It may be objected that we often mistake the meaning of events. We answer that, as in nature, so in providence, we are compelled to believe, not that weknowthe design, but that thereisa design. Instance Shelley's drowning, and Jacob Knapp's prayer that his opponent might be stricken dumb. Lyman Beecher's attributing the burning of the Unitarian church to God's judgment upon false doctrine was invalidated a little later by the burning of his own church.Job 23:10—“He knoweth the way that is mine,”or“the way that is with me,”i. e., my inmost way, life, character;“When he hath tried me, I shall come forth as gold.”1 Cor. 19:4—“and the rock was Christ”—Christ was the ever present source of their refreshment and life, both physical and spiritual. God's providence is all exercised through Christ.2 Cor. 2:14—“But thanks be unto God, who always leadeth us in triumph in Christ”; not, as in A. V.,“causeth us to triumph.”Paul glories, not in conquering, but in being conquered. Let Christ triumph, not Paul.“Great King of grace, my heart subdue; I would be led in triumph too. A willing captive to my Lord, To own the conquests of his word.”Therefore Paul can call himself“the prisoner of Christ Jesus”(Eph. 3:1). It was Christ who had shut him up two years in Cæsarea, and then two succeeding years in Rome.
1. Fatalism.Fatalism maintains the certainty, but denies the freedom, of human self-determination,—thus substituting fate for providence.To this view we object that (a) it contradicts consciousness, which testifies that we are free; (b) it exalts the divine power at the expense of God's truth, wisdom, holiness, love; (c) it destroys all evidence of the personality and freedom of God; (d) it practically makes necessity the only God, and leaves the imperatives of our moral nature without present validity or future vindication.The Mohammedans have frequently been called fatalists, and the practical effect of the teachings of the Koran upon the masses is to make them so. The ordinary Mohammedan will have no physician or medicine, because everything happens as God has before appointed. Smith, however, in his Mohammed and Mohammedanism, denies that fatalism is essential to the system.Islam=“submission,”and the participleMoslem=“submitted,”i. e., to God. Turkish proverb:“A man cannot escape what is written on his forehead.”The Mohammedan thinks of God's dominant attribute as being greatness rather than righteousness, power rather than purity. God is the personification of arbitrary will, not the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. But there is in the system an absence of sacerdotalism, a jealousy for the honor of God, a brotherhood of believers, a reverence for what is considered the word of God, and a bold and habitual devotion of its adherents to their faith.Stanley, Life and Letters, 1:489, refers to the Mussulman tradition existing in Egypt that the fate of Islam requires that it should at last be superseded by Christianity. F. W. Sanders denies that the Koran is peculiarlysensual.“The Christian and Jewish religions,”he says,“have their paradise also. The Koran makes this the reward, but not the ideal, of conduct;‘Grace from thy Lord—that is the grand bliss.’The emphasis of the Koran is upon right living. The Koran does not teach the propagation of religion byforce. It declares that there shall be no compulsion in religion. The practice of converting by the sword is to be distinguished from the teaching of Mohammed, just as the Inquisition and the slave-trade in Christendom do not prove that Jesus taught them. The Koran did not institutepolygamy. It found unlimited polygamy, divorce, and infanticide. The last it prohibited; the two former it restricted and ameliorated, just as Moses found polygamy, but brought it within bounds. The Koran is not hostile tosecular learning. Learning flourished under the Bagdad and Spanish Caliphates. When Moslems oppose learning, they do so without authority from the Koran. The Roman Catholic church has opposed schools, but we do not attribute this to the gospel.”See Zwemer, Moslem Doctrine of God.Calvinists can assert freedom, since man's will finds its highest freedom only in submission to God. Islam also cultivates submission, but it is the submission not of love but of fear. The essential difference between Mohammedanism and Christianity is found in the revelation which the latter gives of the love of God in Christ—a revelation which secures from free moral agents the submission of love; see page 186. On fatalism, see McCosh, Intuitions, 266; Kant, Metaphysic of Ethics, 52-74, 98-108; Mill, Autobiography, 168-170, and System of Logic, 521-526; Hamilton, Metaphysics, 692; Stewart, Active and Moral Powers of Man, ed. Walker, 268-324.
Fatalism maintains the certainty, but denies the freedom, of human self-determination,—thus substituting fate for providence.
To this view we object that (a) it contradicts consciousness, which testifies that we are free; (b) it exalts the divine power at the expense of God's truth, wisdom, holiness, love; (c) it destroys all evidence of the personality and freedom of God; (d) it practically makes necessity the only God, and leaves the imperatives of our moral nature without present validity or future vindication.
The Mohammedans have frequently been called fatalists, and the practical effect of the teachings of the Koran upon the masses is to make them so. The ordinary Mohammedan will have no physician or medicine, because everything happens as God has before appointed. Smith, however, in his Mohammed and Mohammedanism, denies that fatalism is essential to the system.Islam=“submission,”and the participleMoslem=“submitted,”i. e., to God. Turkish proverb:“A man cannot escape what is written on his forehead.”The Mohammedan thinks of God's dominant attribute as being greatness rather than righteousness, power rather than purity. God is the personification of arbitrary will, not the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. But there is in the system an absence of sacerdotalism, a jealousy for the honor of God, a brotherhood of believers, a reverence for what is considered the word of God, and a bold and habitual devotion of its adherents to their faith.Stanley, Life and Letters, 1:489, refers to the Mussulman tradition existing in Egypt that the fate of Islam requires that it should at last be superseded by Christianity. F. W. Sanders denies that the Koran is peculiarlysensual.“The Christian and Jewish religions,”he says,“have their paradise also. The Koran makes this the reward, but not the ideal, of conduct;‘Grace from thy Lord—that is the grand bliss.’The emphasis of the Koran is upon right living. The Koran does not teach the propagation of religion byforce. It declares that there shall be no compulsion in religion. The practice of converting by the sword is to be distinguished from the teaching of Mohammed, just as the Inquisition and the slave-trade in Christendom do not prove that Jesus taught them. The Koran did not institutepolygamy. It found unlimited polygamy, divorce, and infanticide. The last it prohibited; the two former it restricted and ameliorated, just as Moses found polygamy, but brought it within bounds. The Koran is not hostile tosecular learning. Learning flourished under the Bagdad and Spanish Caliphates. When Moslems oppose learning, they do so without authority from the Koran. The Roman Catholic church has opposed schools, but we do not attribute this to the gospel.”See Zwemer, Moslem Doctrine of God.Calvinists can assert freedom, since man's will finds its highest freedom only in submission to God. Islam also cultivates submission, but it is the submission not of love but of fear. The essential difference between Mohammedanism and Christianity is found in the revelation which the latter gives of the love of God in Christ—a revelation which secures from free moral agents the submission of love; see page 186. On fatalism, see McCosh, Intuitions, 266; Kant, Metaphysic of Ethics, 52-74, 98-108; Mill, Autobiography, 168-170, and System of Logic, 521-526; Hamilton, Metaphysics, 692; Stewart, Active and Moral Powers of Man, ed. Walker, 268-324.
