Section III.—Providence.I. Definition of Providence.Providence is that continuous agency of God by which he makes all the events of the physical and moral universe fulfill the original design with which he created it.As Creation explains the existence of the universe, and as Preservation explains its continuance, so Providence explains its evolution and progress.In explanation notice:(a) Providence is not to be taken merely in its etymological sense offoreseeing. It isforseeing also, or a positive agency in connection with all the events of history.(b) Providence is to be distinguished from preservation. While preservation is a maintenance of the existence and powers of created things, providence is an actual care and control of them.(c) Since the original plan of God is all-comprehending, the providence which executes the plan is all-comprehending also, embracing within its scope things small and great, and exercising care over individuals as well as over classes.(d) In respect to the good acts of men, providence embraces all those natural influences of birth and surroundings which prepare men for the operation of God's word and Spirit, and which constitute motives to obedience.(e) In respect to the evil acts of men, providence is never the efficient cause of sin, but is by turns preventive, permissive, directive, and determinative.(f) Since Christ is the only revealer of God, and he is the medium of every divine activity, providence is to be regarded as the work of Christ; see 1 Cor. 8:6—“one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things”;cf.John 5:17—“My Father worketh even until now, and I work.”The Germans have the wordFürsehung, forseeing, looking out for, as well as the wordVorsehung, foreseeing, seeing beforehand. Our word“providence”embraces the meanings of both these words. On the general subject of providence, see Philippi,[pg 420]Glaubenslehre, 2:272-284; Calvin, Institutes, 1:182-219; Dick, Theology, 1:416-446; Hodge, Syst. Theol., 1:581-616; Bib. Sac., 12:179; 21:584; 26:315; 30:593; N. W. Taylor, Moral Government, 2:294-326.Providence is God's attention concentrated everywhere. His care is microscopic as well as telescopic. Robert Browning, Pippa Passes,ad finem:“All service is the same with God—With God, whose puppets, best and worst, Are we: there is no last nor first.”Canon Farrar:“In one chapter of the Koran is the story how Gabriel, as he waited by the gates of gold, was sent by God to earth to do two things. One was to prevent king Solomon from the sin of forgetting the hour of prayer in exultation over his royal steeds; the other to help a little yellow ant on the slope of Ararat, which had grown weary in getting food for its nest, and which would otherwise perish in the rain. To Gabriel the one behest seemed just as kingly as the other, since God had ordered it.‘Silently he left The Presence, and prevented the king's sin, And holp the little ant at entering in.’‘Nothing is too high or low, Too mean or mighty, if God wills it so.’”Yet a preacher began his sermon on Mat. 10:30—“The very hairs of your head are are all numbered”—by saying:“Why, some of you, my hearers, do not believe that even your heads are all numbered!”A modern prophet of unbelief in God's providence is William Watson. In his poem entitled The Unknown God, we read:“When overarched by gorgeous night, I wave my trivial self away; When all I was to all men's sight Shares the erasure of the day: Then do I cast my cumbering load, Then do I gain a sense of God.”Then he likens the God of the Old Testament to Odin and Zeus, and continues:“O streaming worlds, O crowded sky, O life, and mine own soul's abyss, Myself am scarce so small that I Should bow to Deity like this! This my Begetter? This was what Man in his violent youth begot. The God I know of I shall ne'er Know, though he dwells exceeding nigh. Raise thou the stone and find me there. Cleave thou the wood and there am I. Yea, in my flesh his Spirit doth flow, Too near, too far, for me to know. Whate'er my deeds, I am not sure That I can pleasure him or vex: I, that must use a speech so poor It narrows the Supreme with sex. Notes he the good or ill in man? To hope he cares is all I can. I hope with fear. For did I trust This vision granted me at birth, The sire of heaven would seem less just Than many a faulty son of earth. And so he seems indeed! But then, I trust it not, this bounded ken. And dreaming much, I never dare To dream that in my prisoned soul The flutter of a trembling prayer Can move the Mind that is the Whole. Though kneeling nations watch and yearn, Does the primeval Purpose turn? Best by remembering God, say some. We keep our high imperial lot. Fortune, I fear, hath oftenest come When we forgot—when we forgot! A lovelier faith their happier crown, But history laughs and weeps it down: Know they not well how seven times seven, Wronging our mighty arms with rust, We dared not do the work of heaven, Lest heaven should hurl us in the dust? The work of heaven! 'Tis waiting still The sanction of the heavenly will. Unmeet to be profaned by praise Is he whose coils the world enfold; The God on whom I ever gaze, The God I never once behold: Above the cloud, above the clod, The unknown God, the unknown God.”In pleasing contrast to William Watson's Unknown God, is the God of Rudyard Kipling's Recessional:“God of our fathers, known of old—Lord of our far-flung battle-line—Beneath whose awful hand we hold Dominion over palm and pine—Lord God of hosts, be with us yet, Lest we forget—lest we forget! The tumult and the shouting dies—The captains and the kings depart—Still stands thine ancient Sacrifice, An humble and a contrite heart. Lord God of hosts, be with us yet. Lest we forget—lest we forget! Far-called our navies melt away—On dune and headland sinks the fire—So, all our pomp of yesterday Is one with Nineveh and Tyre! Judge of the nations, spare us yet, Lest we forget—lest we forget! If, drunk with sight of power, we loose Wild tongues that have not thee in awe—Such boasting as the Gentiles use, Or lesser breeds without the Law—Lord God of hosts, be with us yet, Lest we forget—lest we forget! For heathen heart that puts her trust In reeking tube and iron shard—All valiant dust that builds on dust, And guarding calls not thee to guard—For frantic boast and foolish word, Thy mercy on thy people, Lord!”These problems of God's providential dealings are intelligible only when we consider that Christ is the revealer of God, and that his suffering for sin opens to us the heart of God. All history is the progressive manifestation of Christ's holiness and love, and in the cross we have the key that unlocks the secret of the universe. With the cross in view, we can believe that Love rules over all, and that“all things work together for good to them that love God.”(Rom. 8:28).[pg 421]II. Proof of the Doctrine of Providence.1. Scriptural Proof.The Scripture witnesses toA. A general providential government and control (a) over the universe at large; (b) over the physical world; (c) over the brute creation; (d) over the affairs of nations; (e) over man's birth and lot in life; (f) over the outward successes and failures of men's lives; (g) over things seemingly accidental or insignificant; (h) in the protection of the righteous; (i) in the supply of the wants of God's people; (j) in the arrangement of answers to prayer; (k) in the exposure and punishment of the wicked.(a)Ps. 103:19—“his kingdom ruleth over all”;Dan. 4:35—“doeth according to his will in the army of heaven, and among the inhabitants of the earth”;Eph. 1:11—“worketh all things after the counsel of his will.”