3. To Christian activity.Here the truth lies between the two extremes of quietism and naturalism.(a) In opposition to the false abnegation of human reason and will which quietism demands, we hold that God guides us, not by continual miracle, but by his natural providence and the energizing of our faculties by his Spirit, so that we rationally and freely do our own work, and work out our own salvation.Upham, Interior Life, 356, defines quietism as“cessation of wandering thoughts and discursive imaginations, rest from irregular desires and affections, and perfect submission of the will.”Its advocates, however, have often spoken of it as a giving up of our will and reason, and a swallowing up of these in the wisdom and will of God. This phraseology is misleading, and savors of a pantheistic merging of man in God. Dorner:“Quietism makes God a monarch without living subjects.”Certain English quietists, like the Mohammedans, will not employ physicians in sickness. They quote2 Chron. 16:12, 13—Asa“sought not to Jehovah, but to the physicians. And Asa slept with his fathers.”They forget that the“physicians”alluded to in Chronicles were probably heathen necromancers. Cromwell to his Ironsides:“Trust God, and keep your powder dry!”Providence does not exclude, but rather implies the operation of natural law, by which we mean God's regular way of working. It leaves no excuse for the sarcasm of Robert Browning's Mr. Sludge the Medium, 223—“Saved your precious self from what befell The thirty-three whom Providence forgot.”Schurman, Belief in God, 213—“The temples were hung with the votive offerings of those only who hadescapeddrowning.”“So like Provvy!”Bentham used to say, when anything particularly unseemly occurred in the way of natural catastrophe, God reveals himself in natural law. Physicians and medicine are his methods, as well as the impartation of faith and courage to the patient. The advocates of faith-cure should provide by faith that no believing Christian should die. With the apostolic miracles should go inspiration, as Edward Irving declared.“Every man is as lazy as circumstances will admit.”We throw upon the shoulders of Providence the burdens which belong to us to bear.“Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling; for it is God who worketh in you both to will and to work, for his good pleasure”(Phil. 2:12, 13).Prayer without the use of means is an insult to God.“If God has decreed that you should live, what is the use of your eating or drinking?”Can a drowning man refuse to swim, or even to lay hold of the rope that is thrown to him, and yet ask God to save him on account of his faith?“Tie your camel,”said Mohammed,“and commit it to God.”Frederick Douglas used to say that when in slavery he often prayed for freedom, but his prayer was never answered till he prayed with his feet—and ran away. Whitney, Integrity of Christian Science, 68—“The existence of the dynamo at the power-house does not make unnecessary the trolley line, nor the secondary motor, nor the conductor's application of the power. True quietism is a resting in the Lord after we have done our part.”Ps. 37:7—“Rest in Jehovah, and wait patiently for him”;Is. 57:2—“He entereth into peace; they rest in their beds, each one that walketh in his uprightness”. Ian Maclaren, Cure of Souls, 147—“Religion has three places of abode: in the reason, which is theology; in the conscience, which is ethics; and in the heart, which is quietism.”On the self-guidance of Christ, see Adamson, The Mind in Christ, 202-232.George Müller, writing about ascertaining the will of God, says:“I seek at the beginning to get my heart into such a state that it has no will of its own in regard to a given matter. Nine tenths of the difficulties are overcome when our hearts are ready to do the Lord's will, whatever it may be. Having done this, I do not leave the result to feeling or simple impression. If I do so, I make myself liable to a great delusion. I seek the will of the Spirit of God through, or in connection with, the Word of God. The Spirit and the Word must be combined. If I look to the Spirit alone, without[pg 440]the Word, I lay myself open to great delusions also. If the Holy Ghost guides us at all, he will do it according to the Scriptures, and never contrary to them. Next I take into account providential circumstances. These often plainly indicate God's will in connection with his Word and his Spirit. I ask God in prayer to reveal to me his will aright. Thus through prayer to God, the study of the Word, and reflection, I come to a deliberate judgment according to the best of my knowledge and ability, and, if my mind is thus at peace, I proceed accordingly.”We must not confound rational piety with false enthusiasm. See Isaac Taylor, Natural History of Enthusiasm.“Not quiescence, but acquiescence, is demanded of us.”As God feeds“the birds of the heaven”(Mat. 6:26), not by dropping food from heaven into their mouths, but by stimulating them to seek food for themselves, so God provides for his rational creatures by giving them a sanctified common sense and by leading them to use it. In a true sense Christianity gives us more will than ever. The Holy Spirit emancipates the will, sets it upon proper objects, and fills it with new energy. We are therefore not to surrender ourselves passively to whatever professes to be a divine suggestion:1 John 4:1—“believe not every spirit, but prove the spirits, whether they are of God.”The test is the revealed word of God:Is. 8:20—“To the law and to the testimony! if they speak not according to this word, surely there is no morning for them.”See remarks on false Mysticism, pages 32, 33.(b) In opposition to naturalism, we hold that God is continually near the human spirit by his providential working, and that this providential working is so adjusted to the Christian's nature and necessities as to furnish instruction with regard to duty, discipline of religious character, and needed help and comfort in trial.In interpreting God's providences, as in interpreting Scripture, we are dependent upon the Holy Spirit. The work of the Spirit is, indeed, in great part an application of Scripture truth to present circumstances. While we never allow ourselves to act blindly and irrationally, but accustom ourselves to weigh evidence with regard to duty, we are to expect, as the gift of the Spirit, an understanding of circumstances—a fine sense of God's providential purposes with regard to us, which will make our true course plain to ourselves, although we may not always be able to explain it to others.The Christian may have a continual divine guidance. Unlike the unfaithful and unbelieving, of whom it is said, inPs. 106:13,“They waited not for his counsel,”the true believer has wisdom given him from above.Ps. 32:8—“I will instruct thee and teach thee in the way which thou shalt go”;Prov. 3:6—“In all thy ways acknowledge him, And he will direct thy paths”;Phil. 1:9—“And this I pray, that your love may abound yet more and more in knowledge and all discernment”(αἰσθήσει = spiritual discernment);James 1:5—“if any of you lacketh wisdom, let him ask of God, who giveth(τοῦ διδόντος Θεοῦ)to all liberally and upbraideth not”;John 15:15—“No longer do I call you servants; for the servant knoweth not what his lord doeth: but I have called you friends”;Col. 1:9, 10—“that ye may be filled with the knowledge of his will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding, to walk worthily of the Lord unto all pleasing.”God's Spirit makes Providence as well as the Bible personal to us. From every page of nature, as well as of the Bible, the living God speaks to us. Tholuck:“The more we recognize in every daily occurrence God's secret inspiration, guiding and controlling us, the more will all which to others wears a common and every-day aspect prove to us a sign and a wondrous work.”Hutton, Essays:“Animals that are blind slaves of impulse, driven about by forces from within, have so to say fewer valves in their moral constitution for the entrance of divine guidance. But minds alive to every word of God give constant opportunity for his interference with suggestions that may alter the course of their lives. The higher the mind, the more it glides into the region of providential control. God turns the good by the slightest breath of thought.”So the Christian hymn,“Guide me, O thou great Jehovah!”likens God's leading of the believer to that of Israel by the pillar of fire and cloud; and Paul in his dungeon calls himself“the prisoner of Christ Jesus”(Eph. 3:1). Affliction is the discipline of God's providence. Greek proverb:“He who does not get thrashed, does not get educated.”On God's Leadings, see A. H. Strong, Philosophy and Religion, 560-562.[pg 441]Abraham“went out, not knowing whither he went”(Heb. 11:8). Not till he reached Canaan did he know the place of his destination. Like a child he placed his hand in the hand of his unseen Father, to be led whither he himself knew not. We often have guidance without discernment of that guidance.Is. 42:16—“I will bring the blind by a way that they know not; in paths that they know not will I lead them.”So we act more wisely than we ourselves understand, and afterwards look back with astonishment to see what we have been able to accomplish. Emerson:“Himself from God he could not free; He builded better than he knew.”Disappointments? Ah, you make a mistake in the spelling; the D should be an H: His appointments. Melanchthon:“Quem poetæ fortunam, nos Deum appellamus.”Chinese proverb:“The good God never smites with both hands.”“Tact is a sort of psychical automatism”(Ladd). There is a Christian tact which is rarely at fault, because its possessor is“led by the Spirit of God”(Rom. 8:14). Yet we must always make allowance, as Oliver Cromwell used to say,“for the possibility of being mistaken.”When Luther's friends wrote despairingly of the negotiations at the Diet of Worms, he replied from Coburg that he had been looking up at the night sky, spangled and studded with stars, and had found no pillars to hold them up. And yet they did not fall. God needs no props for his stars and planets. He hangs them on nothing. So, in the working of God's providence, the unseen is prop enough for the seen. Henry Drummond, Life, 127—“To find out God's will: 1. Pray. 2. Think. 3. Talk to wise people, but do not regard their decision as final. 4. Beware of the bias of your own will, but do not be too much afraid of it (God never unnecessarily thwarts a man's nature and likings, and it is a mistake to think that his will is always in the line of the disagreeable). 5. Meantime, do the next thing (for doing God's will in small things is the best preparation for knowing it in great things). 6. When decision and action are necessary, go ahead. 7. Never reconsider the decision when it is finally acted on; and 8. You will probably not find out until afterwards, perhaps long afterwards, that you have been led at all.”Amiel lamented that everything was left to his own responsibility and declared:“It is this thought that disgusts me with the government of my own life. To win true peace, a man needs to feel himself directed, pardoned and sustained by a supreme Power, to feel himself in the right road, at the point where God would have him be,—in harmony with God and the universe. This faith gives strength and calm. I have not got it. All that is seems to me arbitrary and fortuitous.”How much better is Wordsworth's faith, Excursion, book 4:581—“One adequate support For the calamities of mortal life Exists, one only: an assured belief That the procession of our fate, howe'er Sad or disturbed, is ordered by a Being Of infinite benevolence and power, Whose everlasting purposes embrace All accidents, converting them to good.”Mrs. Browning, De Profundis, stanza xxiii—“I praise thee while my days go on; I love thee while my days go on! Through dark and dearth, through fire and frost, With emptied arms and treasure lost, I thank thee while my days go on!”4. To the evil acts of free agents.(a) Here we must distinguish between the natural agency and the moral agency of God, or between acts of permissive providence and acts of efficient causation. We are ever to remember that God neither works evil, nor causes his creatures to work evil. All sin is chargeable to the self-will and perversity of the creature; to declare God the author of it is the greatest of blasphemies.Bp. Wordsworth:“Godforeseesevil deeds, but neverforcesthem.”“God does not cause sin, any more than the rider of a limping horse causes the limping.”Nor can it be said that Satan is the author of man's sin. Man's powers are his own. Not Satan, but the man himself, gives the wrong application to these powers. Not the cause, but the occasion, of sin is in the tempter; the cause is in the evil will which yields to his persuasions.(b) But while man makes up his evil decision independently of God, God does, by his natural agency, order the method in which this inward evil shall express itself, by limiting it in time, place, and measure, or by guiding it to the end which his wisdom and love, and not man's intent, has[pg 442]set. In all this, however, God only allows sin to develop itself after its own nature, so that it may be known, abhorred, and if possible overcome and forsaken.Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 2:272-284—“Judas's treachery works the reconciliation of the world, and Israel's apostasy the salvation of the Gentiles.... God smooths the path of the sinner, and gives him chance for the outbreak of the evil, like a wise physician who draws to the surface of the body the disease that has been raging within, in order that it may be cured, if possible, by mild means, or, if not, may be removed by the knife.”Christianity rises in spite of, nay, in consequence of opposition, like a kite against the wind. When Christ has used the sword with which he has girded himself, as he used Cyrus and the Assyrian, he breaks it and throws it away. He turns the world upside down that he may get it right side up. He makes use of every member of society, as the locomotive uses every cog. The sufferings of the martyrs add to the number of the church; the worship of relics stimulates the Crusades; the worship of the saints leads to miracle plays and to the modern drama; the worship of images helps modern art; monasticism, scholasticism, the Papacy, even sceptical and destructive criticism stir up defenders of the faith. Shakespeare, Richard III, 5:1—“Thus doth he force the swords of wicked men To turn their own points on their masters' bosoms”; Hamlet, 1:2—“Foul deeds will rise, though all the earth o'erwhelm them, to men's eyes”; Macbeth, 1:7—“Even handed justice Commends the ingredients of the poisoned chalice To our own lips.”The Emperor of Germany went to Paris incognito and returned, thinking that no one had known of his absence. But at every step, going and coming, he was surrounded by detectives who saw that no harm came to him. The swallow drove again and again at the little struggling moth, but there was a plate glass window between them which neither one of them knew. Charles Darwin put his cheek against the plate glass of the cobra's cage, but could not keep himself from starting when the cobra struck. Tacitus, Annales, 14:5—“Noctem sideribus illustrem, quasi convinsendum ad scelus, dii præbuere”—“a night brilliant with stars, as if for the purpose of proving the crime, was granted by the gods.”See F. A. Noble, Our Redemption, 59-76, on the self-registry and self-disclosure of sin, with quotation from Daniel Webster's speech in the case of Knapp at Salem:“It must be confessed. It will be confessed. There is no refuge from confession but suicide, and suicide is confession.”(c) In cases of persistent iniquity, God's providence still compels the sinner to accomplish the design with which he and all things have been created, namely, the manifestation of God's holiness. Even though he struggle against God's plan, yet he must by his very resistance serve it. His sin is made its own detector, judge, and tormentor. His character and doom are made a warning to others. Refusing to glorify God in his salvation, he is made to glorify God in his destruction.Is. 10:5, 7—“Ho Assyrian, the rod of mine anger, the staff in whose hand is mine indignation!... Howbeit, he meaneth not so.”Charles Kingsley, Two Years Ago:“He [Treluddra] is one of those base natures, whom fact only lashes into greater fury,—a Pharaoh, whose heart the Lord himself can only harden”—here we would add the qualification:“consistently with the limits which he has set to the operations of his grace.”Pharaoh's ordering the destruction of the Israelitish children (Ex. 1:16) was made the means of putting Moses under royal protection, of training him for his future work, and finally of rescuing the whole nation whose sons Pharaoh sought to destroy. So God brings good out of evil; see Tyler, Theology of Greek Poets, 28-35. Emerson:“My will fulfilled shall be, For in daylight as in dark My thunderbolt has eyes to see His way home to the mark.”See also Edwards, Works, 4:300-312.Col. 2:15—“having stripped off from himself the principalities and the powers”—the hosts of evil spirits that swarmed upon him in their final onset—“he made a show of them openly, triumphing over them in it,”i. e., in the cross, thus turning their evil into a means of good. Royce, Spirit of Modern Philosophy, 443,—“Love, seeking for absolute evil, is like an electric light engaged in searching for a shadow,—when Love gets there, the shadow has disappeared.”But this means, not that all thingsaregood, but that“all things work together[pg 443]for good”(Rom. 8:28)—God overruling for good that which in itself is only evil. John Wesley:“God buries his workmen, but carries on his work.”Sermon on“The Devil's Mistakes”: Satan thought he could overcome Christ in the wilderness, in the garden, on the cross. He triumphed when he cast Paul into prison. But the cross was to Christ a lifting up, that should draw all men to him (John 12:32), and Paul's imprisonment furnished his epistles to the New Testament.“It is one of the wonders of divine love that even our blemishes and sins God will take when we truly repent of them and give them into his hands, and will in some way make them to be blessings. A friend once showed Ruskin a costly handkerchief on which a blot of ink had been made.‘Nothing can be done with that,’the friend said, thinking the handkerchief worthless and ruined now. Ruskin carried it away with him, and after a time sent it back to his friend. In a most skilful and artistic way, he had made a fine design in India ink, using the blot as its basis. Instead of being ruined, the handkerchief was made far more beautiful and valuable. So God takes the blots and stains upon our lives, the disfiguring blemishes, when we commit them to him, and by his marvellous grace changes them into marks of beauty. David's grievous sin was not only forgiven, but was made a transforming power in his life. Peter's pitiful fall became a step upward through his Lord's forgiveness and gentle dealing.”So“men may rise on stepping stones Of their dead selves to higher things”(Tennyson, In Memoriam, I).