The Mohammedans have frequently been called fatalists, and the practical effect of the teachings of the Koran upon the masses is to make them so. The ordinary Mohammedan will have no physician or medicine, because everything happens as God has before appointed. Smith, however, in his Mohammed and Mohammedanism, denies that fatalism is essential to the system.Islam=“submission,”and the participleMoslem=“submitted,”i. e., to God. Turkish proverb:“A man cannot escape what is written on his forehead.”The Mohammedan thinks of God's dominant attribute as being greatness rather than righteousness, power rather than purity. God is the personification of arbitrary will, not the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. But there is in the system an absence of sacerdotalism, a jealousy for the honor of God, a brotherhood of believers, a reverence for what is considered the word of God, and a bold and habitual devotion of its adherents to their faith.
Stanley, Life and Letters, 1:489, refers to the Mussulman tradition existing in Egypt that the fate of Islam requires that it should at last be superseded by Christianity. F. W. Sanders denies that the Koran is peculiarlysensual.“The Christian and Jewish religions,”he says,“have their paradise also. The Koran makes this the reward, but not the ideal, of conduct;‘Grace from thy Lord—that is the grand bliss.’The emphasis of the Koran is upon right living. The Koran does not teach the propagation of religion byforce. It declares that there shall be no compulsion in religion. The practice of converting by the sword is to be distinguished from the teaching of Mohammed, just as the Inquisition and the slave-trade in Christendom do not prove that Jesus taught them. The Koran did not institutepolygamy. It found unlimited polygamy, divorce, and infanticide. The last it prohibited; the two former it restricted and ameliorated, just as Moses found polygamy, but brought it within bounds. The Koran is not hostile tosecular learning. Learning flourished under the Bagdad and Spanish Caliphates. When Moslems oppose learning, they do so without authority from the Koran. The Roman Catholic church has opposed schools, but we do not attribute this to the gospel.”See Zwemer, Moslem Doctrine of God.
Calvinists can assert freedom, since man's will finds its highest freedom only in submission to God. Islam also cultivates submission, but it is the submission not of love but of fear. The essential difference between Mohammedanism and Christianity is found in the revelation which the latter gives of the love of God in Christ—a revelation which secures from free moral agents the submission of love; see page 186. On fatalism, see McCosh, Intuitions, 266; Kant, Metaphysic of Ethics, 52-74, 98-108; Mill, Autobiography, 168-170, and System of Logic, 521-526; Hamilton, Metaphysics, 692; Stewart, Active and Moral Powers of Man, ed. Walker, 268-324.
2. Casualism.Casualism transfers the freedom of mind to nature, as fatalism transfers the fixity of nature to mind. It thus exchanges providence for chance.[pg 428]Upon this view we remark:(a) If chance be only another name for human ignorance, a name for the fact that there are trivial occurrences in life which have no meaning or relation to us,—we may acknowledge this, and still hold that providence arranges every so-called chance, for purposes beyond our knowledge. Chance, in this sense, is providential coincidence which we cannot understand, and do not need to trouble ourselves about.Not all chances are of equal importance. The casual meeting of a stranger in the street need not bring God's providence before me, although I know that God arranges it. Yet I can conceive of that meeting as leading to religious conversation and to the stranger's conversion. When we are prepared for them, we shall see many opportunities which are now as unmeaning to us as the gold in the river-beds was to the early Indians in California. I should be an ingrate, if I escaped a lightning-stroke, and did not thank God; yet Dr. Arnold's saying that every school boy should put on his hat for God's glory, and with a high moral purpose, seems morbid. There is a certain room for the play of arbitrariness. We must not afflict ourselves or the church of God by requiring a Pharisaic punctiliousness in minutiæ. Life is too short to debate the question which shoe we shall put on first.“Love God and do what you will,”said Augustine; that is, Love God, and act out that love in a simple and natural way. Be free in your service, yet be always on the watch for indications of God's will.(b) If chance be taken in the sense of utter absence of all causal connections in the phenomena of matter and mind,—we oppose to this notion the fact that the causal judgment is formed in accordance with a fundamental and necessary law of human thought, and that no science or knowledge is possible without the assumption of its validity.InLuke 10:31, our Savior says:“By chance a certain priest was going down that way.”Janet:“Chance is not a cause, but a coincidence of causes.”Bowne, Theory of Thought and Knowledge, 197—“By chance is not meant lack of causation, but the coincidence in an event of mutually independent series of causation. Thus the unpurposed meeting of two persons is spoken of as a chance one, when the movement of neither implies that of the other. Here the antithesis of chance is purpose.”(c) If chance be used in the sense of undesigning cause,—it is evidently insufficient to explain the regular and uniform sequences of nature, or the moral progress of the human race. These things argue a superintending and designing mind—in other words, a providence. Since reason demands not only a cause, but a sufficient cause, for the order of the physical and moral world, casualism must be ruled out.The observer at the signal station was asked what was the climate of Rochester.“Climate?”he replied;“Rochester has no climate,—only weather!”So Chauncey Wright spoke of the ups and downs of human affairs as simply“cosmical weather.”But our intuition of design compels us to see mind and purpose in individual and national history, as well as in the physical universe. The same argument which proves the existence of God proves also the existence of a providence. See Farrar, Life of Christ, 1:155, note.