(b)Job 37:5, 10—“God thundereth ... By the breath of God ice is given”;Ps. 104:14—“causeth the grass to grow for the cattle”;135:6, 7—“Whatsoever Jehovah pleased, that hath he done, In heaven and in earth, in the seas and in all deeps ... vapors ... lightnings ... wind”;Mat. 5:45—“maketh his sun to rise ... sendeth rain”;Ps. 104:16—“The trees of Jehovah are filled”—are planted and tended by God as carefully as those which come under human cultivation;cf.Mat. 6:30—“if God so clothe the grass of the field.”(c)Ps. 104:21, 28—“young lions roar ... seek their food from God ... that thou givest them they gather”;Mat. 6:26—“birds of the heaven ... your heavenly Father feedeth them”;10:29—“two sparrows ... not one of them shall fall on the ground without your Father.”(d)Job 12:23—“He increaseth the nations, and he destroyeth them: He enlargeth the nations, and he leadeth them captive”;Ps. 22:28—“the kingdom is Jehovah's; And he is the ruler over the nations”;66:7—“He ruleth by his might for ever; His eyes observe the nations”;Acts 17:26—“made of one every nation of men to dwell on all the face of the earth, having determined their appointed seasons, and the bounds of their habitation”(instance Palestine, Greece, England).(e)1 Sam. 16:1—“fill thy horn with oil, and go: I will send thee to Jesse the Bethlehemite; for I have provided me a king among his sons”;Ps. 139:16—“Thine eyes did see mine unformed substance, And in thy book were all my members written”;Is. 45:5—“I will gird thee, though thou hast not known me”;Jer. 1:5—“Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee ... sanctified thee ... appointed thee”;Gal. 1:15, 16—“God, who separated me, even from my mother's womb, and called me through his grace, to reveal his Son in me, that I might preach him among the Gentiles.”(f)Ps. 75:6, 7—“neither from the east, nor from the west, Nor yet from the south cometh lifting up. But God is the judge, He putteth down one, and lifteth up another”;Luke 1:52—“He hath put down princes from their thrones, And hath exalted them of low degree.”(g)Prov. 16:33—“The lot is cast into the lap; But the whole disposing thereof is of Jehovah”;Mat. 10:30—“the very hairs of your head are all numbered.”(h)Ps. 4:8—“In peace will I both lay me down and sleep; For thou, Jehovah, alone makest me dwell in safety”;5:12—“thou wilt compass him with favor as with a shield”;63:8—“Thy right hand upholdeth me”;121:3—“He that keepeth thee will not slumber”;Rom. 8:28—“to them that love God all things work together for good.”(i)Gen. 22:8, 14—“God will provide himself the lamb ... Jehovah-jireh”(marg.: that is,“Jehovah will see,”or“provide”);Deut. 8:3—“man doth not live by bread only, but by every thing that proceedeth out of the mouth of Jehovah doth man live”;Phil. 4:19—“my God shall supply every need of yours.”(j)Ps. 68:10—“Thou, O God, didst prepare of thy goodness for the poor”;Is. 64:4—“neither hath the eye seen a God besides thee, who worketh for him that waiteth for him”;Mat. 6:8—“your Father knoweth what things ye have need of, before ye ask him”;32, 33—“all these things shall be added unto you.”(k)Ps. 7:12, 13—“If a man turn not, he will whet his sword; He hath bent his bow and made it ready; He hath also prepared for him the instruments of death; He maketh his arrows fiery shafts”;11:6—“Upon the wicked he will rain snares; Fire and brimstone and burning wind shall be the portion of their cup.”The statements of Scripture with regard to God's providence are strikingly confirmed by recent studies in physiography. In the early stages of human development man was almost wholly subject to nature, and environment was a determining factor in his progress. This is the element of truth in Buckle's view. But Buckle ignored the fact that, as civilization advanced, ideas, at least at times, played a greater part than environment. Thermopylæ cannot be explained by climate. In the later stages of human development, nature is largely subject to man, and environment counts for comparatively little.“There shall be no Alps!”says Napoleon. Charles Kingsley:[pg 422]“The spirit of ancient tragedy was man conquered by circumstance; the spirit of modern tragedy is man conquering circumstance.”Yet many national characteristics can be attributed to physical surroundings, and so far as this is the case they are due to the ordering of God's providence. Man's need of fresh water leads him to rivers,—hence the original location of London. Commerce requires seaports,—hence New York. The need of defense leads man to bluffs and hills,—hence Jerusalem, Athens, Rome, Edinburgh. These places of defense became also places of worship and of appeal to God.Goldwin Smith, in his Lectures and Essays, maintains that national characteristics are not congenital, but are the result of environment. The greatness of Rome and the greatness of England have been due to position. The Romans owed their successes to being at first less warlike than their neighbors. They were traders in the centre of the Italian seacoast, and had to depend on discipline to make headway against marauders on the surrounding hills. Only when drawn into foreign conquest did the ascendency of the military spirit become complete, and then the military spirit brought despotism as its natural penalty. Brought into contact with varied races, Rome was led to the founding of colonies. She adopted and assimilated the nations which she conquered, and in governing them learned organization and law.Parcere subjectiswas her rule, as well asdebellare superbos. In a similiar manner Goldwin Smith maintains that the greatness of England is due to position. Britain being an island, only a bold and enterprising race could settle it. Maritime migration strengthened freedom. Insular position gave freedom from invasion. Isolation however gave rise to arrogance and self-assertion. The island became a natural centre of commerce. There is a steadiness of political progress which would have been impossible upon the continent. Yet consolidation was tardy, owing to the fact that Great Britain consists ofseveralislands. Scotland was always liberal, and Ireland foredoomed to subjection.Isaac Taylor, Spirit of Hebrew Poetry, has a valuable chapter on Palestine as the providential theatre of divine revelation. A little land, yet a sample-land of all lands, and a thoroughfare between the greatest lands of antiquity, it was fitted by God to receive and to communicate his truth. George Adam Smith's Historical Geography of the Holy Land is a repertory of information on this subject. Stanley, Life and Letters, 1:269-271, treats of Greek landscape and history. Shaler, Interpretation of Nature, sees such difference between Greek curiosity and search for causes on the one hand, and Roman indifference to scientific explanation of facts on the other, that he cannot think of the Greeks and the Romans as cognate peoples. He believes that Italy was first peopled by Etrurians, a Semitic race from Africa, and that from them the Romans descended. The Romans had as little of the spirit of the naturalist as had the Hebrews. The Jews and the Romans originated and propagated Christianity, but they had no interest in science.On God's pre-arrangement of the physical conditions of national life, striking suggestions may be found in Shaler, Nature and Man in America. Instance the settlement of Massachusetts Bay between 1629 and 1639, the only decade in which such men as John Winthrop could be found and the only one in which they actually emigrated from England. After 1639 there was too much to do at home, and with Charles II the spirit which animated the Pilgrims no longer existed in England. The colonists builded better than they knew, for though they sought a place to worship God themselves, they had no idea of giving this same religious liberty to others. R. E. Thompson, The Hand of God in American History, holds that the American Republic would long since have broken in pieces by its own weight and bulk, if the invention of steam-boat in 1807, railroad locomotive in 1829, telegraph in 1837, and telephone in 1877, had not bound the remote parts of the country together. A woman invented the reaper by combining the action of a row of scissors in cutting. This was as early as 1835. Only in 1855 the competition on the Emperor's farm at Compiègne gave supremacy to the reaper. Without it farming would have been impossible during our civil war, when our men were in the field and women and boys had to gather in the crops.B. A government and control extending to the free actions of men—(a) to men's free acts in general; (b) to the sinful acts of men also.