3. To Christian activity.Here the truth lies between the two extremes of quietism and naturalism.(a) In opposition to the false abnegation of human reason and will which quietism demands, we hold that God guides us, not by continual miracle, but by his natural providence and the energizing of our faculties by his Spirit, so that we rationally and freely do our own work, and work out our own salvation.Upham, Interior Life, 356, defines quietism as“cessation of wandering thoughts and discursive imaginations, rest from irregular desires and affections, and perfect submission of the will.”Its advocates, however, have often spoken of it as a giving up of our will and reason, and a swallowing up of these in the wisdom and will of God. This phraseology is misleading, and savors of a pantheistic merging of man in God. Dorner:“Quietism makes God a monarch without living subjects.”Certain English quietists, like the Mohammedans, will not employ physicians in sickness. They quote2 Chron. 16:12, 13—Asa“sought not to Jehovah, but to the physicians. And Asa slept with his fathers.”They forget that the“physicians”alluded to in Chronicles were probably heathen necromancers. Cromwell to his Ironsides:“Trust God, and keep your powder dry!”Providence does not exclude, but rather implies the operation of natural law, by which we mean God's regular way of working. It leaves no excuse for the sarcasm of Robert Browning's Mr. Sludge the Medium, 223—“Saved your precious self from what befell The thirty-three whom Providence forgot.”Schurman, Belief in God, 213—“The temples were hung with the votive offerings of those only who hadescapeddrowning.”“So like Provvy!”Bentham used to say, when anything particularly unseemly occurred in the way of natural catastrophe, God reveals himself in natural law. Physicians and medicine are his methods, as well as the impartation of faith and courage to the patient. The advocates of faith-cure should provide by faith that no believing Christian should die. With the apostolic miracles should go inspiration, as Edward Irving declared.“Every man is as lazy as circumstances will admit.”We throw upon the shoulders of Providence the burdens which belong to us to bear.“Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling; for it is God who worketh in you both to will and to work, for his good pleasure”(Phil. 2:12, 13).Prayer without the use of means is an insult to God.“If God has decreed that you should live, what is the use of your eating or drinking?”Can a drowning man refuse to swim, or even to lay hold of the rope that is thrown to him, and yet ask God to save him on account of his faith?“Tie your camel,”said Mohammed,“and commit it to God.”Frederick Douglas used to say that when in slavery he often prayed for freedom, but his prayer was never answered till he prayed with his feet—and ran away. Whitney, Integrity of Christian Science, 68—“The existence of the dynamo at the power-house does not make unnecessary the trolley line, nor the secondary motor, nor the conductor's application of the power. True quietism is a resting in the Lord after we have done our part.”Ps. 37:7—“Rest in Jehovah, and wait patiently for him”;Is. 57:2—“He entereth into peace; they rest in their beds, each one that walketh in his uprightness”. Ian Maclaren, Cure of Souls, 147—“Religion has three places of abode: in the reason, which is theology; in the conscience, which is ethics; and in the heart, which is quietism.”On the self-guidance of Christ, see Adamson, The Mind in Christ, 202-232.George Müller, writing about ascertaining the will of God, says:“I seek at the beginning to get my heart into such a state that it has no will of its own in regard to a given matter. Nine tenths of the difficulties are overcome when our hearts are ready to do the Lord's will, whatever it may be. Having done this, I do not leave the result to feeling or simple impression. If I do so, I make myself liable to a great delusion. I seek the will of the Spirit of God through, or in connection with, the Word of God. The Spirit and the Word must be combined. If I look to the Spirit alone, without[pg 440]the Word, I lay myself open to great delusions also. If the Holy Ghost guides us at all, he will do it according to the Scriptures, and never contrary to them. Next I take into account providential circumstances. These often plainly indicate God's will in connection with his Word and his Spirit. I ask God in prayer to reveal to me his will aright. Thus through prayer to God, the study of the Word, and reflection, I come to a deliberate judgment according to the best of my knowledge and ability, and, if my mind is thus at peace, I proceed accordingly.”We must not confound rational piety with false enthusiasm. See Isaac Taylor, Natural History of Enthusiasm.“Not quiescence, but acquiescence, is demanded of us.”As God feeds“the birds of the heaven”(Mat. 6:26), not by dropping food from heaven into their mouths, but by stimulating them to seek food for themselves, so God provides for his rational creatures by giving them a sanctified common sense and by leading them to use it. In a true sense Christianity gives us more will than ever. The Holy Spirit emancipates the will, sets it upon proper objects, and fills it with new energy. We are therefore not to surrender ourselves passively to whatever professes to be a divine suggestion:1 John 4:1—“believe not every spirit, but prove the spirits, whether they are of God.”The test is the revealed word of God:Is. 8:20—“To the law and to the testimony! if they speak not according to this word, surely there is no morning for them.”See remarks on false Mysticism, pages 32, 33.(b) In opposition to naturalism, we hold that God is continually near the human spirit by his providential working, and that this providential working is so adjusted to the Christian's nature and necessities as to furnish instruction with regard to duty, discipline of religious character, and needed help and comfort in trial.In interpreting God's providences, as in interpreting Scripture, we are dependent upon the Holy Spirit. The work of the Spirit is, indeed, in great part an application of Scripture truth to present circumstances. While we never allow ourselves to act blindly and irrationally, but accustom ourselves to weigh evidence with regard to duty, we are to expect, as the gift of the Spirit, an understanding of circumstances—a fine sense of God's providential purposes with regard to us, which will make our true course plain to ourselves, although we may not always be able to explain it to others.The Christian may have a continual divine guidance. Unlike the unfaithful and unbelieving, of whom it is said, inPs. 106:13,“They waited not for his counsel,”the true believer has wisdom given him from above.Ps. 32:8—“I will instruct thee and teach thee in the way which thou shalt go”;Prov. 3:6—“In all thy ways acknowledge him, And he will direct thy paths”;Phil. 1:9—“And this I pray, that your love may abound yet more and more in knowledge and all discernment”(αἰσθήσει = spiritual discernment);James 1:5—“if any of you lacketh wisdom, let him ask of God, who giveth(τοῦ διδόντος Θεοῦ)to all liberally and upbraideth not”;John 15:15—“No longer do I call you servants; for the servant knoweth not what his lord doeth: but I have called you friends”;Col. 1:9, 10—“that ye may be filled with the knowledge of his will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding, to walk worthily of the Lord unto all pleasing.”God's Spirit makes Providence as well as the Bible personal to us. From every page of nature, as well as of the Bible, the living God speaks to us. Tholuck:“The more we recognize in every daily occurrence God's secret inspiration, guiding and controlling us, the more will all which to others wears a common and every-day aspect prove to us a sign and a wondrous work.”Hutton, Essays:“Animals that are blind slaves of impulse, driven about by forces from within, have so to say fewer valves in their moral constitution for the entrance of divine guidance. But minds alive to every word of God give constant opportunity for his interference with suggestions that may alter the course of their lives. The higher the mind, the more it glides into the region of providential control. God turns the good by the slightest breath of thought.”So the Christian hymn,“Guide me, O thou great Jehovah!”likens God's leading of the believer to that of Israel by the pillar of fire and cloud; and Paul in his dungeon calls himself“the prisoner of Christ Jesus”(Eph. 3:1). Affliction is the discipline of God's providence. Greek proverb:“He who does not get thrashed, does not get educated.”On God's Leadings, see A. H. Strong, Philosophy and Religion, 560-562.[pg 441]Abraham“went out, not knowing whither he went”(Heb. 11:8). Not till he reached Canaan did he know the place of his destination. Like a child he placed his hand in the hand of his unseen Father, to be led whither he himself knew not. We often have guidance without discernment of that guidance.Is. 42:16—“I will bring the blind by a way that they know not; in paths that they know not will I lead them.”So we act more wisely than we ourselves understand, and afterwards look back with astonishment to see what we have been able to accomplish. Emerson:“Himself from God he could not free; He builded better than he knew.”Disappointments? Ah, you make a mistake in the spelling; the D should be an H: His appointments. Melanchthon:“Quem poetæ fortunam, nos Deum appellamus.”Chinese proverb:“The good God never smites with both hands.”“Tact is a sort of psychical automatism”(Ladd). There is a Christian tact which is rarely at fault, because its possessor is“led by the Spirit of God”(Rom. 8:14). Yet we must always make allowance, as Oliver Cromwell used to say,“for the possibility of being mistaken.”When Luther's friends wrote despairingly of the negotiations at the Diet of Worms, he replied from Coburg that he had been looking up at the night sky, spangled and studded with stars, and had found no pillars to hold them up. And yet they did not fall. God needs no props for his stars and planets. He hangs them on nothing. So, in the working of God's providence, the unseen is prop enough for the seen. Henry Drummond, Life, 127—“To find out God's will: 1. Pray. 2. Think. 3. Talk to wise people, but do not regard their decision as final. 4. Beware of the bias of your own will, but do not be too much afraid of it (God never unnecessarily thwarts a man's nature and likings, and it is a mistake to think that his will is always in the line of the disagreeable). 5. Meantime, do the next thing (for doing God's will in small things is the best preparation for knowing it in great things). 6. When decision and action are necessary, go ahead. 7. Never reconsider the decision when it is finally acted on; and 8. You will probably not find out until afterwards, perhaps long afterwards, that you have been led at all.”Amiel lamented that everything was left to his own responsibility and declared:“It is this thought that disgusts me with the government of my own life. To win true peace, a man needs to feel himself directed, pardoned and sustained by a supreme Power, to feel himself in the right road, at the point where God would have him be,—in harmony with God and the universe. This faith gives strength and calm. I have not got it. All that is seems to me arbitrary and fortuitous.”How much better is Wordsworth's faith, Excursion, book 4:581—“One adequate support For the calamities of mortal life Exists, one only: an assured belief That the procession of our fate, howe'er Sad or disturbed, is ordered by a Being Of infinite benevolence and power, Whose everlasting purposes embrace All accidents, converting them to good.”Mrs. Browning, De Profundis, stanza xxiii—“I praise thee while my days go on; I love thee while my days go on! Through dark and dearth, through fire and frost, With emptied arms and treasure lost, I thank thee while my days go on!”4. To the evil acts of free agents.(a) Here we must distinguish between the natural agency and the moral agency of God, or between acts of permissive providence and acts of efficient causation. We are ever to remember that God neither works evil, nor causes his creatures to work evil. All sin is chargeable to the self-will and perversity of the creature; to declare God the author of it is the greatest of blasphemies.Bp. Wordsworth:“Godforeseesevil deeds, but neverforcesthem.”“God does not cause sin, any more than the rider of a limping horse causes the limping.”Nor can it be said that Satan is the author of man's sin. Man's powers are his own. Not Satan, but the man himself, gives the wrong application to these powers. Not the cause, but the occasion, of sin is in the tempter; the cause is in the evil will which yields to his persuasions.(b) But while man makes up his evil decision independently of God, God does, by his natural agency, order the method in which this inward evil shall express itself, by limiting it in time, place, and measure, or by guiding it to the end which his wisdom and love, and not man's intent, has[pg 442]set. In all this, however, God only allows sin to develop itself after its own nature, so that it may be known, abhorred, and if possible overcome and forsaken.Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 2:272-284—“Judas's treachery works the reconciliation of the world, and Israel's apostasy the salvation of the Gentiles.... God smooths the path of the sinner, and gives him chance for the outbreak of the evil, like a wise physician who draws to the surface of the body the disease that has been raging within, in order that it may be cured, if possible, by mild means, or, if not, may be removed by the knife.”Christianity rises in spite of, nay, in consequence of opposition, like a kite against the wind. When Christ has used the sword with which he has girded himself, as he used Cyrus and the Assyrian, he breaks it and throws it away. He turns the world upside down that he may get it right side up. He makes use of every member of society, as the locomotive uses every cog. The sufferings of the martyrs add to the number of the church; the worship of relics stimulates the Crusades; the worship of the saints leads to miracle plays and to the modern drama; the worship of images helps modern art; monasticism, scholasticism, the Papacy, even sceptical and destructive criticism stir up defenders of the faith. Shakespeare, Richard III, 5:1—“Thus doth he force the swords of wicked men To turn their own points on their masters' bosoms”; Hamlet, 1:2—“Foul deeds will rise, though all the earth o'erwhelm them, to men's eyes”; Macbeth, 1:7—“Even handed justice Commends the ingredients of the poisoned chalice To our own lips.”The Emperor of Germany went to Paris incognito and returned, thinking that no one had known of his absence. But at every step, going and coming, he was surrounded by detectives who saw that no harm came to him. The swallow drove again and again at the little struggling moth, but there was a plate glass window between them which neither one of them knew. Charles Darwin put his cheek against the plate glass of the cobra's cage, but could not keep himself from starting when the cobra struck. Tacitus, Annales, 14:5—“Noctem sideribus illustrem, quasi convinsendum ad scelus, dii præbuere”—“a night brilliant with stars, as if for the purpose of proving the crime, was granted by the gods.”See F. A. Noble, Our Redemption, 59-76, on the self-registry and self-disclosure of sin, with quotation from Daniel Webster's speech in the case of Knapp at Salem:“It must be confessed. It will be confessed. There is no refuge from confession but suicide, and suicide is confession.”(c) In cases of persistent iniquity, God's providence still compels the sinner to accomplish the design with which he and all things have been created, namely, the manifestation of God's holiness. Even though he struggle against God's plan, yet he must by his very resistance serve it. His sin is made its own detector, judge, and tormentor. His character and doom are made a warning to others. Refusing to glorify God in his salvation, he is made to glorify God in his destruction.Is. 10:5, 7—“Ho Assyrian, the rod of mine anger, the staff in whose hand is mine indignation!... Howbeit, he meaneth not so.”Charles Kingsley, Two Years Ago:“He [Treluddra] is one of those base natures, whom fact only lashes into greater fury,—a Pharaoh, whose heart the Lord himself can only harden”—here we would add the qualification:“consistently with the limits which he has set to the operations of his grace.”Pharaoh's ordering the destruction of the Israelitish children (Ex. 1:16) was made the means of putting Moses under royal protection, of training him for his future work, and finally of rescuing the whole nation whose sons Pharaoh sought to destroy. So God brings good out of evil; see Tyler, Theology of Greek Poets, 28-35. Emerson:“My will fulfilled shall be, For in daylight as in dark My thunderbolt has eyes to see His way home to the mark.”See also Edwards, Works, 4:300-312.Col. 2:15—“having stripped off from himself the principalities and the powers”—the hosts of evil spirits that swarmed upon him in their final onset—“he made a show of them openly, triumphing over them in it,”i. e., in the cross, thus turning their evil into a means of good. Royce, Spirit of Modern Philosophy, 443,—“Love, seeking for absolute evil, is like an electric light engaged in searching for a shadow,—when Love gets there, the shadow has disappeared.”But this means, not that all thingsaregood, but that“all things work together[pg 443]for good”(Rom. 8:28)—God overruling for good that which in itself is only evil. John Wesley:“God buries his workmen, but carries on his work.”Sermon on“The Devil's Mistakes”: Satan thought he could overcome Christ in the wilderness, in the garden, on the cross. He triumphed when he cast Paul into prison. But the cross was to Christ a lifting up, that should draw all men to him (John 12:32), and Paul's imprisonment furnished his epistles to the New Testament.“It is one of the wonders of divine love that even our blemishes and sins God will take when we truly repent of them and give them into his hands, and will in some way make them to be blessings. A friend once showed Ruskin a costly handkerchief on which a blot of ink had been made.‘Nothing can be done with that,’the friend said, thinking the handkerchief worthless and ruined now. Ruskin carried it away with him, and after a time sent it back to his friend. In a most skilful and artistic way, he had made a fine design in India ink, using the blot as its basis. Instead of being ruined, the handkerchief was made far more beautiful and valuable. So God takes the blots and stains upon our lives, the disfiguring blemishes, when we commit them to him, and by his marvellous grace changes them into marks of beauty. David's grievous sin was not only forgiven, but was made a transforming power in his life. Peter's pitiful fall became a step upward through his Lord's forgiveness and gentle dealing.”So“men may rise on stepping stones Of their dead selves to higher things”(Tennyson, In Memoriam, I).