Casualism transfers the freedom of mind to nature, as fatalism transfers the fixity of nature to mind. It thus exchanges providence for chance.[pg 428]Upon this view we remark:
(a) If chance be only another name for human ignorance, a name for the fact that there are trivial occurrences in life which have no meaning or relation to us,—we may acknowledge this, and still hold that providence arranges every so-called chance, for purposes beyond our knowledge. Chance, in this sense, is providential coincidence which we cannot understand, and do not need to trouble ourselves about.
Not all chances are of equal importance. The casual meeting of a stranger in the street need not bring God's providence before me, although I know that God arranges it. Yet I can conceive of that meeting as leading to religious conversation and to the stranger's conversion. When we are prepared for them, we shall see many opportunities which are now as unmeaning to us as the gold in the river-beds was to the early Indians in California. I should be an ingrate, if I escaped a lightning-stroke, and did not thank God; yet Dr. Arnold's saying that every school boy should put on his hat for God's glory, and with a high moral purpose, seems morbid. There is a certain room for the play of arbitrariness. We must not afflict ourselves or the church of God by requiring a Pharisaic punctiliousness in minutiæ. Life is too short to debate the question which shoe we shall put on first.“Love God and do what you will,”said Augustine; that is, Love God, and act out that love in a simple and natural way. Be free in your service, yet be always on the watch for indications of God's will.
Not all chances are of equal importance. The casual meeting of a stranger in the street need not bring God's providence before me, although I know that God arranges it. Yet I can conceive of that meeting as leading to religious conversation and to the stranger's conversion. When we are prepared for them, we shall see many opportunities which are now as unmeaning to us as the gold in the river-beds was to the early Indians in California. I should be an ingrate, if I escaped a lightning-stroke, and did not thank God; yet Dr. Arnold's saying that every school boy should put on his hat for God's glory, and with a high moral purpose, seems morbid. There is a certain room for the play of arbitrariness. We must not afflict ourselves or the church of God by requiring a Pharisaic punctiliousness in minutiæ. Life is too short to debate the question which shoe we shall put on first.“Love God and do what you will,”said Augustine; that is, Love God, and act out that love in a simple and natural way. Be free in your service, yet be always on the watch for indications of God's will.
(b) If chance be taken in the sense of utter absence of all causal connections in the phenomena of matter and mind,—we oppose to this notion the fact that the causal judgment is formed in accordance with a fundamental and necessary law of human thought, and that no science or knowledge is possible without the assumption of its validity.
InLuke 10:31, our Savior says:“By chance a certain priest was going down that way.”Janet:“Chance is not a cause, but a coincidence of causes.”Bowne, Theory of Thought and Knowledge, 197—“By chance is not meant lack of causation, but the coincidence in an event of mutually independent series of causation. Thus the unpurposed meeting of two persons is spoken of as a chance one, when the movement of neither implies that of the other. Here the antithesis of chance is purpose.”
InLuke 10:31, our Savior says:“By chance a certain priest was going down that way.”Janet:“Chance is not a cause, but a coincidence of causes.”Bowne, Theory of Thought and Knowledge, 197—“By chance is not meant lack of causation, but the coincidence in an event of mutually independent series of causation. Thus the unpurposed meeting of two persons is spoken of as a chance one, when the movement of neither implies that of the other. Here the antithesis of chance is purpose.”
(c) If chance be used in the sense of undesigning cause,—it is evidently insufficient to explain the regular and uniform sequences of nature, or the moral progress of the human race. These things argue a superintending and designing mind—in other words, a providence. Since reason demands not only a cause, but a sufficient cause, for the order of the physical and moral world, casualism must be ruled out.
The observer at the signal station was asked what was the climate of Rochester.“Climate?”he replied;“Rochester has no climate,—only weather!”So Chauncey Wright spoke of the ups and downs of human affairs as simply“cosmical weather.”But our intuition of design compels us to see mind and purpose in individual and national history, as well as in the physical universe. The same argument which proves the existence of God proves also the existence of a providence. See Farrar, Life of Christ, 1:155, note.
The observer at the signal station was asked what was the climate of Rochester.“Climate?”he replied;“Rochester has no climate,—only weather!”So Chauncey Wright spoke of the ups and downs of human affairs as simply“cosmical weather.”But our intuition of design compels us to see mind and purpose in individual and national history, as well as in the physical universe. The same argument which proves the existence of God proves also the existence of a providence. See Farrar, Life of Christ, 1:155, note.