(a)Ex. 12:36—“Jehovah gave the people favor in the sight of the Egyptians, so that they let them have what they asked. And they despoiled the Egyptians”;1 Sam. 24:18—“Jehovah had delivered me up into thy hand”(Saul to David);Ps. 33:14, 15—“He looketh forth Upon all the inhabitants of the earth, He that fashioneth the hearts of them all”(i. e., equally, one as well as another);Prov. 16:1—“The plans of the heart belong to man; But the answer of the tongue is from Jehovah”;19:21—“There are many devices in a man's heart; But the counsel of Jehovah,[pg 423]that shall stand”;20:24—“A man's goings are of Jehovah; How then can man understand his way?”21:1—“The king's heart is in the hand of Jehovah as the watercourses: He turneth it whithersoever he will”(i. e., as easily as the rivulets of the eastern fields are turned by the slightest motion of the hand or the foot of the husbandman);Jer. 10:23—“O Jehovah, I know that the way of man is not in himself; it is not in man that walketh to direct his steps”;Phil. 2:13—“it is God who worketh in you both to will and to work, for his good pleasure”;Eph. 2:10—“we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God afore prepared that we should walk in them”;James 4:13-15—“If the Lord will, we shall both live, and do this or that.”(b)2 Sam. 16:10—“because Jehovah hath said unto him[Shimei]:Curse David”;24:1—“the anger of Jehovah was kindled against Israel, and he moved David against them, saying, Go, number Israel and Judah”;Rom. 11:32—“God hath shut up all unto disobedience, that he might have mercy upon all”;2 Thess. 2:11, 12—“God sendeth them a working of error, that they should believe a lie: that they all might be judged who believed not the truth, but had pleasure in unrighteousness.”Henry Ward Beecher:“There seems to be no order in the movements of the bees of a hive, but the honey-comb shows that there was a plan in them all.”John Hunter compared his own brain to a hive in which there was a great deal of buzzing and apparent disorder, while yet a real order underlay it all.“As bees gather their stores of sweets against a time of need, but are colonized by man's superior intelligence for his own purposes, so men plan and work yet are overruled by infinite Wisdom for his own glory.”Dr. Deems:“The world is wide In Time and Tide, And God is guide: Then do not hurry. That man is blest Who does his best And leaves the rest: Then do not worry.”See Bruce, Providential Order, 183sq.; Providence in the Individual Life, 231sq.God's providence with respect to men's evil acts is described in Scripture as of four sorts:(a) Preventive,—God by his providence prevents sin which would otherwise be committed. That he thus prevents sin is to be regarded as matter, not of obligation, but of grace.Gen. 20:6—Of Abimelech:“I also withheld thee from sinning against me”;31:24—“And God came to Laban the Syrian in a dream of the night, and said unto him, Take heed to thyself that thou speak not to Jacob either good or bad”;Psalm 19:13—“Keep back thy servant also from presumptuous sins; Let them not have dominion over me”;Hosea 2:6—“Behold, I will hedge up thy way with thorns, and I will build a wall against her, that she shall not find her paths”—here the“thorns”and the“wall”may represent the restraints and sufferings by which God mercifully checks the fatal pursuit of sin (see Annotated Par. Biblein loco). Parents, government, church, traditions, customs, laws, age, disease, death, are all of them preventive influences. Man sometimes finds himself on the brink of a precipice of sin, and strong temptation hurries him on to make the fatal leap. Suddenly every nerve relaxes, all desire for the evil thing is gone, and he recoils from the fearful brink over which he was just now going to plunge. God has interfered by the voice of conscience and the Spirit. This too is a part of his preventive providence. Men at sixty years of age are eight times less likely to commit crime than at the age of twenty-five. Passion has subsided; fear of punishment has increased. The manager of a great department store, when asked what could prevent its absorbing all the trade of the city, replied:“Death!”Death certainly limits aggregations of property, and so constitutes a means of God's preventive providence. In the life of John G. Paton, the rain sent by God prevented the natives from murdering him and taking his goods.(b) Permissive,—God permits men to cherish and to manifest the evil dispositions of their hearts. God's permissive providence is simply the negative act of withholding impediments from the path of the sinner, instead of preventing his sin by the exercise of divine power. It implies no ignorance, passivity, or indulgence, but consists with hatred of the sin and determination to punish it.2 Chron. 32:31—“God left him[Hezekiah],to try him, that he might know all that was in his heart”;cf.Deut. 8:2—“that he might humble thee, to prove thee, to know what was in thine heart.”Ps. 17:13, 14—“Deliver my soul from the wicked, who is thy sword, from men who are thy hand, O Jehovah”;Ps. 81:12, 13—“So I let them go after the stubbornness of their heart, That they might walk in their own counsels. Oh that my people would hearken unto me!”Is. 53:4, 10—“Surely he hath borne our griefs.... Yet it pleased Jehovah to bruise him.”Hosea 4:17—“Ephraim[pg 424]Ephraim is joined to idols; let him alone”;Acts 14:16—“who in the generations gone by suffered all the nations to walk in their own ways”;Rom. 1:24, 28—“God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts unto uncleanness... God gave them up unto a reprobate mind, to do those things which are not fitting”;3:25—“to show his righteousness, because of the passing over of the sins done aforetime, in the forbearance of God.”To this head of permissive providence is possibly to be referred1 Sam. 18:10—“an evil spirit from God came mightily upon Saul.”As the Hebrew writers saw in second causes the operation of the great first Cause, and said:“The God of glory thundereth”(Ps. 29:3), so, because even the acts of the wicked entered into God's plan, the Hebrew writers sometimes represented God as doing what he merely permitted finite spirits to do. In2 Sam. 24:1, God moves David to number Israel, but in1 Chron. 21:1the same thing is referred to Satan. God's providence in these cases, however, may be directive as well as permissive.Tennyson, The Higher Pantheism:“God is law, say the wise; O Soul, and let us rejoice, For if he thunder by law the thunder is yet his voice.”Fisher, Nature and Method of Revelation, 56—“The clear separation of God's efficiency from God's permissive act was reserved to a later day. All emphasis was in the Old Testament laid upon the sovereign power of God.”Coleridge, in his Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit, letter II, speaks of“the habit, universal with the Hebrew doctors, of referring all excellent or extraordinary things to the great first Cause, without mention of the proximate and instrumental causes—a striking illustration of which may be found by comparing the narratives of the same events in the Psalms and in the historical books.... The distinction between the providential and the miraculous did not enter into their forms of thinking—at any rate, not into their mode of conveying their thoughts.”The woman who had been slandered rebelled when told that God had permitted it for her good; she maintained that Satan had inspired her accuser; she needed to learn that God had permitted the work of Satan.