3. To Christian activity.Here the truth lies between the two extremes of quietism and naturalism.(a) In opposition to the false abnegation of human reason and will which quietism demands, we hold that God guides us, not by continual miracle, but by his natural providence and the energizing of our faculties by his Spirit, so that we rationally and freely do our own work, and work out our own salvation.Upham, Interior Life, 356, defines quietism as“cessation of wandering thoughts and discursive imaginations, rest from irregular desires and affections, and perfect submission of the will.”Its advocates, however, have often spoken of it as a giving up of our will and reason, and a swallowing up of these in the wisdom and will of God. This phraseology is misleading, and savors of a pantheistic merging of man in God. Dorner:“Quietism makes God a monarch without living subjects.”Certain English quietists, like the Mohammedans, will not employ physicians in sickness. They quote2 Chron. 16:12, 13—Asa“sought not to Jehovah, but to the physicians. And Asa slept with his fathers.”They forget that the“physicians”alluded to in Chronicles were probably heathen necromancers. Cromwell to his Ironsides:“Trust God, and keep your powder dry!”Providence does not exclude, but rather implies the operation of natural law, by which we mean God's regular way of working. It leaves no excuse for the sarcasm of Robert Browning's Mr. Sludge the Medium, 223—“Saved your precious self from what befell The thirty-three whom Providence forgot.”Schurman, Belief in God, 213—“The temples were hung with the votive offerings of those only who hadescapeddrowning.”“So like Provvy!”Bentham used to say, when anything particularly unseemly occurred in the way of natural catastrophe, God reveals himself in natural law. Physicians and medicine are his methods, as well as the impartation of faith and courage to the patient. The advocates of faith-cure should provide by faith that no believing Christian should die. With the apostolic miracles should go inspiration, as Edward Irving declared.“Every man is as lazy as circumstances will admit.”We throw upon the shoulders of Providence the burdens which belong to us to bear.“Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling; for it is God who worketh in you both to will and to work, for his good pleasure”(Phil. 2:12, 13).Prayer without the use of means is an insult to God.“If God has decreed that you should live, what is the use of your eating or drinking?”Can a drowning man refuse to swim, or even to lay hold of the rope that is thrown to him, and yet ask God to save him on account of his faith?“Tie your camel,”said Mohammed,“and commit it to God.”Frederick Douglas used to say that when in slavery he often prayed for freedom, but his prayer was never answered till he prayed with his feet—and ran away. Whitney, Integrity of Christian Science, 68—“The existence of the dynamo at the power-house does not make unnecessary the trolley line, nor the secondary motor, nor the conductor's application of the power. True quietism is a resting in the Lord after we have done our part.”Ps. 37:7—“Rest in Jehovah, and wait patiently for him”;Is. 57:2—“He entereth into peace; they rest in their beds, each one that walketh in his uprightness”. Ian Maclaren, Cure of Souls, 147—“Religion has three places of abode: in the reason, which is theology; in the conscience, which is ethics; and in the heart, which is quietism.”On the self-guidance of Christ, see Adamson, The Mind in Christ, 202-232.George Müller, writing about ascertaining the will of God, says:“I seek at the beginning to get my heart into such a state that it has no will of its own in regard to a given matter. Nine tenths of the difficulties are overcome when our hearts are ready to do the Lord's will, whatever it may be. Having done this, I do not leave the result to feeling or simple impression. If I do so, I make myself liable to a great delusion. I seek the will of the Spirit of God through, or in connection with, the Word of God. The Spirit and the Word must be combined. If I look to the Spirit alone, without[pg 440]the Word, I lay myself open to great delusions also. If the Holy Ghost guides us at all, he will do it according to the Scriptures, and never contrary to them. Next I take into account providential circumstances. These often plainly indicate God's will in connection with his Word and his Spirit. I ask God in prayer to reveal to me his will aright. Thus through prayer to God, the study of the Word, and reflection, I come to a deliberate judgment according to the best of my knowledge and ability, and, if my mind is thus at peace, I proceed accordingly.”We must not confound rational piety with false enthusiasm. See Isaac Taylor, Natural History of Enthusiasm.“Not quiescence, but acquiescence, is demanded of us.”As God feeds“the birds of the heaven”(Mat. 6:26), not by dropping food from heaven into their mouths, but by stimulating them to seek food for themselves, so God provides for his rational creatures by giving them a sanctified common sense and by leading them to use it. In a true sense Christianity gives us more will than ever. The Holy Spirit emancipates the will, sets it upon proper objects, and fills it with new energy. We are therefore not to surrender ourselves passively to whatever professes to be a divine suggestion:1 John 4:1—“believe not every spirit, but prove the spirits, whether they are of God.”The test is the revealed word of God:Is. 8:20—“To the law and to the testimony! if they speak not according to this word, surely there is no morning for them.”See remarks on false Mysticism, pages 32, 33.(b) In opposition to naturalism, we hold that God is continually near the human spirit by his providential working, and that this providential working is so adjusted to the Christian's nature and necessities as to furnish instruction with regard to duty, discipline of religious character, and needed help and comfort in trial.In interpreting God's providences, as in interpreting Scripture, we are dependent upon the Holy Spirit. The work of the Spirit is, indeed, in great part an application of Scripture truth to present circumstances. While we never allow ourselves to act blindly and irrationally, but accustom ourselves to weigh evidence with regard to duty, we are to expect, as the gift of the Spirit, an understanding of circumstances—a fine sense of God's providential purposes with regard to us, which will make our true course plain to ourselves, although we may not always be able to explain it to others.The Christian may have a continual divine guidance. Unlike the unfaithful and unbelieving, of whom it is said, inPs. 106:13,“They waited not for his counsel,”the true believer has wisdom given him from above.Ps. 32:8—“I will instruct thee and teach thee in the way which thou shalt go”;Prov. 3:6—“In all thy ways acknowledge him, And he will direct thy paths”;Phil. 1:9—“And this I pray, that your love may abound yet more and more in knowledge and all discernment”(αἰσθήσει = spiritual discernment);James 1:5—“if any of you lacketh wisdom, let him ask of God, who giveth(τοῦ διδόντος Θεοῦ)to all liberally and upbraideth not”;John 15:15—“No longer do I call you servants; for the servant knoweth not what his lord doeth: but I have called you friends”;Col. 1:9, 10—“that ye may be filled with the knowledge of his will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding, to walk worthily of the Lord unto all pleasing.”God's Spirit makes Providence as well as the Bible personal to us. From every page of nature, as well as of the Bible, the living God speaks to us. Tholuck:“The more we recognize in every daily occurrence God's secret inspiration, guiding and controlling us, the more will all which to others wears a common and every-day aspect prove to us a sign and a wondrous work.”Hutton, Essays:“Animals that are blind slaves of impulse, driven about by forces from within, have so to say fewer valves in their moral constitution for the entrance of divine guidance. But minds alive to every word of God give constant opportunity for his interference with suggestions that may alter the course of their lives. The higher the mind, the more it glides into the region of providential control. God turns the good by the slightest breath of thought.”So the Christian hymn,“Guide me, O thou great Jehovah!”likens God's leading of the believer to that of Israel by the pillar of fire and cloud; and Paul in his dungeon calls himself“the prisoner of Christ Jesus”(Eph. 3:1). Affliction is the discipline of God's providence. Greek proverb:“He who does not get thrashed, does not get educated.”On God's Leadings, see A. H. Strong, Philosophy and Religion, 560-562.[pg 441]Abraham“went out, not knowing whither he went”(Heb. 11:8). Not till he reached Canaan did he know the place of his destination. Like a child he placed his hand in the hand of his unseen Father, to be led whither he himself knew not. We often have guidance without discernment of that guidance.Is. 42:16—“I will bring the blind by a way that they know not; in paths that they know not will I lead them.”So we act more wisely than we ourselves understand, and afterwards look back with astonishment to see what we have been able to accomplish. Emerson:“Himself from God he could not free; He builded better than he knew.”Disappointments? Ah, you make a mistake in the spelling; the D should be an H: His appointments. Melanchthon:“Quem poetæ fortunam, nos Deum appellamus.”Chinese proverb:“The good God never smites with both hands.”“Tact is a sort of psychical automatism”(Ladd). There is a Christian tact which is rarely at fault, because its possessor is“led by the Spirit of God”(Rom. 8:14). Yet we must always make allowance, as Oliver Cromwell used to say,“for the possibility of being mistaken.”When Luther's friends wrote despairingly of the negotiations at the Diet of Worms, he replied from Coburg that he had been looking up at the night sky, spangled and studded with stars, and had found no pillars to hold them up. And yet they did not fall. God needs no props for his stars and planets. He hangs them on nothing. So, in the working of God's providence, the unseen is prop enough for the seen. Henry Drummond, Life, 127—“To find out God's will: 1. Pray. 2. Think. 3. Talk to wise people, but do not regard their decision as final. 4. Beware of the bias of your own will, but do not be too much afraid of it (God never unnecessarily thwarts a man's nature and likings, and it is a mistake to think that his will is always in the line of the disagreeable). 5. Meantime, do the next thing (for doing God's will in small things is the best preparation for knowing it in great things). 6. When decision and action are necessary, go ahead. 7. Never reconsider the decision when it is finally acted on; and 8. You will probably not find out until afterwards, perhaps long afterwards, that you have been led at all.”Amiel lamented that everything was left to his own responsibility and declared:“It is this thought that disgusts me with the government of my own life. To win true peace, a man needs to feel himself directed, pardoned and sustained by a supreme Power, to feel himself in the right road, at the point where God would have him be,—in harmony with God and the universe. This faith gives strength and calm. I have not got it. All that is seems to me arbitrary and fortuitous.”How much better is Wordsworth's faith, Excursion, book 4:581—“One adequate support For the calamities of mortal life Exists, one only: an assured belief That the procession of our fate, howe'er Sad or disturbed, is ordered by a Being Of infinite benevolence and power, Whose everlasting purposes embrace All accidents, converting them to good.”Mrs. Browning, De Profundis, stanza xxiii—“I praise thee while my days go on; I love thee while my days go on! Through dark and dearth, through fire and frost, With emptied arms and treasure lost, I thank thee while my days go on!”4. To the evil acts of free agents.(a) Here we must distinguish between the natural agency and the moral agency of God, or between acts of permissive providence and acts of efficient causation. We are ever to remember that God neither works evil, nor causes his creatures to work evil. All sin is chargeable to the self-will and perversity of the creature; to declare God the author of it is the greatest of blasphemies.Bp. Wordsworth:“Godforeseesevil deeds, but neverforcesthem.”“God does not cause sin, any more than the rider of a limping horse causes the limping.”Nor can it be said that Satan is the author of man's sin. Man's powers are his own. Not Satan, but the man himself, gives the wrong application to these powers. Not the cause, but the occasion, of sin is in the tempter; the cause is in the evil will which yields to his persuasions.(b) But while man makes up his evil decision independently of God, God does, by his natural agency, order the method in which this inward evil shall express itself, by limiting it in time, place, and measure, or by guiding it to the end which his wisdom and love, and not man's intent, has[pg 442]set. In all this, however, God only allows sin to develop itself after its own nature, so that it may be known, abhorred, and if possible overcome and forsaken.Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 2:272-284—“Judas's treachery works the reconciliation of the world, and Israel's apostasy the salvation of the Gentiles.... God smooths the path of the sinner, and gives him chance for the outbreak of the evil, like a wise physician who draws to the surface of the body the disease that has been raging within, in order that it may be cured, if possible, by mild means, or, if not, may be removed by the knife.”Christianity rises in spite of, nay, in consequence of opposition, like a kite against the wind. When Christ has used the sword with which he has girded himself, as he used Cyrus and the Assyrian, he breaks it and throws it away. He turns the world upside down that he may get it right side up. He makes use of every member of society, as the locomotive uses every cog. The sufferings of the martyrs add to the number of the church; the worship of relics stimulates the Crusades; the worship of the saints leads to miracle plays and to the modern drama; the worship of images helps modern art; monasticism, scholasticism, the Papacy, even sceptical and destructive criticism stir up defenders of the faith. Shakespeare, Richard III, 5:1—“Thus doth he force the swords of wicked men To turn their own points on their masters' bosoms”; Hamlet, 1:2—“Foul deeds will rise, though all the earth o'erwhelm them, to men's eyes”; Macbeth, 1:7—“Even handed justice Commends the ingredients of the poisoned chalice To our own lips.”The Emperor of Germany went to Paris incognito and returned, thinking that no one had known of his absence. But at every step, going and coming, he was surrounded by detectives who saw that no harm came to him. The swallow drove again and again at the little struggling moth, but there was a plate glass window between them which neither one of them knew. Charles Darwin put his cheek against the plate glass of the cobra's cage, but could not keep himself from starting when the cobra struck. Tacitus, Annales, 14:5—“Noctem sideribus illustrem, quasi convinsendum ad scelus, dii præbuere”—“a night brilliant with stars, as if for the purpose of proving the crime, was granted by the gods.”See F. A. Noble, Our Redemption, 59-76, on the self-registry and self-disclosure of sin, with quotation from Daniel Webster's speech in the case of Knapp at Salem:“It must be confessed. It will be confessed. There is no refuge from confession but suicide, and suicide is confession.”(c) In cases of persistent iniquity, God's providence still compels the sinner to accomplish the design with which he and all things have been created, namely, the manifestation of God's holiness. Even though he struggle against God's plan, yet he must by his very resistance serve it. His sin is made its own detector, judge, and tormentor. His character and doom are made a warning to others. Refusing to glorify God in his salvation, he is made to glorify God in his destruction.Is. 10:5, 7—“Ho Assyrian, the rod of mine anger, the staff in whose hand is mine indignation!... Howbeit, he meaneth not so.”Charles Kingsley, Two Years Ago:“He [Treluddra] is one of those base natures, whom fact only lashes into greater fury,—a Pharaoh, whose heart the Lord himself can only harden”—here we would add the qualification:“consistently with the limits which he has set to the operations of his grace.”Pharaoh's ordering the destruction of the Israelitish children (Ex. 1:16) was made the means of putting Moses under royal protection, of training him for his future work, and finally of rescuing the whole nation whose sons Pharaoh sought to destroy. So God brings good out of evil; see Tyler, Theology of Greek Poets, 28-35. Emerson:“My will fulfilled shall be, For in daylight as in dark My thunderbolt has eyes to see His way home to the mark.”See also Edwards, Works, 4:300-312.Col. 2:15—“having stripped off from himself the principalities and the powers”—the hosts of evil spirits that swarmed upon him in their final onset—“he made a show of them openly, triumphing over them in it,”i. e., in the cross, thus turning their evil into a means of good. Royce, Spirit of Modern Philosophy, 443,—“Love, seeking for absolute evil, is like an electric light engaged in searching for a shadow,—when Love gets there, the shadow has disappeared.”But this means, not that all thingsaregood, but that“all things work together[pg 443]for good”(Rom. 8:28)—God overruling for good that which in itself is only evil. John Wesley:“God buries his workmen, but carries on his work.”Sermon on“The Devil's Mistakes”: Satan thought he could overcome Christ in the wilderness, in the garden, on the cross. He triumphed when he cast Paul into prison. But the cross was to Christ a lifting up, that should draw all men to him (John 12:32), and Paul's imprisonment furnished his epistles to the New Testament.“It is one of the wonders of divine love that even our blemishes and sins God will take when we truly repent of them and give them into his hands, and will in some way make them to be blessings. A friend once showed Ruskin a costly handkerchief on which a blot of ink had been made.‘Nothing can be done with that,’the friend said, thinking the handkerchief worthless and ruined now. Ruskin carried it away with him, and after a time sent it back to his friend. In a most skilful and artistic way, he had made a fine design in India ink, using the blot as its basis. Instead of being ruined, the handkerchief was made far more beautiful and valuable. So God takes the blots and stains upon our lives, the disfiguring blemishes, when we commit them to him, and by his marvellous grace changes them into marks of beauty. David's grievous sin was not only forgiven, but was made a transforming power in his life. Peter's pitiful fall became a step upward through his Lord's forgiveness and gentle dealing.”So“men may rise on stepping stones Of their dead selves to higher things”(Tennyson, In Memoriam, I).