3. Theory of a merely general providence.Many who acknowledge God's control over the movements of planets and the destinies of nations deny any divine arrangement of particular events. Most of the arguments against deism are equally valid against the theory of a merely general providence. This view is indeed only a form of deism, which holds that God has not wholly withdrawn himself from the universe, but that his activity within it is limited to the maintenance of general laws.[pg 429]This appears to have been the view of most of the heathen philosophers. Cicero:“Magna dii curant; parva negligunt.”“Even in kingdoms among men,”he says,“kings do not trouble themselves with insignificant affairs.”Fullerton, Conceptions of the Infinite, 9—“Plutarch thought there could not be an infinity of worlds,—Providence could not possibly take charge of so many.‘Troublesome and boundless infinity’could be grasped by no consciousness.”The ancient Cretans made an image of Jove without ears, for they said:“It is a shame to believe that God would hear the talk of men.”So Jerome, the church Father, thought it absurd that God should know just how many gnats and cockroaches there were in the world. David Harum is wiser when he expresses the belief that there is nothing wholly bad or useless in the world:“A reasonable amount of fleas is good for a dog,—they keep him from broodin' on bein' a dog.”This has been paraphrased:“A reasonable number of beaux are good for a girl,—they keep her from brooding over her being a girl.”In addition to the arguments above alluded to, we may urge against this theory that:(a) General control over the course of nature and of history is impossible without control over the smallest particulars which affect the course of nature and of history. Incidents so slight as well-nigh to escape observation at the time of their occurrence are frequently found to determine the whole future of a human life, and through that life the fortunes of a whole empire and of a whole age.“Nothing great has great beginnings.”“Take care of the pence, and the pounds will take care of themselves.”“Care for the chain is care for the links of the chain.”Instances in point are the sleeplessness of King Ahasuerus (Esther 6:1), and the seeming chance that led to the reading of the record of Mordecai's service and to the salvation of the Jews in Persia; the spider's web spun across the entrance to the cave in which Mohammed had taken refuge, which so deceived his pursuers that they passed on In a bootless chase, leaving to the world the religion and the empire of the Moslems; the preaching of Peter the Hermit, which occasioned the first Crusade; the chance shot of an archer, which pierced the right eye of Harold, the last of the purely English kings, gained the battle of Hastings for William the Conqueror, and secured the throne of England for the Normans; the flight of pigeons to the south-west, which changed the course of Columbus, hitherto directed towards Virginia, to the West Indies, and so prevented the dominion of Spain over North America; the storm that dispersed the Spanish Armada and saved England from the Papacy, and the storm that dispersed the French fleet gathered for the conquest of New England—the latter on a day of fasting and prayer appointed by the Puritans to avert the calamity; the settling of New England by the Puritans, rather than by French Jesuits; the order of Council restraining Cromwell and his friends from sailing to America; Major André's lack of self-possession in presence of his captors, which led him to ask an improper question instead of showing his passport, and which saved the American cause; the unusually early commencement of cold weather, which frustrated the plans of Napoleon and destroyed his army in Russia; the fatal shot at Fort Sumter, which precipitated the war of secession and resulted in the abolition of American slavery. Nature is linked to history; the breeze warps the course of the bullet; the worm perforates the plank of the ship. God must care for the least, or he cannot care for the greatest.“Large doors swing on small hinges.”The barking of a dog determined F. W. Robertson to be a preacher rather than a soldier. Robert Browning, Mr. Sludge the Medium:“We find great things are made of little things, And little things go lessening till at last Comes God behind them.”E. G. Robinson:“We cannot suppose only a general outline to have been in the mind of God, while the filling-up is left to be done in some other way. The general includes the special.”Dr. Lloyd, one of the Oxford Professors, said to Pusey,“I wish you would learn something about those German critics.”“In the obedient spirit of those times,”writes Pusey,“I set myself at once to learn German, and I went to Göttingen, to study at once the language and the theology. My life turned on that hint of Dr. Lloyd's.”Goldwin Smith:“Had a bullet entered the brain of Cromwell or of William III in his first battle, or had Gustavus not fallen at Lützen, the course of history apparently would have been changed. The course even of science would have been changed, if there had not been a Newton and a Darwin.”The annexation of Corsica to France[pg 430]gave to France a Napoleon, and to Europe a conqueror. Martineau, Seat of Authority, 101—“Had the monastery at Erfurt deputed another than young Luther on its errand to paganized Rome, or had Leo X sent a less scandalous agent than Tetzel on his business to Germany, the seeds of the Reformation might have fallen by the wayside where they had no deepness of earth, and the Western revolt of the human mind might have taken another date and another form.”See Appleton, Works, 1:149sq.; Lecky, England in the Eighteenth Century, chap. I.(b) The love of God which prompts a general care for the universe must also prompt a particular care for the smallest events which affect the happiness of his creatures. It belongs to love to regard nothing as trifling or beneath its notice which has to do with the interests of the object of its affection. Infinite love may therefore be expected to provide for all, even the minutest things in the creation. Without belief in this particular care, men cannot long believe in God's general care. Faith in a particular providence is indispensable to the very existence of practical religion; for men will not worship or recognize a God who has no direct relation to them.Man's care for his own body involves care for the least important members of it. A lover's devotion is known by his interest in the minutest concerns of his beloved. So all our affairs are matters of interest to God. Pope's Essay on Man:“All nature is but art unknown to thee; All chance, direction which thou canst not see; All discord, harmony not understood; All partial evil, universal good.”If harvests may be labored for and lost without any agency of God; if rain or sun may act like fate, sweeping away the results of years, and God have no hand in it all; if wind and storm may wreck the ship and drown our dearest friends, and God not care for us or for our loss, then all possibility of general trust in God will disappear also.God's care is shown in the least things as well as in the greatest. In Gethsemane Christ says:“Let these go their way: that the word might be fulfilled which he spake, Of those whom thou hast given me I lost not one”(John 18:8, 9). It is the same spirit as that of his intercessory prayer:“I guarded them, and not one of them perished, but the son of perdition”(John 17:12). Christ gives himself as a prisoner that his disciples may go free, even as he redeems us from the curse of the law by being made a curse for us (Gal. 3:13). The dewdrop is moulded by the same law that rounds the planets into spheres. Gen. Grant said he had never but once sought a place for himself, and in that place he was a comparative failure; he had been an instrument in God's hand for the accomplishing of God's purposes, apart from any plan or thought or hope of his own.Of his journey through the dark continent in search of David Livingston, Henry M. Stanley wrote in Scribner's Monthly for June, 1890:“Constrained at the darkest hour humbly to confess that without God's help I was helpless, I vowed a vow in the forest solitudes that I would confess his aid before men. Silence as of death was around me; it was midnight; I was weakened by illness, prostrated with fatigue, and wan with anxiety for my white and black companions, whose fate was a mystery. In this physical and mental distress I besought God to give me back my people. Nine hours later we were exulting with a rapturous joy. In full view of all was the crimson flag with the crescent, and beneath its waving folds was the long-lost rear column.... My own designs were frustrated constantly by unhappy circumstances. I endeavored to steer my course as direct as possible, but there was an unaccountable influence at the helm.... I have been conscious that the issues of every effort were in other hands.... Divinity seems to have hedged us while we journeyed, impelling us whither it would, effecting its own will, but constantly guiding and protecting us.”He refuses to believe that it is all the result of“luck”, and he closes with a doxology which we should expect from Livingston but not from him:“Thanks be to God, forever and ever!”