(c) Directive,—God directs the evil acts of men to ends unforeseen and unintended by the agents. When evil is in the heart and will certainly come out, God orders its flow in one direction rather than in another, so that its course can be best controlled and least harm may result. This is sometimes called overruling providence.Gen. 50:20—“as for you, ye meant evil against me; but God meant it for good, to bring to pass, as it is this day, to save much people alive”;Ps. 76:10—“the wrath of man shall praise thee: The residue of wrath shalt thou gird upon thee”—put on as an ornament—clothe thyself with it for thine own glory;Is. 10:5—“Ho Assyrian, the rod of mine anger, and the staff in whose hand is mine indignation”;John 13:27—“What thou doest, do quickly”—do in a particular way what is actually being done (Westcott, Bib. Com.,in loco);Acts 4:27, 28—“against thy holy Servant Jesus, whom thou didst anoint, both Herod and Pontius Pilate, with the Gentiles and the peoples of Israel, were gathered together, to do whatsoever thy hand and thy counsel fore-ordained to come to pass.”To this head of directive providence should probably be referred the passages with regard to Pharaoh inEx. 4:21—“I will harden his heart, and he will not let the people go”;7:13—“and Pharaoh's heart was hardened”;8:15—“he hardened his heart”—i. e., Pharaoh hardened his own heart. Here the controlling agency of God did not interfere with the liberty of Pharaoh or oblige him to sin; but in judgment for his previous cruelty and impiety God withdrew the external restraints which had hitherto kept his sin within bounds, and placed him in circumstances which would have influenced to right action a well-disposed mind, but which God foresaw would lead a disposition like Pharaoh's to the peculiar course of wickedness which he actually pursued.God hardened Pharaoh's heart, then, first, by permitting him to harden his own heart, God being the author of his sin only in the sense that he is the author of a free being who is himself the direct author of his sin; secondly, by giving to him the means of enlightenment, Pharaoh's very opportunities being perverted by him into occasions of more virulent wickedness, and good resisted being thus made to result in greater evil; thirdly, by judicially forsaking Pharaoh, when it became manifest that he would not do God's will, and thus making it morally certain, though not necessary, that he would do evil; and fourthly, by so directing Pharaoh's surroundings that his sin would manifest itself in one way rather than in another. Sin is like the lava of the volcano, which will certainly come out, but which God directs in its course down the mountain-side so that it will do least harm. The gravitation downward is due to man's evil will; the direction to this side or to that is due to God's providence. SeeRom. 9:17, 18—“For this very purpose did I raise thee up, that I might show in thee my power, and that my name might be published abroad in all the earth. So then he hath mercy on whom he will, and whom he will he hardeneth.”Thus the very passions which[pg 425]excite men to rebel against God are made completely subservient to his purposes: see Annotated Paragraph Bible, onPs. 76:10.God hardens Pharaoh's heart only after all the earlier plagues have been sent. Pharaoh had hardened his own heart before. God hardens no man's heart who has not first hardened it himself. Crane, Religion of To-morrow, 140—“Jehovah is never said to harden the heart of a good man, or of one who is set to do righteousness. It is always those who are bent on evil whom God hardens. Pharaoh hardens his own heart before the Lord is said to harden it. Nature is God, and it is the nature of human beings to harden when they resist softening influences.”The Watchman, Dec. 5, 1901:11—“God decreed to Pharaoh what Pharaoh had chosen for himself. Persistence in certain inclinations and volitions awakens within the body and soul forces which are not under the control of the will, and which drive the man on in the way he has chosen. After a time nature hardens the hearts of men to do evil.”(d) Determinative,—God determines the bounds reached by the evil passions of his creatures, and the measure of their effects. Since moral evil is a germ capable of indefinite expansion, God's determining the measure of its growth does not alter its character or involve God's complicity with the perverse wills which cherish it.Job 1:12—“And Jehovah said unto Satan, Behold, all that he hath is in thy power; only upon himself put not forth thy hand”;2:6—“Behold, he is in thy hand; only spare his life”;Ps. 124:2—“If it had not been Jehovah who was on our side, when men rose up against us; Then had they swallowed us up alive”;1 Cor. 10:13—“will not suffer you to be tempted above that ye are able; but will with the temptation make also the way of escape, that ye may be able to endure it”;2 Thess. 2:7—“For the mystery of lawlessness doth already work; only there is one that restraineth now, until he be taken out of the way”;Rev. 20:2, 3—“And he laid hold on the dragon, the old serpent, which is the Devil and Satan, and bound him for a thousand years.”Pepper, Outlines of Syst. Theol., 76—The union of God's will and man's will is“such that, while in one view all can be ascribed to God, in another all can be ascribed to the creature. But how God and the creature are united in operation is doubtless known and knowable only to God. A very dim analogy is furnished in the union of the soul and body in men. The hand retains its own physical laws, yet is obedient to the human will. This theory recognizes the veracity of consciousness in its witness to personal freedom, and yet the completeness of God's control of both the bad and the good. Free beings are ruled, but are ruled as free and in their freedom. The freedom is not sacrificed to the control. The two coëxist, each in its integrity. Any doctrine which does not allow this is false to Scripture and destructive of religion.”2. Rational proof.A. Argumentsa priorifrom the divine attributes. (a) From the immutability of God. This makes it certain that he will execute his eternal plan of the universe and its history. But the execution of this plan involves not only creation and preservation, but also providence. (b) From the benevolence of God. This renders it certain that he will care for the intelligent universe he has created. What it was worth his while to create, it is worth his while to care for. But this care is providence. (c) From the justice of God. As the source of moral law, God must assure the vindication of law by administering justice in the universe and punishing the rebellious. But this administration of justice is providence.For heathen ideas of providence, see Cicero, De Natura Deorum, 11:30, where Balbus speaks of the existence of the gods as that,“quo concesso, confitendum est eorum consilio mundum administrari.”Epictetus, sec. 41—“The principal and most important duty in religion is to possess your mind with just and becoming notions of the gods—to believe that there are such supreme beings, and that they govern and dispose of all the affairs of the world with a just and good providence.”Marcus Antoninus:“If there are no gods, or if they have no regard for human affairs, why should I desire to live in a world without gods and without a providence? But gods undoubtedly there are, and they regard human affairs.”See also Bib. Sac., 16:374. As we shall see, however, many of the heathen writers believed in a general, rather than in a particular, providence.