3. To Christian activity.Here the truth lies between the two extremes of quietism and naturalism.(a) In opposition to the false abnegation of human reason and will which quietism demands, we hold that God guides us, not by continual miracle, but by his natural providence and the energizing of our faculties by his Spirit, so that we rationally and freely do our own work, and work out our own salvation.Upham, Interior Life, 356, defines quietism as“cessation of wandering thoughts and discursive imaginations, rest from irregular desires and affections, and perfect submission of the will.”Its advocates, however, have often spoken of it as a giving up of our will and reason, and a swallowing up of these in the wisdom and will of God. This phraseology is misleading, and savors of a pantheistic merging of man in God. Dorner:“Quietism makes God a monarch without living subjects.”Certain English quietists, like the Mohammedans, will not employ physicians in sickness. They quote2 Chron. 16:12, 13—Asa“sought not to Jehovah, but to the physicians. And Asa slept with his fathers.”They forget that the“physicians”alluded to in Chronicles were probably heathen necromancers. Cromwell to his Ironsides:“Trust God, and keep your powder dry!”Providence does not exclude, but rather implies the operation of natural law, by which we mean God's regular way of working. It leaves no excuse for the sarcasm of Robert Browning's Mr. Sludge the Medium, 223—“Saved your precious self from what befell The thirty-three whom Providence forgot.”Schurman, Belief in God, 213—“The temples were hung with the votive offerings of those only who hadescapeddrowning.”“So like Provvy!”Bentham used to say, when anything particularly unseemly occurred in the way of natural catastrophe, God reveals himself in natural law. Physicians and medicine are his methods, as well as the impartation of faith and courage to the patient. The advocates of faith-cure should provide by faith that no believing Christian should die. With the apostolic miracles should go inspiration, as Edward Irving declared.“Every man is as lazy as circumstances will admit.”We throw upon the shoulders of Providence the burdens which belong to us to bear.“Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling; for it is God who worketh in you both to will and to work, for his good pleasure”(Phil. 2:12, 13).Prayer without the use of means is an insult to God.“If God has decreed that you should live, what is the use of your eating or drinking?”Can a drowning man refuse to swim, or even to lay hold of the rope that is thrown to him, and yet ask God to save him on account of his faith?“Tie your camel,”said Mohammed,“and commit it to God.”Frederick Douglas used to say that when in slavery he often prayed for freedom, but his prayer was never answered till he prayed with his feet—and ran away. Whitney, Integrity of Christian Science, 68—“The existence of the dynamo at the power-house does not make unnecessary the trolley line, nor the secondary motor, nor the conductor's application of the power. True quietism is a resting in the Lord after we have done our part.”Ps. 37:7—“Rest in Jehovah, and wait patiently for him”;Is. 57:2—“He entereth into peace; they rest in their beds, each one that walketh in his uprightness”. Ian Maclaren, Cure of Souls, 147—“Religion has three places of abode: in the reason, which is theology; in the conscience, which is ethics; and in the heart, which is quietism.”On the self-guidance of Christ, see Adamson, The Mind in Christ, 202-232.George Müller, writing about ascertaining the will of God, says:“I seek at the beginning to get my heart into such a state that it has no will of its own in regard to a given matter. Nine tenths of the difficulties are overcome when our hearts are ready to do the Lord's will, whatever it may be. Having done this, I do not leave the result to feeling or simple impression. If I do so, I make myself liable to a great delusion. I seek the will of the Spirit of God through, or in connection with, the Word of God. The Spirit and the Word must be combined. If I look to the Spirit alone, without[pg 440]the Word, I lay myself open to great delusions also. If the Holy Ghost guides us at all, he will do it according to the Scriptures, and never contrary to them. Next I take into account providential circumstances. These often plainly indicate God's will in connection with his Word and his Spirit. I ask God in prayer to reveal to me his will aright. Thus through prayer to God, the study of the Word, and reflection, I come to a deliberate judgment according to the best of my knowledge and ability, and, if my mind is thus at peace, I proceed accordingly.”We must not confound rational piety with false enthusiasm. See Isaac Taylor, Natural History of Enthusiasm.“Not quiescence, but acquiescence, is demanded of us.”As God feeds“the birds of the heaven”(Mat. 6:26), not by dropping food from heaven into their mouths, but by stimulating them to seek food for themselves, so God provides for his rational creatures by giving them a sanctified common sense and by leading them to use it. In a true sense Christianity gives us more will than ever. The Holy Spirit emancipates the will, sets it upon proper objects, and fills it with new energy. We are therefore not to surrender ourselves passively to whatever professes to be a divine suggestion:1 John 4:1—“believe not every spirit, but prove the spirits, whether they are of God.”The test is the revealed word of God:Is. 8:20—“To the law and to the testimony! if they speak not according to this word, surely there is no morning for them.”See remarks on false Mysticism, pages 32, 33.(b) In opposition to naturalism, we hold that God is continually near the human spirit by his providential working, and that this providential working is so adjusted to the Christian's nature and necessities as to furnish instruction with regard to duty, discipline of religious character, and needed help and comfort in trial.In interpreting God's providences, as in interpreting Scripture, we are dependent upon the Holy Spirit. The work of the Spirit is, indeed, in great part an application of Scripture truth to present circumstances. While we never allow ourselves to act blindly and irrationally, but accustom ourselves to weigh evidence with regard to duty, we are to expect, as the gift of the Spirit, an understanding of circumstances—a fine sense of God's providential purposes with regard to us, which will make our true course plain to ourselves, although we may not always be able to explain it to others.The Christian may have a continual divine guidance. Unlike the unfaithful and unbelieving, of whom it is said, inPs. 106:13,“They waited not for his counsel,”the true believer has wisdom given him from above.Ps. 32:8—“I will instruct thee and teach thee in the way which thou shalt go”;Prov. 3:6—“In all thy ways acknowledge him, And he will direct thy paths”;Phil. 1:9—“And this I pray, that your love may abound yet more and more in knowledge and all discernment”(αἰσθήσει = spiritual discernment);James 1:5—“if any of you lacketh wisdom, let him ask of God, who giveth(τοῦ διδόντος Θεοῦ)to all liberally and upbraideth not”;John 15:15—“No longer do I call you servants; for the servant knoweth not what his lord doeth: but I have called you friends”;Col. 1:9, 10—“that ye may be filled with the knowledge of his will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding, to walk worthily of the Lord unto all pleasing.”God's Spirit makes Providence as well as the Bible personal to us. From every page of nature, as well as of the Bible, the living God speaks to us. Tholuck:“The more we recognize in every daily occurrence God's secret inspiration, guiding and controlling us, the more will all which to others wears a common and every-day aspect prove to us a sign and a wondrous work.”Hutton, Essays:“Animals that are blind slaves of impulse, driven about by forces from within, have so to say fewer valves in their moral constitution for the entrance of divine guidance. But minds alive to every word of God give constant opportunity for his interference with suggestions that may alter the course of their lives. The higher the mind, the more it glides into the region of providential control. God turns the good by the slightest breath of thought.”So the Christian hymn,“Guide me, O thou great Jehovah!”likens God's leading of the believer to that of Israel by the pillar of fire and cloud; and Paul in his dungeon calls himself“the prisoner of Christ Jesus”(Eph. 3:1). Affliction is the discipline of God's providence. Greek proverb:“He who does not get thrashed, does not get educated.”On God's Leadings, see A. H. Strong, Philosophy and Religion, 560-562.[pg 441]Abraham“went out, not knowing whither he went”(Heb. 11:8). Not till he reached Canaan did he know the place of his destination. Like a child he placed his hand in the hand of his unseen Father, to be led whither he himself knew not. We often have guidance without discernment of that guidance.Is. 42:16—“I will bring the blind by a way that they know not; in paths that they know not will I lead them.”So we act more wisely than we ourselves understand, and afterwards look back with astonishment to see what we have been able to accomplish. Emerson:“Himself from God he could not free; He builded better than he knew.”Disappointments? Ah, you make a mistake in the spelling; the D should be an H: His appointments. Melanchthon:“Quem poetæ fortunam, nos Deum appellamus.”Chinese proverb:“The good God never smites with both hands.”“Tact is a sort of psychical automatism”(Ladd). There is a Christian tact which is rarely at fault, because its possessor is“led by the Spirit of God”(Rom. 8:14). Yet we must always make allowance, as Oliver Cromwell used to say,“for the possibility of being mistaken.”When Luther's friends wrote despairingly of the negotiations at the Diet of Worms, he replied from Coburg that he had been looking up at the night sky, spangled and studded with stars, and had found no pillars to hold them up. And yet they did not fall. God needs no props for his stars and planets. He hangs them on nothing. So, in the working of God's providence, the unseen is prop enough for the seen. Henry Drummond, Life, 127—“To find out God's will: 1. Pray. 2. Think. 3. Talk to wise people, but do not regard their decision as final. 4. Beware of the bias of your own will, but do not be too much afraid of it (God never unnecessarily thwarts a man's nature and likings, and it is a mistake to think that his will is always in the line of the disagreeable). 5. Meantime, do the next thing (for doing God's will in small things is the best preparation for knowing it in great things). 6. When decision and action are necessary, go ahead. 7. Never reconsider the decision when it is finally acted on; and 8. You will probably not find out until afterwards, perhaps long afterwards, that you have been led at all.”Amiel lamented that everything was left to his own responsibility and declared:“It is this thought that disgusts me with the government of my own life. To win true peace, a man needs to feel himself directed, pardoned and sustained by a supreme Power, to feel himself in the right road, at the point where God would have him be,—in harmony with God and the universe. This faith gives strength and calm. I have not got it. All that is seems to me arbitrary and fortuitous.”How much better is Wordsworth's faith, Excursion, book 4:581—“One adequate support For the calamities of mortal life Exists, one only: an assured belief That the procession of our fate, howe'er Sad or disturbed, is ordered by a Being Of infinite benevolence and power, Whose everlasting purposes embrace All accidents, converting them to good.”Mrs. Browning, De Profundis, stanza xxiii—“I praise thee while my days go on; I love thee while my days go on! Through dark and dearth, through fire and frost, With emptied arms and treasure lost, I thank thee while my days go on!”4. To the evil acts of free agents.(a) Here we must distinguish between the natural agency and the moral agency of God, or between acts of permissive providence and acts of efficient causation. We are ever to remember that God neither works evil, nor causes his creatures to work evil. All sin is chargeable to the self-will and perversity of the creature; to declare God the author of it is the greatest of blasphemies.Bp. Wordsworth:“Godforeseesevil deeds, but neverforcesthem.”“God does not cause sin, any more than the rider of a limping horse causes the limping.”Nor can it be said that Satan is the author of man's sin. Man's powers are his own. Not Satan, but the man himself, gives the wrong application to these powers. Not the cause, but the occasion, of sin is in the tempter; the cause is in the evil will which yields to his persuasions.(b) But while man makes up his evil decision independently of God, God does, by his natural agency, order the method in which this inward evil shall express itself, by limiting it in time, place, and measure, or by guiding it to the end which his wisdom and love, and not man's intent, has[pg 442]set. In all this, however, God only allows sin to develop itself after its own nature, so that it may be known, abhorred, and if possible overcome and forsaken.Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 2:272-284—“Judas's treachery works the reconciliation of the world, and Israel's apostasy the salvation of the Gentiles.... God smooths the path of the sinner, and gives him chance for the outbreak of the evil, like a wise physician who draws to the surface of the body the disease that has been raging within, in order that it may be cured, if possible, by mild means, or, if not, may be removed by the knife.”Christianity rises in spite of, nay, in consequence of opposition, like a kite against the wind. When Christ has used the sword with which he has girded himself, as he used Cyrus and the Assyrian, he breaks it and throws it away. He turns the world upside down that he may get it right side up. He makes use of every member of society, as the locomotive uses every cog. The sufferings of the martyrs add to the number of the church; the worship of relics stimulates the Crusades; the worship of the saints leads to miracle plays and to the modern drama; the worship of images helps modern art; monasticism, scholasticism, the Papacy, even sceptical and destructive criticism stir up defenders of the faith. Shakespeare, Richard III, 5:1—“Thus doth he force the swords of wicked men To turn their own points on their masters' bosoms”; Hamlet, 1:2—“Foul deeds will rise, though all the earth o'erwhelm them, to men's eyes”; Macbeth, 1:7—“Even handed justice Commends the ingredients of the poisoned chalice To our own lips.”The Emperor of Germany went to Paris incognito and returned, thinking that no one had known of his absence. But at every step, going and coming, he was surrounded by detectives who saw that no harm came to him. The swallow drove again and again at the little struggling moth, but there was a plate glass window between them which neither one of them knew. Charles Darwin put his cheek against the plate glass of the cobra's cage, but could not keep himself from starting when the cobra struck. Tacitus, Annales, 14:5—“Noctem sideribus illustrem, quasi convinsendum ad scelus, dii præbuere”—“a night brilliant with stars, as if for the purpose of proving the crime, was granted by the gods.”See F. A. Noble, Our Redemption, 59-76, on the self-registry and self-disclosure of sin, with quotation from Daniel Webster's speech in the case of Knapp at Salem:“It must be confessed. It will be confessed. There is no refuge from confession but suicide, and suicide is confession.”(c) In cases of persistent iniquity, God's providence still compels the sinner to accomplish the design with which he and all things have been created, namely, the manifestation of God's holiness. Even though he struggle against God's plan, yet he must by his very resistance serve it. His sin is made its own detector, judge, and tormentor. His character and doom are made a warning to others. Refusing to glorify God in his salvation, he is made to glorify God in his destruction.Is. 10:5, 7—“Ho Assyrian, the rod of mine anger, the staff in whose hand is mine indignation!... Howbeit, he meaneth not so.”Charles Kingsley, Two Years Ago:“He [Treluddra] is one of those base natures, whom fact only lashes into greater fury,—a Pharaoh, whose heart the Lord himself can only harden”—here we would add the qualification:“consistently with the limits which he has set to the operations of his grace.”Pharaoh's ordering the destruction of the Israelitish children (Ex. 1:16) was made the means of putting Moses under royal protection, of training him for his future work, and finally of rescuing the whole nation whose sons Pharaoh sought to destroy. So God brings good out of evil; see Tyler, Theology of Greek Poets, 28-35. Emerson:“My will fulfilled shall be, For in daylight as in dark My thunderbolt has eyes to see His way home to the mark.”See also Edwards, Works, 4:300-312.Col. 2:15—“having stripped off from himself the principalities and the powers”—the hosts of evil spirits that swarmed upon him in their final onset—“he made a show of them openly, triumphing over them in it,”i. e., in the cross, thus turning their evil into a means of good. Royce, Spirit of Modern Philosophy, 443,—“Love, seeking for absolute evil, is like an electric light engaged in searching for a shadow,—when Love gets there, the shadow has disappeared.”But this means, not that all thingsaregood, but that“all things work together[pg 443]for good”(Rom. 8:28)—God overruling for good that which in itself is only evil. John Wesley:“God buries his workmen, but carries on his work.”Sermon on“The Devil's Mistakes”: Satan thought he could overcome Christ in the wilderness, in the garden, on the cross. He triumphed when he cast Paul into prison. But the cross was to Christ a lifting up, that should draw all men to him (John 12:32), and Paul's imprisonment furnished his epistles to the New Testament.“It is one of the wonders of divine love that even our blemishes and sins God will take when we truly repent of them and give them into his hands, and will in some way make them to be blessings. A friend once showed Ruskin a costly handkerchief on which a blot of ink had been made.‘Nothing can be done with that,’the friend said, thinking the handkerchief worthless and ruined now. Ruskin carried it away with him, and after a time sent it back to his friend. In a most skilful and artistic way, he had made a fine design in India ink, using the blot as its basis. Instead of being ruined, the handkerchief was made far more beautiful and valuable. So God takes the blots and stains upon our lives, the disfiguring blemishes, when we commit them to him, and by his marvellous grace changes them into marks of beauty. David's grievous sin was not only forgiven, but was made a transforming power in his life. Peter's pitiful fall became a step upward through his Lord's forgiveness and gentle dealing.”So“men may rise on stepping stones Of their dead selves to higher things”(Tennyson, In Memoriam, I).
3. To Christian activity.Here the truth lies between the two extremes of quietism and naturalism.(a) In opposition to the false abnegation of human reason and will which quietism demands, we hold that God guides us, not by continual miracle, but by his natural providence and the energizing of our faculties by his Spirit, so that we rationally and freely do our own work, and work out our own salvation.Upham, Interior Life, 356, defines quietism as“cessation of wandering thoughts and discursive imaginations, rest from irregular desires and affections, and perfect submission of the will.”Its advocates, however, have often spoken of it as a giving up of our will and reason, and a swallowing up of these in the wisdom and will of God. This phraseology is misleading, and savors of a pantheistic merging of man in God. Dorner:“Quietism makes God a monarch without living subjects.”Certain English quietists, like the Mohammedans, will not employ physicians in sickness. They quote2 Chron. 16:12, 13—Asa“sought not to Jehovah, but to the physicians. And Asa slept with his fathers.”They forget that the“physicians”alluded to in Chronicles were probably heathen necromancers. Cromwell to his Ironsides:“Trust God, and keep your powder dry!”Providence does not exclude, but rather implies the operation of natural law, by which we mean God's regular way of working. It leaves no excuse for the sarcasm of Robert Browning's Mr. Sludge the Medium, 223—“Saved your precious self from what befell The thirty-three whom Providence forgot.”Schurman, Belief in God, 213—“The temples were hung with the votive offerings of those only who hadescapeddrowning.”“So like Provvy!”Bentham used to say, when anything particularly unseemly occurred in the way of natural catastrophe, God reveals himself in natural law. Physicians and medicine are his methods, as well as the impartation of faith and courage to the patient. The advocates of faith-cure should provide by faith that no believing Christian should die. With the apostolic miracles should go inspiration, as Edward Irving declared.“Every man is as lazy as circumstances will admit.”We throw upon the shoulders of Providence the burdens which belong to us to bear.“Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling; for it is God who worketh in you both to will and to work, for his good pleasure”(Phil. 2:12, 13).Prayer without the use of means is an insult to God.“If God has decreed that you should live, what is the use of your eating or drinking?”Can a drowning man refuse to swim, or even to lay hold of the rope that is thrown to him, and yet ask God to save him on account of his faith?“Tie your camel,”said Mohammed,“and commit it to God.”Frederick Douglas used to say that when in slavery he often prayed for freedom, but his prayer was never answered till he prayed with his feet—and ran away. Whitney, Integrity of Christian Science, 68—“The existence of the dynamo at the power-house does not make unnecessary the trolley line, nor the secondary motor, nor the conductor's application of the power. True quietism is a resting in the Lord after we have done our part.”Ps. 37:7—“Rest in Jehovah, and wait patiently for him”;Is. 57:2—“He entereth into peace; they rest in their beds, each one that walketh in his uprightness”. Ian Maclaren, Cure of Souls, 147—“Religion has three places of abode: in the reason, which is theology; in the conscience, which is ethics; and in the heart, which is quietism.”On the self-guidance of Christ, see Adamson, The Mind in Christ, 202-232.George Müller, writing about ascertaining the will of God, says:“I seek at the beginning to get my heart into such a state that it has no will of its own in regard to a given matter. Nine tenths of the difficulties are overcome when our hearts are ready to do the Lord's will, whatever it may be. Having done this, I do not leave the result to feeling or simple impression. If I do so, I make myself liable to a great delusion. I seek the will of the Spirit of God through, or in connection with, the Word of God. The Spirit and the Word must be combined. If I look to the Spirit alone, without[pg 440]the Word, I lay myself open to great delusions also. If the Holy Ghost guides us at all, he will do it according to the Scriptures, and never contrary to them. Next I take into account providential circumstances. These often plainly indicate God's will in connection with his Word and his Spirit. I ask God in prayer to reveal to me his will aright. Thus through prayer to God, the study of the Word, and reflection, I come to a deliberate judgment according to the best of my knowledge and ability, and, if my mind is thus at peace, I proceed accordingly.”We must not confound rational piety with false enthusiasm. See Isaac Taylor, Natural History of Enthusiasm.