(c) In times of personal danger, and in remarkable conjunctures of public affairs, men instinctively attribute to God a control of the events which take place around them. The prayers which such startling emergencies force from men's lips are proof that God is present and active in human affairs. This testimony of our mental constitution must be regarded as virtually the testimony of him who framed this constitution.[pg 431]No advance of science can rid us of this conviction, since it comes from a deeper source than mere reasoning. The intuition of design is awakened by the connection of events in our daily life, as much as by the useful adaptations which we see in nature.Ps. 107:23-28—“They that go down to the sea in ships ... mount up to the heavens, they go down again to the depths ... And are at their wits' end. Then they cry unto Jehovah in their trouble.”A narrow escape from death shows us a present God and Deliverer. Instance the general feeling throughout the land, expressed by the press as well as by the pulpit, at the breaking out of our rebellion and at the President's subsequent Proclamation of Emancipation.“Est deus in nobis; agitante calescimus illo.”For contrast between Nansen's ignoring of God in his polar journey and Dr. Jacob Chamberlain's calling upon God in his strait in India, see Missionary Review, May, 1898. Sunday School Times, March 4, 1893—“Benjamin Franklin became a deist at the age of fifteen. Before the Revolutionary War he was merely a shrewd and pushing business man. He had public spirit, and he made one happy discovery in science. But‘Poor Richard's’sayings express his mind at that time. The perils and anxieties of the great war gave him a deeper insight. He and others entered upon it‘with a rope around their necks.’As he told the Constitutional Convention of 1787, when he proposed that its daily sessions be opened with prayer, the experiences of that war showed him that‘God verily rules in the affairs of men.’And when the designs for an American coinage were under discussion, Franklin proposed to stamp on them, not‘A Penny Saved is a Penny Earned,’or any other piece of worldly prudence, but‘The Fear of the Lord is the Beginning of Wisdom.’”(d) Christian experience confirms the declarations of Scripture that particular events are brought about by God with special reference to the good or ill of the individual. Such events occur at times in such direct connection with the Christian's prayers that no doubt remains with regard to the providential arrangement of them. The possibility of such divine agency in natural events cannot be questioned by one who, like the Christian, has had experience of the greater wonders of regeneration and daily intercourse with God, and who believes in the reality of creation, incarnation, and miracles.Providence prepares the way for men's conversion, sometimes by their own partial reformation, sometimes by the sudden death of others near them. Instance Luther and Judson. The Christian learns that the same Providence that led him before his conversion is busy after his conversion in directing his steps and in supplying his wants. Daniel Defoe:“I have been fed more by miracle than Elijah when the angels were his purveyors.”InPsalm 32, David celebrates not only God's pardoning mercy but his subsequent providential leading:“I will counsel thee with mine eye upon thee”(verse 8). It may be objected that we often mistake the meaning of events. We answer that, as in nature, so in providence, we are compelled to believe, not that weknowthe design, but that thereisa design. Instance Shelley's drowning, and Jacob Knapp's prayer that his opponent might be stricken dumb. Lyman Beecher's attributing the burning of the Unitarian church to God's judgment upon false doctrine was invalidated a little later by the burning of his own church.Job 23:10—“He knoweth the way that is mine,”or“the way that is with me,”i. e., my inmost way, life, character;“When he hath tried me, I shall come forth as gold.”1 Cor. 19:4—“and the rock was Christ”—Christ was the ever present source of their refreshment and life, both physical and spiritual. God's providence is all exercised through Christ.2 Cor. 2:14—“But thanks be unto God, who always leadeth us in triumph in Christ”; not, as in A. V.,“causeth us to triumph.”Paul glories, not in conquering, but in being conquered. Let Christ triumph, not Paul.“Great King of grace, my heart subdue; I would be led in triumph too. A willing captive to my Lord, To own the conquests of his word.”Therefore Paul can call himself“the prisoner of Christ Jesus”(Eph. 3:1). It was Christ who had shut him up two years in Cæsarea, and then two succeeding years in Rome.
Many who acknowledge God's control over the movements of planets and the destinies of nations deny any divine arrangement of particular events. Most of the arguments against deism are equally valid against the theory of a merely general providence. This view is indeed only a form of deism, which holds that God has not wholly withdrawn himself from the universe, but that his activity within it is limited to the maintenance of general laws.
This appears to have been the view of most of the heathen philosophers. Cicero:“Magna dii curant; parva negligunt.”“Even in kingdoms among men,”he says,“kings do not trouble themselves with insignificant affairs.”Fullerton, Conceptions of the Infinite, 9—“Plutarch thought there could not be an infinity of worlds,—Providence could not possibly take charge of so many.‘Troublesome and boundless infinity’could be grasped by no consciousness.”The ancient Cretans made an image of Jove without ears, for they said:“It is a shame to believe that God would hear the talk of men.”So Jerome, the church Father, thought it absurd that God should know just how many gnats and cockroaches there were in the world. David Harum is wiser when he expresses the belief that there is nothing wholly bad or useless in the world:“A reasonable amount of fleas is good for a dog,—they keep him from broodin' on bein' a dog.”This has been paraphrased:“A reasonable number of beaux are good for a girl,—they keep her from brooding over her being a girl.”
This appears to have been the view of most of the heathen philosophers. Cicero:“Magna dii curant; parva negligunt.”“Even in kingdoms among men,”he says,“kings do not trouble themselves with insignificant affairs.”Fullerton, Conceptions of the Infinite, 9—“Plutarch thought there could not be an infinity of worlds,—Providence could not possibly take charge of so many.‘Troublesome and boundless infinity’could be grasped by no consciousness.”The ancient Cretans made an image of Jove without ears, for they said:“It is a shame to believe that God would hear the talk of men.”So Jerome, the church Father, thought it absurd that God should know just how many gnats and cockroaches there were in the world. David Harum is wiser when he expresses the belief that there is nothing wholly bad or useless in the world:“A reasonable amount of fleas is good for a dog,—they keep him from broodin' on bein' a dog.”This has been paraphrased:“A reasonable number of beaux are good for a girl,—they keep her from brooding over her being a girl.”
In addition to the arguments above alluded to, we may urge against this theory that:
(a) General control over the course of nature and of history is impossible without control over the smallest particulars which affect the course of nature and of history. Incidents so slight as well-nigh to escape observation at the time of their occurrence are frequently found to determine the whole future of a human life, and through that life the fortunes of a whole empire and of a whole age.