[pg 426]On the argument for providence derived from God's benevolence, see Appleton, Works, 1:146—“Is indolence more consistent with God's majesty than action would be? The happiness of creatures is a good. Does it honor God to say that he is indifferent to that which he knows to be good and valuable? Even if the world had come into existence without his agency, it would become God's moral character to pay some attention to creatures so numerous and so susceptible to pleasure and pain, especially when he might have so great and favorable an influence on their moral condition.”John 5:17—“My Father worketh even until now, and I work”—is as applicable to providence as to preservation.The complexity of God's providential arrangements may be illustrated by Tyndall's explanation of the fact that heartsease does not grow in the neighborhood of English villages: 1. In English villages dogs run loose. 2. Where dogs run loose, cats must stay at home. 3. Where cats stay at home, field mice abound. 4. Where field mice abound, the nests of bumble-bees are destroyed. 5. Where bumble-bees' nests are destroyed, there is no fertilization of pollen. Therefore, where dogs go loose, no heartsease grows.B. Argumentsa posteriorifrom the facts of nature and of history. (a) The outward lot of individuals and nations is not wholly in their own hands, but is in many acknowledged respects subject to the disposal of a higher power. (b) The observed moral order of the world, although imperfect, cannot be accounted for without recognition of a divine providence. Vice is discouraged and virtue rewarded, in ways which are beyond the power of mere nature. There must be a governing mind and will, and this mind and will must be the mind and will of God.The birthplace of individuals and of nations, the natural powers with which they are endowed, the opportunities and immunities they enjoy, are beyond their own control. A man's destiny for time and for eternity may be practically decided for him by his birth in a Christian home, rather than in a tenement-house at the Five Points, or in a kraal of the Hottentots. Progress largely depends upon“variety of environment”(H. Spencer). But this variety of environment is in great part independent of our own efforts.“There's a Divinity that shapes our ends, Rough hew them how we will.”Shakespeare here expounds human consciousness.“Man proposes and God disposes”has become a proverb. Experience teaches that success and failure are not wholly due to us. Men often labor and lose; they consult and nothing ensues; they“embattle and are broken.”Providence is not always on the side of the heaviest battalions. Not arms but ideas have decided the fate of the world—as Xerxes found at Thermopylæ, and Napoleon at Waterloo. Great movements are generally begun without consciousness of their greatness.Cf.Is. 42:16—“I will bring the blind by a way that they know not”;1 Cor. 5:37, 38—“thou sowest ... a bare grain ... but God giveth it a body even as it pleased him.”The deed returns to the doer, and character shapes destiny. This is true in the long run. Eternity will show the truth of the maxim. But here in time a sufficient number of apparent exceptions are permitted to render possible a moral probation. If evil were always immediately followed by penalty, righteousness would have a compelling power upon the will and the highest virtue would be impossible. Job's friends accuse Job of acting upon this principle. The Hebrew children deny its truth, when they say:“But if not”—even if God does not deliver us—“we will not serve thy gods, nor worship the golden image which thou hast set up”(Dan. 3:18.)Martineau, Seat of Authority, 298—“Through some misdirection or infirmity, most of the larger agencies in history have failed to reach their own ideal, yet have accomplished revolutions greater and more beneficent; the conquests of Alexander, the empire of Rome, the Crusades, the ecclesiastical persecutions, the monastic asceticisms, the missionary zeal of Christendom, have all played a momentous part in the drama of the world, yet a part which is a surprise to each. All this shows the controlling presence of a Reason and a Will transcendent and divine.”Kidd, Social Evolution, 99, declares that the progress of the race has taken place only under conditions which have had no sanction from the reason of the great proportion of the individuals who submit to them. He concludes that a rational religion is a scientific impossibility, and that the function of religion is to provide a super-rational sanction for social progress. We prefer to say that Providence pushes the race forward even against its will.James Russell Lowell, Letters, 2:51, suggests that God's calm control of the forces[pg 427]of the universe, both physical and mental, should give us confidence when evil seems impending:“How many times have I seen the fire-engines of church and state clanging and lumbering along to put out—a false alarm! And when the heavens are cloudy, what a glare can be cast by a burning shanty!”See Sermon on Providence in Political Revolutions, in Farrar's Science and Theology, 228. On the moral order of the world, notwithstanding its imperfections, see Butler, Analogy, Bohn's ed., 98; King, in Baptist Review, 1884:202-222.
Section III.—Providence.I. Definition of Providence.Providence is that continuous agency of God by which he makes all the events of the physical and moral universe fulfill the original design with which he created it.As Creation explains the existence of the universe, and as Preservation explains its continuance, so Providence explains its evolution and progress.In explanation notice:(a) Providence is not to be taken merely in its etymological sense offoreseeing. It isforseeing also, or a positive agency in connection with all the events of history.(b) Providence is to be distinguished from preservation. While preservation is a maintenance of the existence and powers of created things, providence is an actual care and control of them.(c) Since the original plan of God is all-comprehending, the providence which executes the plan is all-comprehending also, embracing within its scope things small and great, and exercising care over individuals as well as over classes.(d) In respect to the good acts of men, providence embraces all those natural influences of birth and surroundings which prepare men for the operation of God's word and Spirit, and which constitute motives to obedience.(e) In respect to the evil acts of men, providence is never the efficient cause of sin, but is by turns preventive, permissive, directive, and determinative.(f) Since Christ is the only revealer of God, and he is the medium of every divine activity, providence is to be regarded as the work of Christ; see 1 Cor. 8:6—“one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things”;cf.John 5:17—“My Father worketh even until now, and I work.”The Germans have the wordFürsehung, forseeing, looking out for, as well as the wordVorsehung, foreseeing, seeing beforehand. Our word“providence”embraces the meanings of both these words. On the general subject of providence, see Philippi,[pg 420]Glaubenslehre, 2:272-284; Calvin, Institutes, 1:182-219; Dick, Theology, 1:416-446; Hodge, Syst. Theol., 1:581-616; Bib. Sac., 12:179; 21:584; 26:315; 30:593; N. W. Taylor, Moral Government, 2:294-326.Providence is God's attention concentrated everywhere. His care is microscopic as well as telescopic. Robert Browning, Pippa Passes,ad finem:“All service is the same with God—With God, whose puppets, best and worst, Are we: there is no last nor first.”Canon Farrar:“In one chapter of the Koran is the story how Gabriel, as he waited by the gates of gold, was sent by God to earth to do two things. One was to prevent king Solomon from the sin of forgetting the hour of prayer in exultation over his royal steeds; the other to help a little yellow ant on the slope of Ararat, which had grown weary in getting food for its nest, and which would otherwise perish in the rain. To Gabriel the one behest seemed just as kingly as the other, since God had ordered it.