“Not quiescence, but acquiescence, is demanded of us.”As God feeds“the birds of the heaven”(Mat. 6:26), not by dropping food from heaven into their mouths, but by stimulating them to seek food for themselves, so God provides for his rational creatures by giving them a sanctified common sense and by leading them to use it. In a true sense Christianity gives us more will than ever. The Holy Spirit emancipates the will, sets it upon proper objects, and fills it with new energy. We are therefore not to surrender ourselves passively to whatever professes to be a divine suggestion:1 John 4:1—“believe not every spirit, but prove the spirits, whether they are of God.”The test is the revealed word of God:Is. 8:20—“To the law and to the testimony! if they speak not according to this word, surely there is no morning for them.”See remarks on false Mysticism, pages 32, 33.(b) In opposition to naturalism, we hold that God is continually near the human spirit by his providential working, and that this providential working is so adjusted to the Christian's nature and necessities as to furnish instruction with regard to duty, discipline of religious character, and needed help and comfort in trial.In interpreting God's providences, as in interpreting Scripture, we are dependent upon the Holy Spirit. The work of the Spirit is, indeed, in great part an application of Scripture truth to present circumstances. While we never allow ourselves to act blindly and irrationally, but accustom ourselves to weigh evidence with regard to duty, we are to expect, as the gift of the Spirit, an understanding of circumstances—a fine sense of God's providential purposes with regard to us, which will make our true course plain to ourselves, although we may not always be able to explain it to others.The Christian may have a continual divine guidance. Unlike the unfaithful and unbelieving, of whom it is said, inPs. 106:13,“They waited not for his counsel,”the true believer has wisdom given him from above.Ps. 32:8—“I will instruct thee and teach thee in the way which thou shalt go”;Prov. 3:6—“In all thy ways acknowledge him, And he will direct thy paths”;Phil. 1:9—“And this I pray, that your love may abound yet more and more in knowledge and all discernment”(αἰσθήσει = spiritual discernment);James 1:5—“if any of you lacketh wisdom, let him ask of God, who giveth(τοῦ διδόντος Θεοῦ)to all liberally and upbraideth not”;John 15:15—“No longer do I call you servants; for the servant knoweth not what his lord doeth: but I have called you friends”;Col. 1:9, 10—“that ye may be filled with the knowledge of his will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding, to walk worthily of the Lord unto all pleasing.”God's Spirit makes Providence as well as the Bible personal to us. From every page of nature, as well as of the Bible, the living God speaks to us. Tholuck:“The more we recognize in every daily occurrence God's secret inspiration, guiding and controlling us, the more will all which to others wears a common and every-day aspect prove to us a sign and a wondrous work.”Hutton, Essays:“Animals that are blind slaves of impulse, driven about by forces from within, have so to say fewer valves in their moral constitution for the entrance of divine guidance. But minds alive to every word of God give constant opportunity for his interference with suggestions that may alter the course of their lives. The higher the mind, the more it glides into the region of providential control. God turns the good by the slightest breath of thought.”So the Christian hymn,“Guide me, O thou great Jehovah!”likens God's leading of the believer to that of Israel by the pillar of fire and cloud; and Paul in his dungeon calls himself“the prisoner of Christ Jesus”(Eph. 3:1). Affliction is the discipline of God's providence. Greek proverb:“He who does not get thrashed, does not get educated.”On God's Leadings, see A. H. Strong, Philosophy and Religion, 560-562.[pg 441]Abraham“went out, not knowing whither he went”(Heb. 11:8). Not till he reached Canaan did he know the place of his destination. Like a child he placed his hand in the hand of his unseen Father, to be led whither he himself knew not. We often have guidance without discernment of that guidance.Is. 42:16—“I will bring the blind by a way that they know not; in paths that they know not will I lead them.”So we act more wisely than we ourselves understand, and afterwards look back with astonishment to see what we have been able to accomplish. Emerson:“Himself from God he could not free; He builded better than he knew.”Disappointments? Ah, you make a mistake in the spelling; the D should be an H: His appointments. Melanchthon:“Quem poetæ fortunam, nos Deum appellamus.”Chinese proverb:“The good God never smites with both hands.”“Tact is a sort of psychical automatism”(Ladd). There is a Christian tact which is rarely at fault, because its possessor is“led by the Spirit of God”(Rom. 8:14). Yet we must always make allowance, as Oliver Cromwell used to say,“for the possibility of being mistaken.”When Luther's friends wrote despairingly of the negotiations at the Diet of Worms, he replied from Coburg that he had been looking up at the night sky, spangled and studded with stars, and had found no pillars to hold them up. And yet they did not fall. God needs no props for his stars and planets. He hangs them on nothing. So, in the working of God's providence, the unseen is prop enough for the seen. Henry Drummond, Life, 127—“To find out God's will: 1. Pray. 2. Think. 3. Talk to wise people, but do not regard their decision as final. 4. Beware of the bias of your own will, but do not be too much afraid of it (God never unnecessarily thwarts a man's nature and likings, and it is a mistake to think that his will is always in the line of the disagreeable). 5. Meantime, do the next thing (for doing God's will in small things is the best preparation for knowing it in great things). 6. When decision and action are necessary, go ahead. 7. Never reconsider the decision when it is finally acted on; and 8. You will probably not find out until afterwards, perhaps long afterwards, that you have been led at all.”Amiel lamented that everything was left to his own responsibility and declared:“It is this thought that disgusts me with the government of my own life. To win true peace, a man needs to feel himself directed, pardoned and sustained by a supreme Power, to feel himself in the right road, at the point where God would have him be,—in harmony with God and the universe. This faith gives strength and calm. I have not got it. All that is seems to me arbitrary and fortuitous.”How much better is Wordsworth's faith, Excursion, book 4:581—“One adequate support For the calamities of mortal life Exists, one only: an assured belief That the procession of our fate, howe'er Sad or disturbed, is ordered by a Being Of infinite benevolence and power, Whose everlasting purposes embrace All accidents, converting them to good.”Mrs. Browning, De Profundis, stanza xxiii—“I praise thee while my days go on; I love thee while my days go on! Through dark and dearth, through fire and frost, With emptied arms and treasure lost, I thank thee while my days go on!”4. To the evil acts of free agents.(a) Here we must distinguish between the natural agency and the moral agency of God, or between acts of permissive providence and acts of efficient causation. We are ever to remember that God neither works evil, nor causes his creatures to work evil. All sin is chargeable to the self-will and perversity of the creature; to declare God the author of it is the greatest of blasphemies.Bp. Wordsworth:“Godforeseesevil deeds, but neverforcesthem.”“God does not cause sin, any more than the rider of a limping horse causes the limping.”Nor can it be said that Satan is the author of man's sin. Man's powers are his own. Not Satan, but the man himself, gives the wrong application to these powers. Not the cause, but the occasion, of sin is in the tempter; the cause is in the evil will which yields to his persuasions.(b) But while man makes up his evil decision independently of God, God does, by his natural agency, order the method in which this inward evil shall express itself, by limiting it in time, place, and measure, or by guiding it to the end which his wisdom and love, and not man's intent, has[pg 442]set. In all this, however, God only allows sin to develop itself after its own nature, so that it may be known, abhorred, and if possible overcome and forsaken.Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 2:272-284—“Judas's treachery works the reconciliation of the world, and Israel's apostasy the salvation of the Gentiles.... God smooths the path of the sinner, and gives him chance for the outbreak of the evil, like a wise physician who draws to the surface of the body the disease that has been raging within, in order that it may be cured, if possible, by mild means, or, if not, may be removed by the knife.”Christianity rises in spite of, nay, in consequence of opposition, like a kite against the wind. When Christ has used the sword with which he has girded himself, as he used Cyrus and the Assyrian, he breaks it and throws it away. He turns the world upside down that he may get it right side up. He makes use of every member of society, as the locomotive uses every cog. The sufferings of the martyrs add to the number of the church; the worship of relics stimulates the Crusades; the worship of the saints leads to miracle plays and to the modern drama; the worship of images helps modern art; monasticism, scholasticism, the Papacy, even sceptical and destructive criticism stir up defenders of the faith. Shakespeare, Richard III, 5:1—“Thus doth he force the swords of wicked men To turn their own points on their masters' bosoms”; Hamlet, 1:2—“Foul deeds will rise, though all the earth o'erwhelm them, to men's eyes”; Macbeth, 1:7—“Even handed justice Commends the ingredients of the poisoned chalice To our own lips.”The Emperor of Germany went to Paris incognito and returned, thinking that no one had known of his absence. But at every step, going and coming, he was surrounded by detectives who saw that no harm came to him. The swallow drove again and again at the little struggling moth, but there was a plate glass window between them which neither one of them knew. Charles Darwin put his cheek against the plate glass of the cobra's cage, but could not keep himself from starting when the cobra struck. Tacitus, Annales, 14:5—“Noctem sideribus illustrem, quasi convinsendum ad scelus, dii præbuere”—“a night brilliant with stars, as if for the purpose of proving the crime, was granted by the gods.”See F. A. Noble, Our Redemption, 59-76, on the self-registry and self-disclosure of sin, with quotation from Daniel Webster's speech in the case of Knapp at Salem:“It must be confessed. It will be confessed. There is no refuge from confession but suicide, and suicide is confession.”(c) In cases of persistent iniquity, God's providence still compels the sinner to accomplish the design with which he and all things have been created, namely, the manifestation of God's holiness. Even though he struggle against God's plan, yet he must by his very resistance serve it. His sin is made its own detector, judge, and tormentor. His character and doom are made a warning to others. Refusing to glorify God in his salvation, he is made to glorify God in his destruction.Is. 10:5, 7—“Ho Assyrian, the rod of mine anger, the staff in whose hand is mine indignation!... Howbeit, he meaneth not so.”Charles Kingsley, Two Years Ago:“He [Treluddra] is one of those base natures, whom fact only lashes into greater fury,—a Pharaoh, whose heart the Lord himself can only harden”—here we would add the qualification:“consistently with the limits which he has set to the operations of his grace.”Pharaoh's ordering the destruction of the Israelitish children (Ex. 1:16) was made the means of putting Moses under royal protection, of training him for his future work, and finally of rescuing the whole nation whose sons Pharaoh sought to destroy. So God brings good out of evil; see Tyler, Theology of Greek Poets, 28-35. Emerson:“My will fulfilled shall be, For in daylight as in dark My thunderbolt has eyes to see His way home to the mark.”See also Edwards, Works, 4:300-312.Col. 2:15—“having stripped off from himself the principalities and the powers”—the hosts of evil spirits that swarmed upon him in their final onset—“he made a show of them openly, triumphing over them in it,”i. e., in the cross, thus turning their evil into a means of good. Royce, Spirit of Modern Philosophy, 443,—“Love, seeking for absolute evil, is like an electric light engaged in searching for a shadow,—when Love gets there, the shadow has disappeared.”But this means, not that all thingsaregood, but that“all things work together[pg 443]for good”(Rom. 8:28)—God overruling for good that which in itself is only evil. John Wesley:“God buries his workmen, but carries on his work.”Sermon on“The Devil's Mistakes”: Satan thought he could overcome Christ in the wilderness, in the garden, on the cross. He triumphed when he cast Paul into prison. But the cross was to Christ a lifting up, that should draw all men to him (John 12:32), and Paul's imprisonment furnished his epistles to the New Testament.“It is one of the wonders of divine love that even our blemishes and sins God will take when we truly repent of them and give them into his hands, and will in some way make them to be blessings. A friend once showed Ruskin a costly handkerchief on which a blot of ink had been made.‘Nothing can be done with that,’the friend said, thinking the handkerchief worthless and ruined now. Ruskin carried it away with him, and after a time sent it back to his friend. In a most skilful and artistic way, he had made a fine design in India ink, using the blot as its basis. Instead of being ruined, the handkerchief was made far more beautiful and valuable. So God takes the blots and stains upon our lives, the disfiguring blemishes, when we commit them to him, and by his marvellous grace changes them into marks of beauty. David's grievous sin was not only forgiven, but was made a transforming power in his life. Peter's pitiful fall became a step upward through his Lord's forgiveness and gentle dealing.”So“men may rise on stepping stones Of their dead selves to higher things”(Tennyson, In Memoriam, I).
3. To Christian activity.Here the truth lies between the two extremes of quietism and naturalism.(a) In opposition to the false abnegation of human reason and will which quietism demands, we hold that God guides us, not by continual miracle, but by his natural providence and the energizing of our faculties by his Spirit, so that we rationally and freely do our own work, and work out our own salvation.Upham, Interior Life, 356, defines quietism as“cessation of wandering thoughts and discursive imaginations, rest from irregular desires and affections, and perfect submission of the will.”Its advocates, however, have often spoken of it as a giving up of our will and reason, and a swallowing up of these in the wisdom and will of God. This phraseology is misleading, and savors of a pantheistic merging of man in God. Dorner:“Quietism makes God a monarch without living subjects.”Certain English quietists, like the Mohammedans, will not employ physicians in sickness. They quote2 Chron. 16:12, 13—Asa“sought not to Jehovah, but to the physicians. And Asa slept with his fathers.”They forget that the“physicians”alluded to in Chronicles were probably heathen necromancers. Cromwell to his Ironsides:“Trust God, and keep your powder dry!”Providence does not exclude, but rather implies the operation of natural law, by which we mean God's regular way of working. It leaves no excuse for the sarcasm of Robert Browning's Mr. Sludge the Medium, 223—“Saved your precious self from what befell The thirty-three whom Providence forgot.”Schurman, Belief in God, 213—“The temples were hung with the votive offerings of those only who hadescapeddrowning.”“So like Provvy!”Bentham used to say, when anything particularly unseemly occurred in the way of natural catastrophe, God reveals himself in natural law. Physicians and medicine are his methods, as well as the impartation of faith and courage to the patient. The advocates of faith-cure should provide by faith that no believing Christian should die. With the apostolic miracles should go inspiration, as Edward Irving declared.“Every man is as lazy as circumstances will admit.”We throw upon the shoulders of Providence the burdens which belong to us to bear.“Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling; for it is God who worketh in you both to will and to work, for his good pleasure”(Phil. 2:12, 13).Prayer without the use of means is an insult to God.“If God has decreed that you should live, what is the use of your eating or drinking?”Can a drowning man refuse to swim, or even to lay hold of the rope that is thrown to him, and yet ask God to save him on account of his faith?“Tie your camel,”said Mohammed,“and commit it to God.”Frederick Douglas used to say that when in slavery he often prayed for freedom, but his prayer was never answered till he prayed with his feet—and ran away. Whitney, Integrity of Christian Science, 68—“The existence of the dynamo at the power-house does not make unnecessary the trolley line, nor the secondary motor, nor the conductor's application of the power. True quietism is a resting in the Lord after we have done our part.”Ps. 37:7—“Rest in Jehovah, and wait patiently for him”;Is. 57:2—“He entereth into peace; they rest in their beds, each one that walketh in his uprightness”. Ian Maclaren, Cure of Souls, 147—“Religion has three places of abode: in the reason, which is theology; in the conscience, which is ethics; and in the heart, which is quietism.”On the self-guidance of Christ, see Adamson, The Mind in Christ, 202-232.George Müller, writing about ascertaining the will of God, says:“I seek at the beginning to get my heart into such a state that it has no will of its own in regard to a given matter. Nine tenths of the difficulties are overcome when our hearts are ready to do the Lord's will, whatever it may be. Having done this, I do not leave the result to feeling or simple impression. If I do so, I make myself liable to a great delusion. I seek the will of the Spirit of God through, or in connection with, the Word of God. The Spirit and the Word must be combined. If I look to the Spirit alone, without[pg 440]the Word, I lay myself open to great delusions also. If the Holy Ghost guides us at all, he will do it according to the Scriptures, and never contrary to them. Next I take into account providential circumstances. These often plainly indicate God's will in connection with his Word and his Spirit. I ask God in prayer to reveal to me his will aright. Thus through prayer to God, the study of the Word, and reflection, I come to a deliberate judgment according to the best of my knowledge and ability, and, if my mind is thus at peace, I proceed accordingly.”We must not confound rational piety with false enthusiasm. See Isaac Taylor, Natural History of Enthusiasm.“Not quiescence, but acquiescence, is demanded of us.”As God feeds“the birds of the heaven”(Mat. 6:26), not by dropping food from heaven into their mouths, but by stimulating them to seek food for themselves, so God provides for his rational creatures by giving them a sanctified common sense and by leading them to use it. In a true sense Christianity gives us more will than ever. The Holy Spirit emancipates the will, sets it upon proper objects, and fills it with new energy. We are therefore not to surrender ourselves passively to whatever professes to be a divine suggestion:1 John 4:1—“believe not every spirit, but prove the spirits, whether they are of God.”The test is the revealed word of God:Is. 8:20—“To the law and to the testimony! if they speak not according to this word, surely there is no morning for them.”See remarks on false Mysticism, pages 32, 33.(b) In opposition to naturalism, we hold that God is continually near the human spirit by his providential working, and that this providential working is so adjusted to the Christian's nature and necessities as to furnish instruction with regard to duty, discipline of religious character, and needed help and comfort in trial.In interpreting God's providences, as in interpreting Scripture, we are dependent upon the Holy Spirit. The work of the Spirit is, indeed, in great part an application of Scripture truth to present circumstances. While we never allow ourselves to act blindly and irrationally, but accustom ourselves to weigh evidence with regard to duty, we are to expect, as the gift of the Spirit, an understanding of circumstances—a fine sense of God's providential purposes with regard to us, which will make our true course plain to ourselves, although we may not always be able to explain it to others.The Christian may have a continual divine guidance. Unlike the unfaithful and unbelieving, of whom it is said, inPs. 106:13,“They waited not for his counsel,”the true believer has wisdom given him from above.Ps. 32:8—“I will instruct thee and teach thee in the way which thou shalt go”;Prov. 3:6—“In all thy ways acknowledge him, And he will direct thy paths”;Phil. 1:9—“And this I pray, that your love may abound yet more and more in knowledge and all discernment”(αἰσθήσει = spiritual discernment);James 1:5—“if any of you lacketh wisdom, let him ask of God, who giveth(τοῦ διδόντος Θεοῦ)to all liberally and upbraideth not”;John 15:15—“No longer do I call you servants; for the servant knoweth not what his lord doeth: but I have called you friends”;Col. 1:9, 10—“that ye may be filled with the knowledge of his will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding, to walk worthily of the Lord unto all pleasing.”God's Spirit makes Providence as well as the Bible personal to us. From every page of nature, as well as of the Bible, the living God speaks to us. Tholuck:“The more we recognize in every daily occurrence God's secret inspiration, guiding and controlling us, the more will all which to others wears a common and every-day aspect prove to us a sign and a wondrous work.”Hutton, Essays:“Animals that are blind slaves of impulse, driven about by forces from within, have so to say fewer valves in their moral constitution for the entrance of divine guidance. But minds alive to every word of God give constant opportunity for his interference with suggestions that may alter the course of their lives. The higher the mind, the more it glides into the region of providential control. God turns the good by the slightest breath of thought.”So the Christian hymn,“Guide me, O thou great Jehovah!”likens God's leading of the believer to that of Israel by the pillar of fire and cloud; and Paul in his dungeon calls himself“the prisoner of Christ Jesus”(Eph. 3:1). Affliction is the discipline of God's providence. Greek proverb:“He who does not get thrashed, does not get educated.”On God's Leadings, see A. H. Strong, Philosophy and Religion, 560-562.