“Nothing great has great beginnings.”“Take care of the pence, and the pounds will take care of themselves.”“Care for the chain is care for the links of the chain.”Instances in point are the sleeplessness of King Ahasuerus (Esther 6:1), and the seeming chance that led to the reading of the record of Mordecai's service and to the salvation of the Jews in Persia; the spider's web spun across the entrance to the cave in which Mohammed had taken refuge, which so deceived his pursuers that they passed on In a bootless chase, leaving to the world the religion and the empire of the Moslems; the preaching of Peter the Hermit, which occasioned the first Crusade; the chance shot of an archer, which pierced the right eye of Harold, the last of the purely English kings, gained the battle of Hastings for William the Conqueror, and secured the throne of England for the Normans; the flight of pigeons to the south-west, which changed the course of Columbus, hitherto directed towards Virginia, to the West Indies, and so prevented the dominion of Spain over North America; the storm that dispersed the Spanish Armada and saved England from the Papacy, and the storm that dispersed the French fleet gathered for the conquest of New England—the latter on a day of fasting and prayer appointed by the Puritans to avert the calamity; the settling of New England by the Puritans, rather than by French Jesuits; the order of Council restraining Cromwell and his friends from sailing to America; Major André's lack of self-possession in presence of his captors, which led him to ask an improper question instead of showing his passport, and which saved the American cause; the unusually early commencement of cold weather, which frustrated the plans of Napoleon and destroyed his army in Russia; the fatal shot at Fort Sumter, which precipitated the war of secession and resulted in the abolition of American slavery. Nature is linked to history; the breeze warps the course of the bullet; the worm perforates the plank of the ship. God must care for the least, or he cannot care for the greatest.“Large doors swing on small hinges.”The barking of a dog determined F. W. Robertson to be a preacher rather than a soldier. Robert Browning, Mr. Sludge the Medium:“We find great things are made of little things, And little things go lessening till at last Comes God behind them.”E. G. Robinson:“We cannot suppose only a general outline to have been in the mind of God, while the filling-up is left to be done in some other way. The general includes the special.”Dr. Lloyd, one of the Oxford Professors, said to Pusey,“I wish you would learn something about those German critics.”“In the obedient spirit of those times,”writes Pusey,“I set myself at once to learn German, and I went to Göttingen, to study at once the language and the theology. My life turned on that hint of Dr. Lloyd's.”Goldwin Smith:“Had a bullet entered the brain of Cromwell or of William III in his first battle, or had Gustavus not fallen at Lützen, the course of history apparently would have been changed. The course even of science would have been changed, if there had not been a Newton and a Darwin.”The annexation of Corsica to France[pg 430]gave to France a Napoleon, and to Europe a conqueror. Martineau, Seat of Authority, 101—“Had the monastery at Erfurt deputed another than young Luther on its errand to paganized Rome, or had Leo X sent a less scandalous agent than Tetzel on his business to Germany, the seeds of the Reformation might have fallen by the wayside where they had no deepness of earth, and the Western revolt of the human mind might have taken another date and another form.”See Appleton, Works, 1:149sq.; Lecky, England in the Eighteenth Century, chap. I.
“Nothing great has great beginnings.”“Take care of the pence, and the pounds will take care of themselves.”“Care for the chain is care for the links of the chain.”Instances in point are the sleeplessness of King Ahasuerus (Esther 6:1), and the seeming chance that led to the reading of the record of Mordecai's service and to the salvation of the Jews in Persia; the spider's web spun across the entrance to the cave in which Mohammed had taken refuge, which so deceived his pursuers that they passed on In a bootless chase, leaving to the world the religion and the empire of the Moslems; the preaching of Peter the Hermit, which occasioned the first Crusade; the chance shot of an archer, which pierced the right eye of Harold, the last of the purely English kings, gained the battle of Hastings for William the Conqueror, and secured the throne of England for the Normans; the flight of pigeons to the south-west, which changed the course of Columbus, hitherto directed towards Virginia, to the West Indies, and so prevented the dominion of Spain over North America; the storm that dispersed the Spanish Armada and saved England from the Papacy, and the storm that dispersed the French fleet gathered for the conquest of New England—the latter on a day of fasting and prayer appointed by the Puritans to avert the calamity; the settling of New England by the Puritans, rather than by French Jesuits; the order of Council restraining Cromwell and his friends from sailing to America; Major André's lack of self-possession in presence of his captors, which led him to ask an improper question instead of showing his passport, and which saved the American cause; the unusually early commencement of cold weather, which frustrated the plans of Napoleon and destroyed his army in Russia; the fatal shot at Fort Sumter, which precipitated the war of secession and resulted in the abolition of American slavery. Nature is linked to history; the breeze warps the course of the bullet; the worm perforates the plank of the ship. God must care for the least, or he cannot care for the greatest.
“Large doors swing on small hinges.”The barking of a dog determined F. W. Robertson to be a preacher rather than a soldier. Robert Browning, Mr. Sludge the Medium:“We find great things are made of little things, And little things go lessening till at last Comes God behind them.”E. G. Robinson:“We cannot suppose only a general outline to have been in the mind of God, while the filling-up is left to be done in some other way. The general includes the special.”Dr. Lloyd, one of the Oxford Professors, said to Pusey,“I wish you would learn something about those German critics.”“In the obedient spirit of those times,”writes Pusey,“I set myself at once to learn German, and I went to Göttingen, to study at once the language and the theology. My life turned on that hint of Dr. Lloyd's.”
Goldwin Smith:“Had a bullet entered the brain of Cromwell or of William III in his first battle, or had Gustavus not fallen at Lützen, the course of history apparently would have been changed. The course even of science would have been changed, if there had not been a Newton and a Darwin.”The annexation of Corsica to France[pg 430]gave to France a Napoleon, and to Europe a conqueror. Martineau, Seat of Authority, 101—“Had the monastery at Erfurt deputed another than young Luther on its errand to paganized Rome, or had Leo X sent a less scandalous agent than Tetzel on his business to Germany, the seeds of the Reformation might have fallen by the wayside where they had no deepness of earth, and the Western revolt of the human mind might have taken another date and another form.”See Appleton, Works, 1:149sq.; Lecky, England in the Eighteenth Century, chap. I.