‘Silently he left The Presence, and prevented the king's sin, And holp the little ant at entering in.’‘Nothing is too high or low, Too mean or mighty, if God wills it so.’”Yet a preacher began his sermon on Mat. 10:30—“The very hairs of your head are are all numbered”—by saying:“Why, some of you, my hearers, do not believe that even your heads are all numbered!”A modern prophet of unbelief in God's providence is William Watson. In his poem entitled The Unknown God, we read:“When overarched by gorgeous night, I wave my trivial self away; When all I was to all men's sight Shares the erasure of the day: Then do I cast my cumbering load, Then do I gain a sense of God.”Then he likens the God of the Old Testament to Odin and Zeus, and continues:“O streaming worlds, O crowded sky, O life, and mine own soul's abyss, Myself am scarce so small that I Should bow to Deity like this! This my Begetter? This was what Man in his violent youth begot. The God I know of I shall ne'er Know, though he dwells exceeding nigh. Raise thou the stone and find me there. Cleave thou the wood and there am I. Yea, in my flesh his Spirit doth flow, Too near, too far, for me to know. Whate'er my deeds, I am not sure That I can pleasure him or vex: I, that must use a speech so poor It narrows the Supreme with sex. Notes he the good or ill in man? To hope he cares is all I can. I hope with fear. For did I trust This vision granted me at birth, The sire of heaven would seem less just Than many a faulty son of earth. And so he seems indeed! But then, I trust it not, this bounded ken. And dreaming much, I never dare To dream that in my prisoned soul The flutter of a trembling prayer Can move the Mind that is the Whole. Though kneeling nations watch and yearn, Does the primeval Purpose turn? Best by remembering God, say some. We keep our high imperial lot. Fortune, I fear, hath oftenest come When we forgot—when we forgot! A lovelier faith their happier crown, But history laughs and weeps it down: Know they not well how seven times seven, Wronging our mighty arms with rust, We dared not do the work of heaven, Lest heaven should hurl us in the dust? The work of heaven! 'Tis waiting still The sanction of the heavenly will. Unmeet to be profaned by praise Is he whose coils the world enfold; The God on whom I ever gaze, The God I never once behold: Above the cloud, above the clod, The unknown God, the unknown God.”In pleasing contrast to William Watson's Unknown God, is the God of Rudyard Kipling's Recessional:“God of our fathers, known of old—Lord of our far-flung battle-line—Beneath whose awful hand we hold Dominion over palm and pine—Lord God of hosts, be with us yet, Lest we forget—lest we forget! The tumult and the shouting dies—The captains and the kings depart—Still stands thine ancient Sacrifice, An humble and a contrite heart. Lord God of hosts, be with us yet. Lest we forget—lest we forget! Far-called our navies melt away—On dune and headland sinks the fire—So, all our pomp of yesterday Is one with Nineveh and Tyre! Judge of the nations, spare us yet, Lest we forget—lest we forget! If, drunk with sight of power, we loose Wild tongues that have not thee in awe—Such boasting as the Gentiles use, Or lesser breeds without the Law—Lord God of hosts, be with us yet, Lest we forget—lest we forget! For heathen heart that puts her trust In reeking tube and iron shard—All valiant dust that builds on dust, And guarding calls not thee to guard—For frantic boast and foolish word, Thy mercy on thy people, Lord!”These problems of God's providential dealings are intelligible only when we consider that Christ is the revealer of God, and that his suffering for sin opens to us the heart of God. All history is the progressive manifestation of Christ's holiness and love, and in the cross we have the key that unlocks the secret of the universe. With the cross in view, we can believe that Love rules over all, and that“all things work together for good to them that love God.”(Rom. 8:28).[pg 421]II. Proof of the Doctrine of Providence.1. Scriptural Proof.The Scripture witnesses toA. A general providential government and control (a) over the universe at large; (b) over the physical world; (c) over the brute creation; (d) over the affairs of nations; (e) over man's birth and lot in life; (f) over the outward successes and failures of men's lives; (g) over things seemingly accidental or insignificant; (h) in the protection of the righteous; (i) in the supply of the wants of God's people; (j) in the arrangement of answers to prayer; (k) in the exposure and punishment of the wicked.(a)Ps. 103:19—“his kingdom ruleth over all”;Dan. 4:35—“doeth according to his will in the army of heaven, and among the inhabitants of the earth”;Eph. 1:11—“worketh all things after the counsel of his will.”(b)Job 37:5, 10—“God thundereth ... By the breath of God ice is given”;Ps. 104:14—“causeth the grass to grow for the cattle”;135:6, 7—“Whatsoever Jehovah pleased, that hath he done, In heaven and in earth, in the seas and in all deeps ... vapors ... lightnings ... wind”;Mat. 5:45—“maketh his sun to rise ... sendeth rain”;Ps. 104:16—“The trees of Jehovah are filled”—are planted and tended by God as carefully as those which come under human cultivation;cf.Mat. 6:30—“if God so clothe the grass of the field.”(c)Ps. 104:21, 28—“young lions roar ... seek their food from God ... that thou givest them they gather”;Mat. 6:26—“birds of the heaven ... your heavenly Father feedeth them”;10:29—“two sparrows ... not one of them shall fall on the ground without your Father.”(d)Job 12:23—“He increaseth the nations, and he destroyeth them: He enlargeth the nations, and he leadeth them captive”;Ps. 22:28—“the kingdom is Jehovah's; And he is the ruler over the nations”;66:7—“He ruleth by his might for ever; His eyes observe the nations”;Acts 17:26—“made of one every nation of men to dwell on all the face of the earth, having determined their appointed seasons, and the bounds of their habitation”(instance Palestine, Greece, England).(e)1 Sam. 16:1—“fill thy horn with oil, and go: I will send thee to Jesse the Bethlehemite; for I have provided me a king among his sons”;Ps. 139:16—“Thine eyes did see mine unformed substance, And in thy book were all my members written”;Is. 45:5—“I will gird thee, though thou hast not known me”;Jer. 1:5—“Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee ... sanctified thee ... appointed thee”;Gal. 1:15, 16—“God, who separated me, even from my mother's womb, and called me through his grace, to reveal his Son in me, that I might preach him among the Gentiles.”(f)Ps. 75:6, 7—“neither from the east, nor from the west, Nor yet from the south cometh lifting up. But God is the judge, He putteth down one, and lifteth up another”;Luke 1:52—“He hath put down princes from their thrones, And hath exalted them of low degree.”(g)Prov. 16:33—“The lot is cast into the lap; But the whole disposing thereof is of Jehovah”;Mat. 10:30—“the very hairs of your head are all numbered.”(h)Ps. 4:8—“In peace will I both lay me down and sleep; For thou, Jehovah, alone makest me dwell in safety”;5:12—“thou wilt compass him with favor as with a shield”;63:8—“Thy right hand upholdeth me”;121:3—“He that keepeth thee will not slumber”;Rom. 8:28—“to them that love God all things work together for good.”