[pg 441]Abraham“went out, not knowing whither he went”(Heb. 11:8). Not till he reached Canaan did he know the place of his destination. Like a child he placed his hand in the hand of his unseen Father, to be led whither he himself knew not. We often have guidance without discernment of that guidance.Is. 42:16—“I will bring the blind by a way that they know not; in paths that they know not will I lead them.”So we act more wisely than we ourselves understand, and afterwards look back with astonishment to see what we have been able to accomplish. Emerson:“Himself from God he could not free; He builded better than he knew.”Disappointments? Ah, you make a mistake in the spelling; the D should be an H: His appointments. Melanchthon:“Quem poetæ fortunam, nos Deum appellamus.”Chinese proverb:“The good God never smites with both hands.”“Tact is a sort of psychical automatism”(Ladd). There is a Christian tact which is rarely at fault, because its possessor is“led by the Spirit of God”(Rom. 8:14). Yet we must always make allowance, as Oliver Cromwell used to say,“for the possibility of being mistaken.”When Luther's friends wrote despairingly of the negotiations at the Diet of Worms, he replied from Coburg that he had been looking up at the night sky, spangled and studded with stars, and had found no pillars to hold them up. And yet they did not fall. God needs no props for his stars and planets. He hangs them on nothing. So, in the working of God's providence, the unseen is prop enough for the seen. Henry Drummond, Life, 127—“To find out God's will: 1. Pray. 2. Think. 3. Talk to wise people, but do not regard their decision as final. 4. Beware of the bias of your own will, but do not be too much afraid of it (God never unnecessarily thwarts a man's nature and likings, and it is a mistake to think that his will is always in the line of the disagreeable). 5. Meantime, do the next thing (for doing God's will in small things is the best preparation for knowing it in great things). 6. When decision and action are necessary, go ahead. 7. Never reconsider the decision when it is finally acted on; and 8. You will probably not find out until afterwards, perhaps long afterwards, that you have been led at all.”Amiel lamented that everything was left to his own responsibility and declared:“It is this thought that disgusts me with the government of my own life. To win true peace, a man needs to feel himself directed, pardoned and sustained by a supreme Power, to feel himself in the right road, at the point where God would have him be,—in harmony with God and the universe. This faith gives strength and calm. I have not got it. All that is seems to me arbitrary and fortuitous.”How much better is Wordsworth's faith, Excursion, book 4:581—“One adequate support For the calamities of mortal life Exists, one only: an assured belief That the procession of our fate, howe'er Sad or disturbed, is ordered by a Being Of infinite benevolence and power, Whose everlasting purposes embrace All accidents, converting them to good.”Mrs. Browning, De Profundis, stanza xxiii—“I praise thee while my days go on; I love thee while my days go on! Through dark and dearth, through fire and frost, With emptied arms and treasure lost, I thank thee while my days go on!”4. To the evil acts of free agents.(a) Here we must distinguish between the natural agency and the moral agency of God, or between acts of permissive providence and acts of efficient causation. We are ever to remember that God neither works evil, nor causes his creatures to work evil. All sin is chargeable to the self-will and perversity of the creature; to declare God the author of it is the greatest of blasphemies.Bp. Wordsworth:“Godforeseesevil deeds, but neverforcesthem.”“God does not cause sin, any more than the rider of a limping horse causes the limping.”Nor can it be said that Satan is the author of man's sin. Man's powers are his own. Not Satan, but the man himself, gives the wrong application to these powers. Not the cause, but the occasion, of sin is in the tempter; the cause is in the evil will which yields to his persuasions.(b) But while man makes up his evil decision independently of God, God does, by his natural agency, order the method in which this inward evil shall express itself, by limiting it in time, place, and measure, or by guiding it to the end which his wisdom and love, and not man's intent, has[pg 442]set. In all this, however, God only allows sin to develop itself after its own nature, so that it may be known, abhorred, and if possible overcome and forsaken.Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 2:272-284—“Judas's treachery works the reconciliation of the world, and Israel's apostasy the salvation of the Gentiles.... God smooths the path of the sinner, and gives him chance for the outbreak of the evil, like a wise physician who draws to the surface of the body the disease that has been raging within, in order that it may be cured, if possible, by mild means, or, if not, may be removed by the knife.”Christianity rises in spite of, nay, in consequence of opposition, like a kite against the wind. When Christ has used the sword with which he has girded himself, as he used Cyrus and the Assyrian, he breaks it and throws it away. He turns the world upside down that he may get it right side up. He makes use of every member of society, as the locomotive uses every cog. The sufferings of the martyrs add to the number of the church; the worship of relics stimulates the Crusades; the worship of the saints leads to miracle plays and to the modern drama; the worship of images helps modern art; monasticism, scholasticism, the Papacy, even sceptical and destructive criticism stir up defenders of the faith. Shakespeare, Richard III, 5:1—“Thus doth he force the swords of wicked men To turn their own points on their masters' bosoms”; Hamlet, 1:2—“Foul deeds will rise, though all the earth o'erwhelm them, to men's eyes”; Macbeth, 1:7—“Even handed justice Commends the ingredients of the poisoned chalice To our own lips.”The Emperor of Germany went to Paris incognito and returned, thinking that no one had known of his absence. But at every step, going and coming, he was surrounded by detectives who saw that no harm came to him. The swallow drove again and again at the little struggling moth, but there was a plate glass window between them which neither one of them knew. Charles Darwin put his cheek against the plate glass of the cobra's cage, but could not keep himself from starting when the cobra struck. Tacitus, Annales, 14:5—“Noctem sideribus illustrem, quasi convinsendum ad scelus, dii præbuere”—“a night brilliant with stars, as if for the purpose of proving the crime, was granted by the gods.”See F. A. Noble, Our Redemption, 59-76, on the self-registry and self-disclosure of sin, with quotation from Daniel Webster's speech in the case of Knapp at Salem:“It must be confessed. It will be confessed. There is no refuge from confession but suicide, and suicide is confession.”(c) In cases of persistent iniquity, God's providence still compels the sinner to accomplish the design with which he and all things have been created, namely, the manifestation of God's holiness. Even though he struggle against God's plan, yet he must by his very resistance serve it. His sin is made its own detector, judge, and tormentor. His character and doom are made a warning to others. Refusing to glorify God in his salvation, he is made to glorify God in his destruction.Is. 10:5, 7—“Ho Assyrian, the rod of mine anger, the staff in whose hand is mine indignation!... Howbeit, he meaneth not so.”Charles Kingsley, Two Years Ago:“He [Treluddra] is one of those base natures, whom fact only lashes into greater fury,—a Pharaoh, whose heart the Lord himself can only harden”—here we would add the qualification:“consistently with the limits which he has set to the operations of his grace.”Pharaoh's ordering the destruction of the Israelitish children (Ex. 1:16) was made the means of putting Moses under royal protection, of training him for his future work, and finally of rescuing the whole nation whose sons Pharaoh sought to destroy. So God brings good out of evil; see Tyler, Theology of Greek Poets, 28-35. Emerson:“My will fulfilled shall be, For in daylight as in dark My thunderbolt has eyes to see His way home to the mark.”See also Edwards, Works, 4:300-312.Col. 2:15—“having stripped off from himself the principalities and the powers”—the hosts of evil spirits that swarmed upon him in their final onset—“he made a show of them openly, triumphing over them in it,”i. e., in the cross, thus turning their evil into a means of good. Royce, Spirit of Modern Philosophy, 443,—“Love, seeking for absolute evil, is like an electric light engaged in searching for a shadow,—when Love gets there, the shadow has disappeared.”But this means, not that all thingsaregood, but that“all things work together[pg 443]for good”(Rom. 8:28)—God overruling for good that which in itself is only evil. John Wesley:“God buries his workmen, but carries on his work.”Sermon on“The Devil's Mistakes”: Satan thought he could overcome Christ in the wilderness, in the garden, on the cross. He triumphed when he cast Paul into prison. But the cross was to Christ a lifting up, that should draw all men to him (John 12:32), and Paul's imprisonment furnished his epistles to the New Testament.“It is one of the wonders of divine love that even our blemishes and sins God will take when we truly repent of them and give them into his hands, and will in some way make them to be blessings. A friend once showed Ruskin a costly handkerchief on which a blot of ink had been made.‘Nothing can be done with that,’the friend said, thinking the handkerchief worthless and ruined now. Ruskin carried it away with him, and after a time sent it back to his friend. In a most skilful and artistic way, he had made a fine design in India ink, using the blot as its basis. Instead of being ruined, the handkerchief was made far more beautiful and valuable. So God takes the blots and stains upon our lives, the disfiguring blemishes, when we commit them to him, and by his marvellous grace changes them into marks of beauty. David's grievous sin was not only forgiven, but was made a transforming power in his life. Peter's pitiful fall became a step upward through his Lord's forgiveness and gentle dealing.”So“men may rise on stepping stones Of their dead selves to higher things”(Tennyson, In Memoriam, I).
3. To Christian activity.Here the truth lies between the two extremes of quietism and naturalism.(a) In opposition to the false abnegation of human reason and will which quietism demands, we hold that God guides us, not by continual miracle, but by his natural providence and the energizing of our faculties by his Spirit, so that we rationally and freely do our own work, and work out our own salvation.Upham, Interior Life, 356, defines quietism as“cessation of wandering thoughts and discursive imaginations, rest from irregular desires and affections, and perfect submission of the will.”Its advocates, however, have often spoken of it as a giving up of our will and reason, and a swallowing up of these in the wisdom and will of God. This phraseology is misleading, and savors of a pantheistic merging of man in God. Dorner:“Quietism makes God a monarch without living subjects.”Certain English quietists, like the Mohammedans, will not employ physicians in sickness. They quote2 Chron. 16:12, 13—Asa“sought not to Jehovah, but to the physicians. And Asa slept with his fathers.”They forget that the“physicians”alluded to in Chronicles were probably heathen necromancers. Cromwell to his Ironsides:“Trust God, and keep your powder dry!”Providence does not exclude, but rather implies the operation of natural law, by which we mean God's regular way of working. It leaves no excuse for the sarcasm of Robert Browning's Mr. Sludge the Medium, 223—“Saved your precious self from what befell The thirty-three whom Providence forgot.”Schurman, Belief in God, 213—“The temples were hung with the votive offerings of those only who hadescapeddrowning.”“So like Provvy!”Bentham used to say, when anything particularly unseemly occurred in the way of natural catastrophe, God reveals himself in natural law. Physicians and medicine are his methods, as well as the impartation of faith and courage to the patient. The advocates of faith-cure should provide by faith that no believing Christian should die. With the apostolic miracles should go inspiration, as Edward Irving declared.“Every man is as lazy as circumstances will admit.”We throw upon the shoulders of Providence the burdens which belong to us to bear.“Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling; for it is God who worketh in you both to will and to work, for his good pleasure”(Phil. 2:12, 13).Prayer without the use of means is an insult to God.“If God has decreed that you should live, what is the use of your eating or drinking?”Can a drowning man refuse to swim, or even to lay hold of the rope that is thrown to him, and yet ask God to save him on account of his faith?“Tie your camel,”said Mohammed,“and commit it to God.”Frederick Douglas used to say that when in slavery he often prayed for freedom, but his prayer was never answered till he prayed with his feet—and ran away. Whitney, Integrity of Christian Science, 68—“The existence of the dynamo at the power-house does not make unnecessary the trolley line, nor the secondary motor, nor the conductor's application of the power. True quietism is a resting in the Lord after we have done our part.”Ps. 37:7—“Rest in Jehovah, and wait patiently for him”;Is. 57:2—“He entereth into peace; they rest in their beds, each one that walketh in his uprightness”. Ian Maclaren, Cure of Souls, 147—“Religion has three places of abode: in the reason, which is theology; in the conscience, which is ethics; and in the heart, which is quietism.”On the self-guidance of Christ, see Adamson, The Mind in Christ, 202-232.George Müller, writing about ascertaining the will of God, says:“I seek at the beginning to get my heart into such a state that it has no will of its own in regard to a given matter. Nine tenths of the difficulties are overcome when our hearts are ready to do the Lord's will, whatever it may be. Having done this, I do not leave the result to feeling or simple impression. If I do so, I make myself liable to a great delusion. I seek the will of the Spirit of God through, or in connection with, the Word of God. The Spirit and the Word must be combined. If I look to the Spirit alone, without[pg 440]the Word, I lay myself open to great delusions also. If the Holy Ghost guides us at all, he will do it according to the Scriptures, and never contrary to them. Next I take into account providential circumstances. These often plainly indicate God's will in connection with his Word and his Spirit. I ask God in prayer to reveal to me his will aright. Thus through prayer to God, the study of the Word, and reflection, I come to a deliberate judgment according to the best of my knowledge and ability, and, if my mind is thus at peace, I proceed accordingly.”We must not confound rational piety with false enthusiasm. See Isaac Taylor, Natural History of Enthusiasm.“Not quiescence, but acquiescence, is demanded of us.”As God feeds“the birds of the heaven”(Mat. 6:26), not by dropping food from heaven into their mouths, but by stimulating them to seek food for themselves, so God provides for his rational creatures by giving them a sanctified common sense and by leading them to use it. In a true sense Christianity gives us more will than ever. The Holy Spirit emancipates the will, sets it upon proper objects, and fills it with new energy. We are therefore not to surrender ourselves passively to whatever professes to be a divine suggestion:1 John 4:1—“believe not every spirit, but prove the spirits, whether they are of God.”The test is the revealed word of God:Is. 8:20—“To the law and to the testimony! if they speak not according to this word, surely there is no morning for them.”See remarks on false Mysticism, pages 32, 33.(b) In opposition to naturalism, we hold that God is continually near the human spirit by his providential working, and that this providential working is so adjusted to the Christian's nature and necessities as to furnish instruction with regard to duty, discipline of religious character, and needed help and comfort in trial.In interpreting God's providences, as in interpreting Scripture, we are dependent upon the Holy Spirit. The work of the Spirit is, indeed, in great part an application of Scripture truth to present circumstances. While we never allow ourselves to act blindly and irrationally, but accustom ourselves to weigh evidence with regard to duty, we are to expect, as the gift of the Spirit, an understanding of circumstances—a fine sense of God's providential purposes with regard to us, which will make our true course plain to ourselves, although we may not always be able to explain it to others.The Christian may have a continual divine guidance. Unlike the unfaithful and unbelieving, of whom it is said, inPs. 106:13,“They waited not for his counsel,”the true believer has wisdom given him from above.Ps. 32:8—“I will instruct thee and teach thee in the way which thou shalt go”;Prov. 3:6—“In all thy ways acknowledge him, And he will direct thy paths”;Phil. 1:9—“And this I pray, that your love may abound yet more and more in knowledge and all discernment”(αἰσθήσει = spiritual discernment);James 1:5—“if any of you lacketh wisdom, let him ask of God, who giveth(τοῦ διδόντος Θεοῦ)to all liberally and upbraideth not”;John 15:15—“No longer do I call you servants; for the servant knoweth not what his lord doeth: but I have called you friends”;Col. 1:9, 10—“that ye may be filled with the knowledge of his will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding, to walk worthily of the Lord unto all pleasing.”God's Spirit makes Providence as well as the Bible personal to us. From every page of nature, as well as of the Bible, the living God speaks to us. Tholuck:“The more we recognize in every daily occurrence God's secret inspiration, guiding and controlling us, the more will all which to others wears a common and every-day aspect prove to us a sign and a wondrous work.”Hutton, Essays:“Animals that are blind slaves of impulse, driven about by forces from within, have so to say fewer valves in their moral constitution for the entrance of divine guidance. But minds alive to every word of God give constant opportunity for his interference with suggestions that may alter the course of their lives. The higher the mind, the more it glides into the region of providential control. God turns the good by the slightest breath of thought.”So the Christian hymn,“Guide me, O thou great Jehovah!”likens God's leading of the believer to that of Israel by the pillar of fire and cloud; and Paul in his dungeon calls himself“the prisoner of Christ Jesus”(Eph. 3:1). Affliction is the discipline of God's providence. Greek proverb:“He who does not get thrashed, does not get educated.”On God's Leadings, see A. H. Strong, Philosophy and Religion, 560-562.[pg 441]Abraham“went out, not knowing whither he went”(Heb. 11:8). Not till he reached Canaan did he know the place of his destination. Like a child he placed his hand in the hand of his unseen Father, to be led whither he himself knew not. We often have guidance without discernment of that guidance.Is. 42:16—“I will bring the blind by a way that they know not; in paths that they know not will I lead them.”So we act more wisely than we ourselves understand, and afterwards look back with astonishment to see what we have been able to accomplish. Emerson:“Himself from God he could not free; He builded better than he knew.”Disappointments? Ah, you make a mistake in the spelling; the D should be an H: His appointments. Melanchthon:“Quem poetæ fortunam, nos Deum appellamus.”Chinese proverb:“The good God never smites with both hands.”“Tact is a sort of psychical automatism”(Ladd). There is a Christian tact which is rarely at fault, because its possessor is“led by the Spirit of God”(Rom. 8:14). Yet we must always make allowance, as Oliver Cromwell used to say,“for the possibility of being mistaken.”When Luther's friends wrote despairingly of the negotiations at the Diet of Worms, he replied from Coburg that he had been looking up at the night sky, spangled and studded with stars, and had found no pillars to hold them up. And yet they did not fall. God needs no props for his stars and planets. He hangs them on nothing. So, in the working of God's providence, the unseen is prop enough for the seen. Henry Drummond, Life, 127—“To find out God's will: 1. Pray. 2. Think. 3. Talk to wise people, but do not regard their decision as final. 4. Beware of the bias of your own will, but do not be too much afraid of it (God never unnecessarily thwarts a man's nature and likings, and it is a mistake to think that his will is always in the line of the disagreeable). 5. Meantime, do the next thing (for doing God's will in small things is the best preparation for knowing it in great things). 6. When decision and action are necessary, go ahead. 7. Never reconsider the decision when it is finally acted on; and 8. You will probably not find out until afterwards, perhaps long afterwards, that you have been led at all.”Amiel lamented that everything was left to his own responsibility and declared:“It is this thought that disgusts me with the government of my own life. To win true peace, a man needs to feel himself directed, pardoned and sustained by a supreme Power, to feel himself in the right road, at the point where God would have him be,—in harmony with God and the universe. This faith gives strength and calm. I have not got it. All that is seems to me arbitrary and fortuitous.”How much better is Wordsworth's faith, Excursion, book 4:581—“One adequate support For the calamities of mortal life Exists, one only: an assured belief That the procession of our fate, howe'er Sad or disturbed, is ordered by a Being Of infinite benevolence and power, Whose everlasting purposes embrace All accidents, converting them to good.”Mrs. Browning, De Profundis, stanza xxiii—“I praise thee while my days go on; I love thee while my days go on! Through dark and dearth, through fire and frost, With emptied arms and treasure lost, I thank thee while my days go on!”
Here the truth lies between the two extremes of quietism and naturalism.
(a) In opposition to the false abnegation of human reason and will which quietism demands, we hold that God guides us, not by continual miracle, but by his natural providence and the energizing of our faculties by his Spirit, so that we rationally and freely do our own work, and work out our own salvation.