(b) The love of God which prompts a general care for the universe must also prompt a particular care for the smallest events which affect the happiness of his creatures. It belongs to love to regard nothing as trifling or beneath its notice which has to do with the interests of the object of its affection. Infinite love may therefore be expected to provide for all, even the minutest things in the creation. Without belief in this particular care, men cannot long believe in God's general care. Faith in a particular providence is indispensable to the very existence of practical religion; for men will not worship or recognize a God who has no direct relation to them.
Man's care for his own body involves care for the least important members of it. A lover's devotion is known by his interest in the minutest concerns of his beloved. So all our affairs are matters of interest to God. Pope's Essay on Man:“All nature is but art unknown to thee; All chance, direction which thou canst not see; All discord, harmony not understood; All partial evil, universal good.”If harvests may be labored for and lost without any agency of God; if rain or sun may act like fate, sweeping away the results of years, and God have no hand in it all; if wind and storm may wreck the ship and drown our dearest friends, and God not care for us or for our loss, then all possibility of general trust in God will disappear also.God's care is shown in the least things as well as in the greatest. In Gethsemane Christ says:“Let these go their way: that the word might be fulfilled which he spake, Of those whom thou hast given me I lost not one”(John 18:8, 9). It is the same spirit as that of his intercessory prayer:“I guarded them, and not one of them perished, but the son of perdition”(John 17:12). Christ gives himself as a prisoner that his disciples may go free, even as he redeems us from the curse of the law by being made a curse for us (Gal. 3:13). The dewdrop is moulded by the same law that rounds the planets into spheres. Gen. Grant said he had never but once sought a place for himself, and in that place he was a comparative failure; he had been an instrument in God's hand for the accomplishing of God's purposes, apart from any plan or thought or hope of his own.Of his journey through the dark continent in search of David Livingston, Henry M. Stanley wrote in Scribner's Monthly for June, 1890:“Constrained at the darkest hour humbly to confess that without God's help I was helpless, I vowed a vow in the forest solitudes that I would confess his aid before men. Silence as of death was around me; it was midnight; I was weakened by illness, prostrated with fatigue, and wan with anxiety for my white and black companions, whose fate was a mystery. In this physical and mental distress I besought God to give me back my people. Nine hours later we were exulting with a rapturous joy. In full view of all was the crimson flag with the crescent, and beneath its waving folds was the long-lost rear column.... My own designs were frustrated constantly by unhappy circumstances. I endeavored to steer my course as direct as possible, but there was an unaccountable influence at the helm.... I have been conscious that the issues of every effort were in other hands.... Divinity seems to have hedged us while we journeyed, impelling us whither it would, effecting its own will, but constantly guiding and protecting us.”He refuses to believe that it is all the result of“luck”, and he closes with a doxology which we should expect from Livingston but not from him:“Thanks be to God, forever and ever!”
Man's care for his own body involves care for the least important members of it. A lover's devotion is known by his interest in the minutest concerns of his beloved. So all our affairs are matters of interest to God. Pope's Essay on Man:“All nature is but art unknown to thee; All chance, direction which thou canst not see; All discord, harmony not understood; All partial evil, universal good.”If harvests may be labored for and lost without any agency of God; if rain or sun may act like fate, sweeping away the results of years, and God have no hand in it all; if wind and storm may wreck the ship and drown our dearest friends, and God not care for us or for our loss, then all possibility of general trust in God will disappear also.
God's care is shown in the least things as well as in the greatest. In Gethsemane Christ says:“Let these go their way: that the word might be fulfilled which he spake, Of those whom thou hast given me I lost not one”(John 18:8, 9). It is the same spirit as that of his intercessory prayer:“I guarded them, and not one of them perished, but the son of perdition”(John 17:12). Christ gives himself as a prisoner that his disciples may go free, even as he redeems us from the curse of the law by being made a curse for us (Gal. 3:13). The dewdrop is moulded by the same law that rounds the planets into spheres. Gen. Grant said he had never but once sought a place for himself, and in that place he was a comparative failure; he had been an instrument in God's hand for the accomplishing of God's purposes, apart from any plan or thought or hope of his own.
Of his journey through the dark continent in search of David Livingston, Henry M. Stanley wrote in Scribner's Monthly for June, 1890:“Constrained at the darkest hour humbly to confess that without God's help I was helpless, I vowed a vow in the forest solitudes that I would confess his aid before men. Silence as of death was around me; it was midnight; I was weakened by illness, prostrated with fatigue, and wan with anxiety for my white and black companions, whose fate was a mystery. In this physical and mental distress I besought God to give me back my people. Nine hours later we were exulting with a rapturous joy. In full view of all was the crimson flag with the crescent, and beneath its waving folds was the long-lost rear column.... My own designs were frustrated constantly by unhappy circumstances. I endeavored to steer my course as direct as possible, but there was an unaccountable influence at the helm.... I have been conscious that the issues of every effort were in other hands.... Divinity seems to have hedged us while we journeyed, impelling us whither it would, effecting its own will, but constantly guiding and protecting us.”He refuses to believe that it is all the result of“luck”, and he closes with a doxology which we should expect from Livingston but not from him:“Thanks be to God, forever and ever!”
(c) In times of personal danger, and in remarkable conjunctures of public affairs, men instinctively attribute to God a control of the events which take place around them. The prayers which such startling emergencies force from men's lips are proof that God is present and active in human affairs. This testimony of our mental constitution must be regarded as virtually the testimony of him who framed this constitution.