(i)Gen. 22:8, 14—“God will provide himself the lamb ... Jehovah-jireh”(marg.: that is,“Jehovah will see,”or“provide”);Deut. 8:3—“man doth not live by bread only, but by every thing that proceedeth out of the mouth of Jehovah doth man live”;Phil. 4:19—“my God shall supply every need of yours.”(j)Ps. 68:10—“Thou, O God, didst prepare of thy goodness for the poor”;Is. 64:4—“neither hath the eye seen a God besides thee, who worketh for him that waiteth for him”;Mat. 6:8—“your Father knoweth what things ye have need of, before ye ask him”;32, 33—“all these things shall be added unto you.”(k)Ps. 7:12, 13—“If a man turn not, he will whet his sword; He hath bent his bow and made it ready; He hath also prepared for him the instruments of death; He maketh his arrows fiery shafts”;11:6—“Upon the wicked he will rain snares; Fire and brimstone and burning wind shall be the portion of their cup.”The statements of Scripture with regard to God's providence are strikingly confirmed by recent studies in physiography. In the early stages of human development man was almost wholly subject to nature, and environment was a determining factor in his progress. This is the element of truth in Buckle's view. But Buckle ignored the fact that, as civilization advanced, ideas, at least at times, played a greater part than environment. Thermopylæ cannot be explained by climate. In the later stages of human development, nature is largely subject to man, and environment counts for comparatively little.“There shall be no Alps!”says Napoleon. Charles Kingsley:[pg 422]“The spirit of ancient tragedy was man conquered by circumstance; the spirit of modern tragedy is man conquering circumstance.”Yet many national characteristics can be attributed to physical surroundings, and so far as this is the case they are due to the ordering of God's providence. Man's need of fresh water leads him to rivers,—hence the original location of London. Commerce requires seaports,—hence New York. The need of defense leads man to bluffs and hills,—hence Jerusalem, Athens, Rome, Edinburgh. These places of defense became also places of worship and of appeal to God.Goldwin Smith, in his Lectures and Essays, maintains that national characteristics are not congenital, but are the result of environment. The greatness of Rome and the greatness of England have been due to position. The Romans owed their successes to being at first less warlike than their neighbors. They were traders in the centre of the Italian seacoast, and had to depend on discipline to make headway against marauders on the surrounding hills. Only when drawn into foreign conquest did the ascendency of the military spirit become complete, and then the military spirit brought despotism as its natural penalty. Brought into contact with varied races, Rome was led to the founding of colonies. She adopted and assimilated the nations which she conquered, and in governing them learned organization and law.Parcere subjectiswas her rule, as well asdebellare superbos. In a similiar manner Goldwin Smith maintains that the greatness of England is due to position. Britain being an island, only a bold and enterprising race could settle it. Maritime migration strengthened freedom. Insular position gave freedom from invasion. Isolation however gave rise to arrogance and self-assertion. The island became a natural centre of commerce. There is a steadiness of political progress which would have been impossible upon the continent. Yet consolidation was tardy, owing to the fact that Great Britain consists ofseveralislands. Scotland was always liberal, and Ireland foredoomed to subjection.Isaac Taylor, Spirit of Hebrew Poetry, has a valuable chapter on Palestine as the providential theatre of divine revelation. A little land, yet a sample-land of all lands, and a thoroughfare between the greatest lands of antiquity, it was fitted by God to receive and to communicate his truth. George Adam Smith's Historical Geography of the Holy Land is a repertory of information on this subject. Stanley, Life and Letters, 1:269-271, treats of Greek landscape and history. Shaler, Interpretation of Nature, sees such difference between Greek curiosity and search for causes on the one hand, and Roman indifference to scientific explanation of facts on the other, that he cannot think of the Greeks and the Romans as cognate peoples. He believes that Italy was first peopled by Etrurians, a Semitic race from Africa, and that from them the Romans descended. The Romans had as little of the spirit of the naturalist as had the Hebrews. The Jews and the Romans originated and propagated Christianity, but they had no interest in science.On God's pre-arrangement of the physical conditions of national life, striking suggestions may be found in Shaler, Nature and Man in America. Instance the settlement of Massachusetts Bay between 1629 and 1639, the only decade in which such men as John Winthrop could be found and the only one in which they actually emigrated from England. After 1639 there was too much to do at home, and with Charles II the spirit which animated the Pilgrims no longer existed in England. The colonists builded better than they knew, for though they sought a place to worship God themselves, they had no idea of giving this same religious liberty to others. R. E. Thompson, The Hand of God in American History, holds that the American Republic would long since have broken in pieces by its own weight and bulk, if the invention of steam-boat in 1807, railroad locomotive in 1829, telegraph in 1837, and telephone in 1877, had not bound the remote parts of the country together. A woman invented the reaper by combining the action of a row of scissors in cutting. This was as early as 1835. Only in 1855 the competition on the Emperor's farm at Compiègne gave supremacy to the reaper. Without it farming would have been impossible during our civil war, when our men were in the field and women and boys had to gather in the crops.B. A government and control extending to the free actions of men—(a) to men's free acts in general; (b) to the sinful acts of men also.(a)Ex. 12:36—“Jehovah gave the people favor in the sight of the Egyptians, so that they let them have what they asked. And they despoiled the Egyptians”;1 Sam. 24:18—“Jehovah had delivered me up into thy hand”(Saul to David);Ps. 33:14, 15—“He looketh forth Upon all the inhabitants of the earth, He that fashioneth the hearts of them all”(i. e., equally, one as well as another);Prov. 16:1—“The plans of the heart belong to man; But the answer of the tongue is from Jehovah”;19:21—“There are many devices in a man's heart; But the counsel of Jehovah,[pg 423]that shall stand”;20:24—“A man's goings are of Jehovah; How then can man understand his way?”21:1—“The king's heart is in the hand of Jehovah as the watercourses: He turneth it whithersoever he will”(i. e., as easily as the rivulets of the eastern fields are turned by the slightest motion of the hand or the foot of the husbandman);Jer. 10:23—“O Jehovah, I know that the way of man is not in himself; it is not in man that walketh to direct his steps”;Phil. 2:13—“it is God who worketh in you both to will and to work, for his good pleasure”;Eph. 2:10—“we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God afore prepared that we should walk in them”;James 4:13-15—“If the Lord will, we shall both live, and do this or that.”(b)2 Sam. 16:10—“because Jehovah hath said unto him[Shimei]:Curse David”;24:1—“the anger of Jehovah was kindled against Israel, and he moved David against them, saying, Go, number Israel and Judah”;Rom. 11:32—“God hath shut up all unto disobedience, that he might have mercy upon all”;2 Thess. 