Upham, Interior Life, 356, defines quietism as“cessation of wandering thoughts and discursive imaginations, rest from irregular desires and affections, and perfect submission of the will.”Its advocates, however, have often spoken of it as a giving up of our will and reason, and a swallowing up of these in the wisdom and will of God. This phraseology is misleading, and savors of a pantheistic merging of man in God. Dorner:“Quietism makes God a monarch without living subjects.”Certain English quietists, like the Mohammedans, will not employ physicians in sickness. They quote2 Chron. 16:12, 13—Asa“sought not to Jehovah, but to the physicians. And Asa slept with his fathers.”They forget that the“physicians”alluded to in Chronicles were probably heathen necromancers. Cromwell to his Ironsides:“Trust God, and keep your powder dry!”Providence does not exclude, but rather implies the operation of natural law, by which we mean God's regular way of working. It leaves no excuse for the sarcasm of Robert Browning's Mr. Sludge the Medium, 223—“Saved your precious self from what befell The thirty-three whom Providence forgot.”Schurman, Belief in God, 213—“The temples were hung with the votive offerings of those only who hadescapeddrowning.”“So like Provvy!”Bentham used to say, when anything particularly unseemly occurred in the way of natural catastrophe, God reveals himself in natural law. Physicians and medicine are his methods, as well as the impartation of faith and courage to the patient. The advocates of faith-cure should provide by faith that no believing Christian should die. With the apostolic miracles should go inspiration, as Edward Irving declared.“Every man is as lazy as circumstances will admit.”We throw upon the shoulders of Providence the burdens which belong to us to bear.“Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling; for it is God who worketh in you both to will and to work, for his good pleasure”(Phil. 2:12, 13).Prayer without the use of means is an insult to God.“If God has decreed that you should live, what is the use of your eating or drinking?”Can a drowning man refuse to swim, or even to lay hold of the rope that is thrown to him, and yet ask God to save him on account of his faith?“Tie your camel,”said Mohammed,“and commit it to God.”Frederick Douglas used to say that when in slavery he often prayed for freedom, but his prayer was never answered till he prayed with his feet—and ran away. Whitney, Integrity of Christian Science, 68—“The existence of the dynamo at the power-house does not make unnecessary the trolley line, nor the secondary motor, nor the conductor's application of the power. True quietism is a resting in the Lord after we have done our part.”Ps. 37:7—“Rest in Jehovah, and wait patiently for him”;Is. 57:2—“He entereth into peace; they rest in their beds, each one that walketh in his uprightness”. Ian Maclaren, Cure of Souls, 147—“Religion has three places of abode: in the reason, which is theology; in the conscience, which is ethics; and in the heart, which is quietism.”On the self-guidance of Christ, see Adamson, The Mind in Christ, 202-232.George Müller, writing about ascertaining the will of God, says:“I seek at the beginning to get my heart into such a state that it has no will of its own in regard to a given matter. Nine tenths of the difficulties are overcome when our hearts are ready to do the Lord's will, whatever it may be. Having done this, I do not leave the result to feeling or simple impression. If I do so, I make myself liable to a great delusion. I seek the will of the Spirit of God through, or in connection with, the Word of God. The Spirit and the Word must be combined. If I look to the Spirit alone, without[pg 440]the Word, I lay myself open to great delusions also. If the Holy Ghost guides us at all, he will do it according to the Scriptures, and never contrary to them. Next I take into account providential circumstances. These often plainly indicate God's will in connection with his Word and his Spirit. I ask God in prayer to reveal to me his will aright. Thus through prayer to God, the study of the Word, and reflection, I come to a deliberate judgment according to the best of my knowledge and ability, and, if my mind is thus at peace, I proceed accordingly.”We must not confound rational piety with false enthusiasm. See Isaac Taylor, Natural History of Enthusiasm.“Not quiescence, but acquiescence, is demanded of us.”As God feeds“the birds of the heaven”(Mat. 6:26), not by dropping food from heaven into their mouths, but by stimulating them to seek food for themselves, so God provides for his rational creatures by giving them a sanctified common sense and by leading them to use it. In a true sense Christianity gives us more will than ever. The Holy Spirit emancipates the will, sets it upon proper objects, and fills it with new energy. We are therefore not to surrender ourselves passively to whatever professes to be a divine suggestion:1 John 4:1—“believe not every spirit, but prove the spirits, whether they are of God.”The test is the revealed word of God:Is. 8:20—“To the law and to the testimony! if they speak not according to this word, surely there is no morning for them.”See remarks on false Mysticism, pages 32, 33.
Upham, Interior Life, 356, defines quietism as“cessation of wandering thoughts and discursive imaginations, rest from irregular desires and affections, and perfect submission of the will.”Its advocates, however, have often spoken of it as a giving up of our will and reason, and a swallowing up of these in the wisdom and will of God. This phraseology is misleading, and savors of a pantheistic merging of man in God. Dorner:“Quietism makes God a monarch without living subjects.”Certain English quietists, like the Mohammedans, will not employ physicians in sickness. They quote2 Chron. 16:12, 13—Asa“sought not to Jehovah, but to the physicians. And Asa slept with his fathers.”They forget that the“physicians”alluded to in Chronicles were probably heathen necromancers. Cromwell to his Ironsides:“Trust God, and keep your powder dry!”
Providence does not exclude, but rather implies the operation of natural law, by which we mean God's regular way of working. It leaves no excuse for the sarcasm of Robert Browning's Mr. Sludge the Medium, 223—“Saved your precious self from what befell The thirty-three whom Providence forgot.”Schurman, Belief in God, 213—“The temples were hung with the votive offerings of those only who hadescapeddrowning.”“So like Provvy!”Bentham used to say, when anything particularly unseemly occurred in the way of natural catastrophe, God reveals himself in natural law. Physicians and medicine are his methods, as well as the impartation of faith and courage to the patient. The advocates of faith-cure should provide by faith that no believing Christian should die. With the apostolic miracles should go inspiration, as Edward Irving declared.“Every man is as lazy as circumstances will admit.”We throw upon the shoulders of Providence the burdens which belong to us to bear.“Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling; for it is God who worketh in you both to will and to work, for his good pleasure”(Phil. 2:12, 13).
Prayer without the use of means is an insult to God.“If God has decreed that you should live, what is the use of your eating or drinking?”Can a drowning man refuse to swim, or even to lay hold of the rope that is thrown to him, and yet ask God to save him on account of his faith?“Tie your camel,”said Mohammed,“and commit it to God.”Frederick Douglas used to say that when in slavery he often prayed for freedom, but his prayer was never answered till he prayed with his feet—and ran away. Whitney, Integrity of Christian Science, 68—“The existence of the dynamo at the power-house does not make unnecessary the trolley line, nor the secondary motor, nor the conductor's application of the power. True quietism is a resting in the Lord after we have done our part.”Ps. 37:7—“Rest in Jehovah, and wait patiently for him”;Is. 57:2—“He entereth into peace; they rest in their beds, each one that walketh in his uprightness”. Ian Maclaren, Cure of Souls, 147—“Religion has three places of abode: in the reason, which is theology; in the conscience, which is ethics; and in the heart, which is quietism.”On the self-guidance of Christ, see Adamson, The Mind in Christ, 202-232.
George Müller, writing about ascertaining the will of God, says:“I seek at the beginning to get my heart into such a state that it has no will of its own in regard to a given matter. Nine tenths of the difficulties are overcome when our hearts are ready to do the Lord's will, whatever it may be. Having done this, I do not leave the result to feeling or simple impression. If I do so, I make myself liable to a great delusion. I seek the will of the Spirit of God through, or in connection with, the Word of God. The Spirit and the Word must be combined. If I look to the Spirit alone, without[pg 440]the Word, I lay myself open to great delusions also. If the Holy Ghost guides us at all, he will do it according to the Scriptures, and never contrary to them. Next I take into account providential circumstances. These often plainly indicate God's will in connection with his Word and his Spirit. I ask God in prayer to reveal to me his will aright. Thus through prayer to God, the study of the Word, and reflection, I come to a deliberate judgment according to the best of my knowledge and ability, and, if my mind is thus at peace, I proceed accordingly.”
We must not confound rational piety with false enthusiasm. See Isaac Taylor, Natural History of Enthusiasm.“Not quiescence, but acquiescence, is demanded of us.”As God feeds“the birds of the heaven”(Mat. 6:26), not by dropping food from heaven into their mouths, but by stimulating them to seek food for themselves, so God provides for his rational creatures by giving them a sanctified common sense and by leading them to use it. In a true sense Christianity gives us more will than ever. The Holy Spirit emancipates the will, sets it upon proper objects, and fills it with new energy. We are therefore not to surrender ourselves passively to whatever professes to be a divine suggestion:1 John 4:1—“believe not every spirit, but prove the spirits, whether they are of God.”The test is the revealed word of God:Is. 8:20—“To the law and to the testimony! if they speak not according to this word, surely there is no morning for them.”See remarks on false Mysticism, pages 32, 33.
(b) In opposition to naturalism, we hold that God is continually near the human spirit by his providential working, and that this providential working is so adjusted to the Christian's nature and necessities as to furnish instruction with regard to duty, discipline of religious character, and needed help and comfort in trial.
In interpreting God's providences, as in interpreting Scripture, we are dependent upon the Holy Spirit. The work of the Spirit is, indeed, in great part an application of Scripture truth to present circumstances. While we never allow ourselves to act blindly and irrationally, but accustom ourselves to weigh evidence with regard to duty, we are to expect, as the gift of the Spirit, an understanding of circumstances—a fine sense of God's providential purposes with regard to us, which will make our true course plain to ourselves, although we may not always be able to explain it to others.
The Christian may have a continual divine guidance. Unlike the unfaithful and unbelieving, of whom it is said, inPs. 106:13,“They waited not for his counsel,”the true believer has wisdom given him from above.Ps. 32:8—“I will instruct thee and teach thee in the way which thou shalt go”;Prov. 3:6—“In all thy ways acknowledge him, And he will direct thy paths”;Phil. 1:9—“And this I pray, that your love may abound yet more and more in knowledge and all discernment”(αἰσθήσει = spiritual discernment);James 1:5—“if any of you lacketh wisdom, let him ask of God, who giveth(τοῦ διδόντος Θεοῦ)to all liberally and upbraideth not”;John 15:15—“No longer do I call you servants; for the servant knoweth not what his lord doeth: but I have called you friends”;Col. 1:9, 10—“that ye may be filled with the knowledge of his will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding, to walk worthily of the Lord unto all pleasing.”God's Spirit makes Providence as well as the Bible personal to us. From every page of nature, as well as of the Bible, the living God speaks to us. Tholuck:“The more we recognize in every daily occurrence God's secret inspiration, guiding and controlling us, the more will all which to others wears a common and every-day aspect prove to us a sign and a wondrous work.”Hutton, Essays:“Animals that are blind slaves of impulse, driven about by forces from within, have so to say fewer valves in their moral constitution for the entrance of divine guidance. But minds alive to every word of God give constant opportunity for his interference with suggestions that may alter the course of their lives. The higher the mind, the more it glides into the region of providential control. God turns the good by the slightest breath of thought.”So the Christian hymn,“Guide me, O thou great Jehovah!”likens God's leading of the believer to that of Israel by the pillar of fire and cloud; and Paul in his dungeon calls himself“the prisoner of Christ Jesus”(Eph. 3:1). Affliction is the discipline of God's providence. Greek proverb:“He who does not get thrashed, does not get educated.”On God's Leadings, see A. H. Strong, Philosophy and Religion, 560-562.[pg 441]Abraham“went out, not knowing whither he went”(Heb. 11:8). Not till he reached Canaan did he know the place of his destination. Like a child he placed his hand in the hand of his unseen Father, to be led whither he himself knew not. We often have guidance without discernment of that guidance.Is. 42:16—“I will bring the blind by a way that they know not; in paths that they know not will I lead them.”So we act more wisely than we ourselves understand, and afterwards look back with astonishment to see what we have been able to accomplish. Emerson:“Himself from God he could not free; He builded better than he knew.”Disappointments? Ah, you make a mistake in the spelling; the D should be an H: His appointments. Melanchthon:“Quem poetæ fortunam, nos Deum appellamus.”Chinese proverb:“The good God never smites with both hands.”“Tact is a sort of psychical automatism”(Ladd). There is a Christian tact which is rarely at fault, because its possessor is“led by the Spirit of God”(Rom. 8:14). Yet we must always make allowance, as Oliver Cromwell used to say,“for the possibility of being mistaken.”When Luther's friends wrote despairingly of the negotiations at the Diet of Worms, he replied from Coburg that he had been looking up at the night sky, spangled and studded with stars, and had found no pillars to hold them up. And yet they did not fall. God needs no props for his stars and planets. He hangs them on nothing. So, in the working of God's providence, the unseen is prop enough for the seen. Henry Drummond, Life, 127—“To find out God's will: 1. Pray. 2. Think. 3. Talk to wise people, but do not regard their decision as final. 4. Beware of the bias of your own will, but do not be too much afraid of it (God never unnecessarily thwarts a man's nature and likings, and it is a mistake to think that his will is always in the line of the disagreeable). 5. Meantime, do the next thing (for doing God's will in small things is the best preparation for knowing it in great things). 6. When decision and action are necessary, go ahead. 7. Never reconsider the decision when it is finally acted on; and 8. You will probably not find out until afterwards, perhaps long afterwards, that you have been led at all.”Amiel lamented that everything was left to his own responsibility and declared:“It is this thought that disgusts me with the government of my own life. To win true peace, a man needs to feel himself directed, pardoned and sustained by a supreme Power, to feel himself in the right road, at the point where God would have him be,—in harmony with God and the universe. This faith gives strength and calm. I have not got it. All that is seems to me arbitrary and fortuitous.”How much better is Wordsworth's faith, Excursion, book 4:581—“One adequate support For the calamities of mortal life Exists, one only: an assured belief That the procession of our fate, howe'er Sad or disturbed, is ordered by a Being Of infinite benevolence and power, Whose everlasting purposes embrace All accidents, converting them to good.”Mrs. Browning, De Profundis, stanza xxiii—“I praise thee while my days go on; I love thee while my days go on! Through dark and dearth, through fire and frost, With emptied arms and treasure lost, I thank thee while my days go on!”
The Christian may have a continual divine guidance. Unlike the unfaithful and unbelieving, of whom it is said, inPs. 106:13,“They waited not for his counsel,”the true believer has wisdom given him from above.Ps. 32:8—“I will instruct thee and teach thee in the way which thou shalt go”;Prov. 3:6—“In all thy ways acknowledge him, And he will direct thy paths”;Phil. 1:9—“And this I pray, that your love may abound yet more and more in knowledge and all discernment”(αἰσθήσει = spiritual discernment);James 1:5—“if any of you lacketh wisdom, let him ask of God, who giveth(τοῦ διδόντος Θεοῦ)to all liberally and upbraideth not”;John 15:15—“No longer do I call you servants; for the servant knoweth not what his lord doeth: but I have called you friends”;Col. 1:9, 10—“that ye may be filled with the knowledge of his will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding, to walk worthily of the Lord unto all pleasing.”
God's Spirit makes Providence as well as the Bible personal to us. From every page of nature, as well as of the Bible, the living God speaks to us. Tholuck:“The more we recognize in every daily occurrence God's secret inspiration, guiding and controlling us, the more will all which to others wears a common and every-day aspect prove to us a sign and a wondrous work.”Hutton, Essays:“Animals that are blind slaves of impulse, driven about by forces from within, have so to say fewer valves in their moral constitution for the entrance of divine guidance. But minds alive to every word of God give constant opportunity for his interference with suggestions that may alter the course of their lives. The higher the mind, the more it glides into the region of providential control. God turns the good by the slightest breath of thought.”So the Christian hymn,“Guide me, O thou great Jehovah!”likens God's leading of the believer to that of Israel by the pillar of fire and cloud; and Paul in his dungeon calls himself“the prisoner of Christ Jesus”(Eph. 3:1). Affliction is the discipline of God's providence. Greek proverb:“He who does not get thrashed, does not get educated.”On God's Leadings, see A. H. Strong, Philosophy and Religion, 560-562.
Abraham“went out, not knowing whither he went”(Heb. 11:8). Not till he reached Canaan did he know the place of his destination. Like a child he placed his hand in the hand of his unseen Father, to be led whither he himself knew not. We often have guidance without discernment of that guidance.Is. 42:16—“I will bring the blind by a way that they know not; in paths that they know not will I lead them.”So we act more wisely than we ourselves understand, and afterwards look back with astonishment to see what we have been able to accomplish. Emerson:“Himself from God he could not free; He builded better than he knew.”Disappointments? Ah, you make a mistake in the spelling; the D should be an H: His appointments. Melanchthon:“Quem poetæ fortunam, nos Deum appellamus.”Chinese proverb:“The good God never smites with both hands.”“Tact is a sort of psychical automatism”(Ladd). There is a Christian tact which is rarely at fault, because its possessor is“led by the Spirit of God”(Rom. 8:14). Yet we must always make allowance, as Oliver Cromwell used to say,“for the possibility of being mistaken.”
When Luther's friends wrote despairingly of the negotiations at the Diet of Worms, he replied from Coburg that he had been looking up at the night sky, spangled and studded with stars, and had found no pillars to hold them up. And yet they did not fall. God needs no props for his stars and planets. He hangs them on nothing. So, in the working of God's providence, the unseen is prop enough for the seen. Henry Drummond, Life, 127—“To find out God's will: 1. Pray. 2. Think. 3. Talk to wise people, but do not regard their decision as final. 4. Beware of the bias of your own will, but do not be too much afraid of it (God never unnecessarily thwarts a man's nature and likings, and it is a mistake to think that his will is always in the line of the disagreeable). 5. Meantime, do the next thing (for doing God's will in small things is the best preparation for knowing it in great things). 6. When decision and action are necessary, go ahead. 7. Never reconsider the decision when it is finally acted on; and 8. You will probably not find out until afterwards, perhaps long afterwards, that you have been led at all.”