No advance of science can rid us of this conviction, since it comes from a deeper source than mere reasoning. The intuition of design is awakened by the connection of events in our daily life, as much as by the useful adaptations which we see in nature.Ps. 107:23-28—“They that go down to the sea in ships ... mount up to the heavens, they go down again to the depths ... And are at their wits' end. Then they cry unto Jehovah in their trouble.”A narrow escape from death shows us a present God and Deliverer. Instance the general feeling throughout the land, expressed by the press as well as by the pulpit, at the breaking out of our rebellion and at the President's subsequent Proclamation of Emancipation.“Est deus in nobis; agitante calescimus illo.”For contrast between Nansen's ignoring of God in his polar journey and Dr. Jacob Chamberlain's calling upon God in his strait in India, see Missionary Review, May, 1898. Sunday School Times, March 4, 1893—“Benjamin Franklin became a deist at the age of fifteen. Before the Revolutionary War he was merely a shrewd and pushing business man. He had public spirit, and he made one happy discovery in science. But‘Poor Richard's’sayings express his mind at that time. The perils and anxieties of the great war gave him a deeper insight. He and others entered upon it‘with a rope around their necks.’As he told the Constitutional Convention of 1787, when he proposed that its daily sessions be opened with prayer, the experiences of that war showed him that‘God verily rules in the affairs of men.’And when the designs for an American coinage were under discussion, Franklin proposed to stamp on them, not‘A Penny Saved is a Penny Earned,’or any other piece of worldly prudence, but‘The Fear of the Lord is the Beginning of Wisdom.’”
No advance of science can rid us of this conviction, since it comes from a deeper source than mere reasoning. The intuition of design is awakened by the connection of events in our daily life, as much as by the useful adaptations which we see in nature.Ps. 107:23-28—“They that go down to the sea in ships ... mount up to the heavens, they go down again to the depths ... And are at their wits' end. Then they cry unto Jehovah in their trouble.”A narrow escape from death shows us a present God and Deliverer. Instance the general feeling throughout the land, expressed by the press as well as by the pulpit, at the breaking out of our rebellion and at the President's subsequent Proclamation of Emancipation.
“Est deus in nobis; agitante calescimus illo.”For contrast between Nansen's ignoring of God in his polar journey and Dr. Jacob Chamberlain's calling upon God in his strait in India, see Missionary Review, May, 1898. Sunday School Times, March 4, 1893—“Benjamin Franklin became a deist at the age of fifteen. Before the Revolutionary War he was merely a shrewd and pushing business man. He had public spirit, and he made one happy discovery in science. But‘Poor Richard's’sayings express his mind at that time. The perils and anxieties of the great war gave him a deeper insight. He and others entered upon it‘with a rope around their necks.’As he told the Constitutional Convention of 1787, when he proposed that its daily sessions be opened with prayer, the experiences of that war showed him that‘God verily rules in the affairs of men.’And when the designs for an American coinage were under discussion, Franklin proposed to stamp on them, not‘A Penny Saved is a Penny Earned,’or any other piece of worldly prudence, but‘The Fear of the Lord is the Beginning of Wisdom.’”
(d) Christian experience confirms the declarations of Scripture that particular events are brought about by God with special reference to the good or ill of the individual. Such events occur at times in such direct connection with the Christian's prayers that no doubt remains with regard to the providential arrangement of them. The possibility of such divine agency in natural events cannot be questioned by one who, like the Christian, has had experience of the greater wonders of regeneration and daily intercourse with God, and who believes in the reality of creation, incarnation, and miracles.
Providence prepares the way for men's conversion, sometimes by their own partial reformation, sometimes by the sudden death of others near them. Instance Luther and Judson. The Christian learns that the same Providence that led him before his conversion is busy after his conversion in directing his steps and in supplying his wants. Daniel Defoe:“I have been fed more by miracle than Elijah when the angels were his purveyors.”InPsalm 32, David celebrates not only God's pardoning mercy but his subsequent providential leading:“I will counsel thee with mine eye upon thee”(verse 8). It may be objected that we often mistake the meaning of events. We answer that, as in nature, so in providence, we are compelled to believe, not that weknowthe design, but that thereisa design. Instance Shelley's drowning, and Jacob Knapp's prayer that his opponent might be stricken dumb. Lyman Beecher's attributing the burning of the Unitarian church to God's judgment upon false doctrine was invalidated a little later by the burning of his own church.Job 23:10—“He knoweth the way that is mine,”or“the way that is with me,”i. e., my inmost way, life, character;“When he hath tried me, I shall come forth as gold.”1 Cor. 19:4—“and the rock was Christ”—Christ was the ever present source of their refreshment and life, both physical and spiritual. God's providence is all exercised through Christ.2 Cor. 2:14—“But thanks be unto God, who always leadeth us in triumph in Christ”; not, as in A. V.,“causeth us to triumph.”Paul glories, not in conquering, but in being conquered. Let Christ triumph, not Paul.“Great King of grace, my heart subdue; I would be led in triumph too. A willing captive to my Lord, To own the conquests of his word.”Therefore Paul can call himself“the prisoner of Christ Jesus”(Eph. 3:1). It was Christ who had shut him up two years in Cæsarea, and then two succeeding years in Rome.
Providence prepares the way for men's conversion, sometimes by their own partial reformation, sometimes by the sudden death of others near them. Instance Luther and Judson. The Christian learns that the same Providence that led him before his conversion is busy after his conversion in directing his steps and in supplying his wants. Daniel Defoe:“I have been fed more by miracle than Elijah when the angels were his purveyors.”InPsalm 32, David celebrates not only God's pardoning mercy but his subsequent providential leading:“I will counsel thee with mine eye upon thee”(verse 8). It may be objected that we often mistake the meaning of events. We answer that, as in nature, so in providence, we are compelled to believe, not that weknowthe design, but that thereisa design. Instance Shelley's drowning, and Jacob Knapp's prayer that his opponent might be stricken dumb. Lyman Beecher's attributing the burning of the Unitarian church to God's judgment upon false doctrine was invalidated a little later by the burning of his own church.
Job 23:10—“He knoweth the way that is mine,”or“the way that is with me,”i. e., my inmost way, life, character;“When he hath tried me, I shall come forth as gold.”1 Cor. 19:4—“and the rock was Christ”—Christ was the ever present source of their refreshment and life, both physical and spiritual. God's providence is all exercised through Christ.2 Cor. 2:14—“But thanks be unto God, who always leadeth us in triumph in Christ”; not, as in A. V.,“causeth us to triumph.”Paul glories, not in conquering, but in being conquered. Let Christ triumph, not Paul.“Great King of grace, my heart subdue; I would be led in triumph too. A willing captive to my Lord, To own the conquests of his word.”Therefore Paul can call himself“the prisoner of Christ Jesus”(Eph. 3:1). It was Christ who had shut him up two years in Cæsarea, and then two succeeding years in Rome.