Amiel lamented that everything was left to his own responsibility and declared:“It is this thought that disgusts me with the government of my own life. To win true peace, a man needs to feel himself directed, pardoned and sustained by a supreme Power, to feel himself in the right road, at the point where God would have him be,—in harmony with God and the universe. This faith gives strength and calm. I have not got it. All that is seems to me arbitrary and fortuitous.”How much better is Wordsworth's faith, Excursion, book 4:581—“One adequate support For the calamities of mortal life Exists, one only: an assured belief That the procession of our fate, howe'er Sad or disturbed, is ordered by a Being Of infinite benevolence and power, Whose everlasting purposes embrace All accidents, converting them to good.”Mrs. Browning, De Profundis, stanza xxiii—“I praise thee while my days go on; I love thee while my days go on! Through dark and dearth, through fire and frost, With emptied arms and treasure lost, I thank thee while my days go on!”
4. To the evil acts of free agents.(a) Here we must distinguish between the natural agency and the moral agency of God, or between acts of permissive providence and acts of efficient causation. We are ever to remember that God neither works evil, nor causes his creatures to work evil. All sin is chargeable to the self-will and perversity of the creature; to declare God the author of it is the greatest of blasphemies.Bp. Wordsworth:“Godforeseesevil deeds, but neverforcesthem.”“God does not cause sin, any more than the rider of a limping horse causes the limping.”Nor can it be said that Satan is the author of man's sin. Man's powers are his own. Not Satan, but the man himself, gives the wrong application to these powers. Not the cause, but the occasion, of sin is in the tempter; the cause is in the evil will which yields to his persuasions.(b) But while man makes up his evil decision independently of God, God does, by his natural agency, order the method in which this inward evil shall express itself, by limiting it in time, place, and measure, or by guiding it to the end which his wisdom and love, and not man's intent, has[pg 442]set. In all this, however, God only allows sin to develop itself after its own nature, so that it may be known, abhorred, and if possible overcome and forsaken.Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 2:272-284—“Judas's treachery works the reconciliation of the world, and Israel's apostasy the salvation of the Gentiles.... God smooths the path of the sinner, and gives him chance for the outbreak of the evil, like a wise physician who draws to the surface of the body the disease that has been raging within, in order that it may be cured, if possible, by mild means, or, if not, may be removed by the knife.”Christianity rises in spite of, nay, in consequence of opposition, like a kite against the wind. When Christ has used the sword with which he has girded himself, as he used Cyrus and the Assyrian, he breaks it and throws it away. He turns the world upside down that he may get it right side up. He makes use of every member of society, as the locomotive uses every cog. The sufferings of the martyrs add to the number of the church; the worship of relics stimulates the Crusades; the worship of the saints leads to miracle plays and to the modern drama; the worship of images helps modern art; monasticism, scholasticism, the Papacy, even sceptical and destructive criticism stir up defenders of the faith. Shakespeare, Richard III, 5:1—“Thus doth he force the swords of wicked men To turn their own points on their masters' bosoms”; Hamlet, 1:2—“Foul deeds will rise, though all the earth o'erwhelm them, to men's eyes”; Macbeth, 1:7—“Even handed justice Commends the ingredients of the poisoned chalice To our own lips.”The Emperor of Germany went to Paris incognito and returned, thinking that no one had known of his absence. But at every step, going and coming, he was surrounded by detectives who saw that no harm came to him. The swallow drove again and again at the little struggling moth, but there was a plate glass window between them which neither one of them knew. Charles Darwin put his cheek against the plate glass of the cobra's cage, but could not keep himself from starting when the cobra struck. Tacitus, Annales, 14:5—“Noctem sideribus illustrem, quasi convinsendum ad scelus, dii præbuere”—“a night brilliant with stars, as if for the purpose of proving the crime, was granted by the gods.”See F. A. Noble, Our Redemption, 59-76, on the self-registry and self-disclosure of sin, with quotation from Daniel Webster's speech in the case of Knapp at Salem:“It must be confessed. It will be confessed. There is no refuge from confession but suicide, and suicide is confession.”(c) In cases of persistent iniquity, God's providence still compels the sinner to accomplish the design with which he and all things have been created, namely, the manifestation of God's holiness. Even though he struggle against God's plan, yet he must by his very resistance serve it. His sin is made its own detector, judge, and tormentor. His character and doom are made a warning to others. Refusing to glorify God in his salvation, he is made to glorify God in his destruction.Is. 10:5, 7—“Ho Assyrian, the rod of mine anger, the staff in whose hand is mine indignation!... Howbeit, he meaneth not so.”Charles Kingsley, Two Years Ago:“He [Treluddra] is one of those base natures, whom fact only lashes into greater fury,—a Pharaoh, whose heart the Lord himself can only harden”—here we would add the qualification:“consistently with the limits which he has set to the operations of his grace.”Pharaoh's ordering the destruction of the Israelitish children (Ex. 1:16) was made the means of putting Moses under royal protection, of training him for his future work, and finally of rescuing the whole nation whose sons Pharaoh sought to destroy. So God brings good out of evil; see Tyler, Theology of Greek Poets, 28-35. Emerson:“My will fulfilled shall be, For in daylight as in dark My thunderbolt has eyes to see His way home to the mark.”See also Edwards, Works, 4:300-312.Col. 2:15—“having stripped off from himself the principalities and the powers”—the hosts of evil spirits that swarmed upon him in their final onset—“he made a show of them openly, triumphing over them in it,”i. e., in the cross, thus turning their evil into a means of good. Royce, Spirit of Modern Philosophy, 443,—“Love, seeking for absolute evil, is like an electric light engaged in searching for a shadow,—when Love gets there, the shadow has disappeared.”But this means, not that all thingsaregood, but that“all things work together[pg 443]for good”(Rom. 8:28)—God overruling for good that which in itself is only evil. John Wesley:“God buries his workmen, but carries on his work.”Sermon on“The Devil's Mistakes”: Satan thought he could overcome Christ in the wilderness, in the garden, on the cross. He triumphed when he cast Paul into prison. But the cross was to Christ a lifting up, that should draw all men to him (John 12:32), and Paul's imprisonment furnished his epistles to the New Testament.“It is one of the wonders of divine love that even our blemishes and sins God will take when we truly repent of them and give them into his hands, and will in some way make them to be blessings. A friend once showed Ruskin a costly handkerchief on which a blot of ink had been made.‘Nothing can be done with that,’the friend said, thinking the handkerchief worthless and ruined now. Ruskin carried it away with him, and after a time sent it back to his friend. In a most skilful and artistic way, he had made a fine design in India ink, using the blot as its basis. Instead of being ruined, the handkerchief was made far more beautiful and valuable. So God takes the blots and stains upon our lives, the disfiguring blemishes, when we commit them to him, and by his marvellous grace changes them into marks of beauty. David's grievous sin was not only forgiven, but was made a transforming power in his life. Peter's pitiful fall became a step upward through his Lord's forgiveness and gentle dealing.”So“men may rise on stepping stones Of their dead selves to higher things”(Tennyson, In Memoriam, I).
(a) Here we must distinguish between the natural agency and the moral agency of God, or between acts of permissive providence and acts of efficient causation. We are ever to remember that God neither works evil, nor causes his creatures to work evil. All sin is chargeable to the self-will and perversity of the creature; to declare God the author of it is the greatest of blasphemies.
Bp. Wordsworth:“Godforeseesevil deeds, but neverforcesthem.”“God does not cause sin, any more than the rider of a limping horse causes the limping.”Nor can it be said that Satan is the author of man's sin. Man's powers are his own. Not Satan, but the man himself, gives the wrong application to these powers. Not the cause, but the occasion, of sin is in the tempter; the cause is in the evil will which yields to his persuasions.
Bp. Wordsworth:“Godforeseesevil deeds, but neverforcesthem.”“God does not cause sin, any more than the rider of a limping horse causes the limping.”Nor can it be said that Satan is the author of man's sin. Man's powers are his own. Not Satan, but the man himself, gives the wrong application to these powers. Not the cause, but the occasion, of sin is in the tempter; the cause is in the evil will which yields to his persuasions.
(b) But while man makes up his evil decision independently of God, God does, by his natural agency, order the method in which this inward evil shall express itself, by limiting it in time, place, and measure, or by guiding it to the end which his wisdom and love, and not man's intent, has[pg 442]set. In all this, however, God only allows sin to develop itself after its own nature, so that it may be known, abhorred, and if possible overcome and forsaken.
Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 2:272-284—“Judas's treachery works the reconciliation of the world, and Israel's apostasy the salvation of the Gentiles.... God smooths the path of the sinner, and gives him chance for the outbreak of the evil, like a wise physician who draws to the surface of the body the disease that has been raging within, in order that it may be cured, if possible, by mild means, or, if not, may be removed by the knife.”Christianity rises in spite of, nay, in consequence of opposition, like a kite against the wind. When Christ has used the sword with which he has girded himself, as he used Cyrus and the Assyrian, he breaks it and throws it away. He turns the world upside down that he may get it right side up. He makes use of every member of society, as the locomotive uses every cog. The sufferings of the martyrs add to the number of the church; the worship of relics stimulates the Crusades; the worship of the saints leads to miracle plays and to the modern drama; the worship of images helps modern art; monasticism, scholasticism, the Papacy, even sceptical and destructive criticism stir up defenders of the faith. Shakespeare, Richard III, 5:1—“Thus doth he force the swords of wicked men To turn their own points on their masters' bosoms”; Hamlet, 1:2—“Foul deeds will rise, though all the earth o'erwhelm them, to men's eyes”; Macbeth, 1:7—“Even handed justice Commends the ingredients of the poisoned chalice To our own lips.”The Emperor of Germany went to Paris incognito and returned, thinking that no one had known of his absence. But at every step, going and coming, he was surrounded by detectives who saw that no harm came to him. The swallow drove again and again at the little struggling moth, but there was a plate glass window between them which neither one of them knew. Charles Darwin put his cheek against the plate glass of the cobra's cage, but could not keep himself from starting when the cobra struck. Tacitus, Annales, 14:5—“Noctem sideribus illustrem, quasi convinsendum ad scelus, dii præbuere”—“a night brilliant with stars, as if for the purpose of proving the crime, was granted by the gods.”See F. A. Noble, Our Redemption, 59-76, on the self-registry and self-disclosure of sin, with quotation from Daniel Webster's speech in the case of Knapp at Salem:“It must be confessed. It will be confessed. There is no refuge from confession but suicide, and suicide is confession.”
Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 2:272-284—“Judas's treachery works the reconciliation of the world, and Israel's apostasy the salvation of the Gentiles.... God smooths the path of the sinner, and gives him chance for the outbreak of the evil, like a wise physician who draws to the surface of the body the disease that has been raging within, in order that it may be cured, if possible, by mild means, or, if not, may be removed by the knife.”
Christianity rises in spite of, nay, in consequence of opposition, like a kite against the wind. When Christ has used the sword with which he has girded himself, as he used Cyrus and the Assyrian, he breaks it and throws it away. He turns the world upside down that he may get it right side up. He makes use of every member of society, as the locomotive uses every cog. The sufferings of the martyrs add to the number of the church; the worship of relics stimulates the Crusades; the worship of the saints leads to miracle plays and to the modern drama; the worship of images helps modern art; monasticism, scholasticism, the Papacy, even sceptical and destructive criticism stir up defenders of the faith. Shakespeare, Richard III, 5:1—“Thus doth he force the swords of wicked men To turn their own points on their masters' bosoms”; Hamlet, 1:2—“Foul deeds will rise, though all the earth o'erwhelm them, to men's eyes”; Macbeth, 1:7—“Even handed justice Commends the ingredients of the poisoned chalice To our own lips.”
The Emperor of Germany went to Paris incognito and returned, thinking that no one had known of his absence. But at every step, going and coming, he was surrounded by detectives who saw that no harm came to him. The swallow drove again and again at the little struggling moth, but there was a plate glass window between them which neither one of them knew. Charles Darwin put his cheek against the plate glass of the cobra's cage, but could not keep himself from starting when the cobra struck. Tacitus, Annales, 14:5—“Noctem sideribus illustrem, quasi convinsendum ad scelus, dii præbuere”—“a night brilliant with stars, as if for the purpose of proving the crime, was granted by the gods.”See F. A. Noble, Our Redemption, 59-76, on the self-registry and self-disclosure of sin, with quotation from Daniel Webster's speech in the case of Knapp at Salem:“It must be confessed. It will be confessed. There is no refuge from confession but suicide, and suicide is confession.”
(c) In cases of persistent iniquity, God's providence still compels the sinner to accomplish the design with which he and all things have been created, namely, the manifestation of God's holiness. Even though he struggle against God's plan, yet he must by his very resistance serve it. His sin is made its own detector, judge, and tormentor. His character and doom are made a warning to others. Refusing to glorify God in his salvation, he is made to glorify God in his destruction.
Is. 10:5, 7—“Ho Assyrian, the rod of mine anger, the staff in whose hand is mine indignation!... Howbeit, he meaneth not so.”Charles Kingsley, Two Years Ago:“He [Treluddra] is one of those base natures, whom fact only lashes into greater fury,—a Pharaoh, whose heart the Lord himself can only harden”—here we would add the qualification:“consistently with the limits which he has set to the operations of his grace.”Pharaoh's ordering the destruction of the Israelitish children (Ex. 1:16) was made the means of putting Moses under royal protection, of training him for his future work, and finally of rescuing the whole nation whose sons Pharaoh sought to destroy. So God brings good out of evil; see Tyler, Theology of Greek Poets, 28-35. Emerson:“My will fulfilled shall be, For in daylight as in dark My thunderbolt has eyes to see His way home to the mark.”See also Edwards, Works, 4:300-312.Col. 2:15—“having stripped off from himself the principalities and the powers”—the hosts of evil spirits that swarmed upon him in their final onset—“he made a show of them openly, triumphing over them in it,”i. e., in the cross, thus turning their evil into a means of good. Royce, Spirit of Modern Philosophy, 443,—“Love, seeking for absolute evil, is like an electric light engaged in searching for a shadow,—when Love gets there, the shadow has disappeared.”But this means, not that all thingsaregood, but that“all things work together[pg 443]for good”(Rom. 8:28)—God overruling for good that which in itself is only evil. John Wesley:“God buries his workmen, but carries on his work.”Sermon on“The Devil's Mistakes”: Satan thought he could overcome Christ in the wilderness, in the garden, on the cross. He triumphed when he cast Paul into prison. But the cross was to Christ a lifting up, that should draw all men to him (John 12:32), and Paul's imprisonment furnished his epistles to the New Testament.“It is one of the wonders of divine love that even our blemishes and sins God will take when we truly repent of them and give them into his hands, and will in some way make them to be blessings. A friend once showed Ruskin a costly handkerchief on which a blot of ink had been made.‘Nothing can be done with that,’the friend said, thinking the handkerchief worthless and ruined now. Ruskin carried it away with him, and after a time sent it back to his friend. In a most skilful and artistic way, he had made a fine design in India ink, using the blot as its basis. Instead of being ruined, the handkerchief was made far more beautiful and valuable. So God takes the blots and stains upon our lives, the disfiguring blemishes, when we commit them to him, and by his marvellous grace changes them into marks of beauty. David's grievous sin was not only forgiven, but was made a transforming power in his life. Peter's pitiful fall became a step upward through his Lord's forgiveness and gentle dealing.”So“men may rise on stepping stones Of their dead selves to higher things”(Tennyson, In Memoriam, I).
Is. 10:5, 7—“Ho Assyrian, the rod of mine anger, the staff in whose hand is mine indignation!... Howbeit, he meaneth not so.”Charles Kingsley, Two Years Ago:“He [Treluddra] is one of those base natures, whom fact only lashes into greater fury,—a Pharaoh, whose heart the Lord himself can only harden”—here we would add the qualification:“consistently with the limits which he has set to the operations of his grace.”Pharaoh's ordering the destruction of the Israelitish children (Ex. 1:16) was made the means of putting Moses under royal protection, of training him for his future work, and finally of rescuing the whole nation whose sons Pharaoh sought to destroy. So God brings good out of evil; see Tyler, Theology of Greek Poets, 28-35. Emerson:“My will fulfilled shall be, For in daylight as in dark My thunderbolt has eyes to see His way home to the mark.”See also Edwards, Works, 4:300-312.
Col. 2:15—“having stripped off from himself the principalities and the powers”—the hosts of evil spirits that swarmed upon him in their final onset—“he made a show of them openly, triumphing over them in it,”i. e., in the cross, thus turning their evil into a means of good. Royce, Spirit of Modern Philosophy, 443,—“Love, seeking for absolute evil, is like an electric light engaged in searching for a shadow,—when Love gets there, the shadow has disappeared.”But this means, not that all thingsaregood, but that“all things work together[pg 443]for good”(Rom. 8:28)—God overruling for good that which in itself is only evil. John Wesley:“God buries his workmen, but carries on his work.”Sermon on“The Devil's Mistakes”: Satan thought he could overcome Christ in the wilderness, in the garden, on the cross. He triumphed when he cast Paul into prison. But the cross was to Christ a lifting up, that should draw all men to him (John 12:32), and Paul's imprisonment furnished his epistles to the New Testament.
“It is one of the wonders of divine love that even our blemishes and sins God will take when we truly repent of them and give them into his hands, and will in some way make them to be blessings. A friend once showed Ruskin a costly handkerchief on which a blot of ink had been made.‘Nothing can be done with that,’the friend said, thinking the handkerchief worthless and ruined now. Ruskin carried it away with him, and after a time sent it back to his friend. In a most skilful and artistic way, he had made a fine design in India ink, using the blot as its basis. Instead of being ruined, the handkerchief was made far more beautiful and valuable. So God takes the blots and stains upon our lives, the disfiguring blemishes, when we commit them to him, and by his marvellous grace changes them into marks of beauty. David's grievous sin was not only forgiven, but was made a transforming power in his life. Peter's pitiful fall became a step upward through his Lord's forgiveness and gentle dealing.”So“men may rise on stepping stones Of their dead selves to higher things”(Tennyson, In Memoriam, I).