2:11, 12—“God sendeth them a working of error, that they should believe a lie: that they all might be judged who believed not the truth, but had pleasure in unrighteousness.”Henry Ward Beecher:“There seems to be no order in the movements of the bees of a hive, but the honey-comb shows that there was a plan in them all.”John Hunter compared his own brain to a hive in which there was a great deal of buzzing and apparent disorder, while yet a real order underlay it all.“As bees gather their stores of sweets against a time of need, but are colonized by man's superior intelligence for his own purposes, so men plan and work yet are overruled by infinite Wisdom for his own glory.”Dr. Deems:“The world is wide In Time and Tide, And God is guide: Then do not hurry. That man is blest Who does his best And leaves the rest: Then do not worry.”See Bruce, Providential Order, 183sq.; Providence in the Individual Life, 231sq.God's providence with respect to men's evil acts is described in Scripture as of four sorts:(a) Preventive,—God by his providence prevents sin which would otherwise be committed. That he thus prevents sin is to be regarded as matter, not of obligation, but of grace.Gen. 20:6—Of Abimelech:“I also withheld thee from sinning against me”;31:24—“And God came to Laban the Syrian in a dream of the night, and said unto him, Take heed to thyself that thou speak not to Jacob either good or bad”;Psalm 19:13—“Keep back thy servant also from presumptuous sins; Let them not have dominion over me”;Hosea 2:6—“Behold, I will hedge up thy way with thorns, and I will build a wall against her, that she shall not find her paths”—here the“thorns”and the“wall”may represent the restraints and sufferings by which God mercifully checks the fatal pursuit of sin (see Annotated Par. Biblein loco). Parents, government, church, traditions, customs, laws, age, disease, death, are all of them preventive influences. Man sometimes finds himself on the brink of a precipice of sin, and strong temptation hurries him on to make the fatal leap. Suddenly every nerve relaxes, all desire for the evil thing is gone, and he recoils from the fearful brink over which he was just now going to plunge. God has interfered by the voice of conscience and the Spirit. This too is a part of his preventive providence. Men at sixty years of age are eight times less likely to commit crime than at the age of twenty-five. Passion has subsided; fear of punishment has increased. The manager of a great department store, when asked what could prevent its absorbing all the trade of the city, replied:“Death!”Death certainly limits aggregations of property, and so constitutes a means of God's preventive providence. In the life of John G. Paton, the rain sent by God prevented the natives from murdering him and taking his goods.(b) Permissive,—God permits men to cherish and to manifest the evil dispositions of their hearts. God's permissive providence is simply the negative act of withholding impediments from the path of the sinner, instead of preventing his sin by the exercise of divine power. It implies no ignorance, passivity, or indulgence, but consists with hatred of the sin and determination to punish it.2 Chron. 32:31—“God left him[Hezekiah],to try him, that he might know all that was in his heart”;cf.Deut. 8:2—“that he might humble thee, to prove thee, to know what was in thine heart.”Ps. 17:13, 14—“Deliver my soul from the wicked, who is thy sword, from men who are thy hand, O Jehovah”;Ps. 81:12, 13—“So I let them go after the stubbornness of their heart, That they might walk in their own counsels. Oh that my people would hearken unto me!”Is. 53:4, 10—“Surely he hath borne our griefs.... Yet it pleased Jehovah to bruise him.”Hosea 4:17—“Ephraim[pg 424]Ephraim is joined to idols; let him alone”;Acts 14:16—“who in the generations gone by suffered all the nations to walk in their own ways”;Rom. 1:24, 28—“God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts unto uncleanness... God gave them up unto a reprobate mind, to do those things which are not fitting”;3:25—“to show his righteousness, because of the passing over of the sins done aforetime, in the forbearance of God.”To this head of permissive providence is possibly to be referred1 Sam. 18:10—“an evil spirit from God came mightily upon Saul.”As the Hebrew writers saw in second causes the operation of the great first Cause, and said:“The God of glory thundereth”(Ps. 29:3), so, because even the acts of the wicked entered into God's plan, the Hebrew writers sometimes represented God as doing what he merely permitted finite spirits to do. In2 Sam. 24:1, God moves David to number Israel, but in1 Chron. 21:1the same thing is referred to Satan. God's providence in these cases, however, may be directive as well as permissive.Tennyson, The Higher Pantheism:“God is law, say the wise; O Soul, and let us rejoice, For if he thunder by law the thunder is yet his voice.”Fisher, Nature and Method of Revelation, 56—“The clear separation of God's efficiency from God's permissive act was reserved to a later day. All emphasis was in the Old Testament laid upon the sovereign power of God.”Coleridge, in his Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit, letter II, speaks of“the habit, universal with the Hebrew doctors, of referring all excellent or extraordinary things to the great first Cause, without mention of the proximate and instrumental causes—a striking illustration of which may be found by comparing the narratives of the same events in the Psalms and in the historical books.... The distinction between the providential and the miraculous did not enter into their forms of thinking—at any rate, not into their mode of conveying their thoughts.”The woman who had been slandered rebelled when told that God had permitted it for her good; she maintained that Satan had inspired her accuser; she needed to learn that God had permitted the work of Satan.(c) Directive,—God directs the evil acts of men to ends unforeseen and unintended by the agents. When evil is in the heart and will certainly come out, God orders its flow in one direction rather than in another, so that its course can be best controlled and least harm may result. This is sometimes called overruling providence.Gen. 50:20—“as for you, ye meant evil against me; but God meant it for good, to bring to pass, as it is this day, to save much people alive”;Ps. 76:10—“the wrath of man shall praise thee: The residue of wrath shalt thou gird upon thee”—put on as an ornament—clothe thyself with it for thine own glory;Is. 10:5—“Ho Assyrian, the rod of mine anger, and the staff in whose hand is mine indignation”;John 13:27—“What thou doest, do quickly”—do in a particular way what is actually being done (Westcott, Bib. Com.,in loco);Acts 4:27, 28—“against thy holy Servant Jesus, whom thou didst anoint, both Herod and Pontius Pilate, with the Gentiles and the peoples of Israel, were gathered together, to do whatsoever thy hand and thy counsel fore-ordained to come to pass.”To this head of directive providence should probably be referred the passages with regard to Pharaoh inEx. 4:21—“I will harden his heart, and he will not let the people go”;7:13—“and Pharaoh's heart was hardened”;8:15—“he hardened his heart”—i. e., Pharaoh hardened his own heart. Here the controlling agency of God did not interfere with the liberty of Pharaoh or oblige him to sin; but in judgment for his previous cruelty and impiety God withdrew the external restraints which had hitherto kept his sin within bounds, and placed him in circumstances which would have influenced to right action a well-disposed mind, but which God foresaw would lead a disposition like Pharaoh's to the peculiar course of wickedness which he actually pursued.God hardened Pharaoh's heart, then, first, by permitting him to harden his own heart, God being the author of his sin only in the sense that he is the author of a free being who is himself the direct author of his sin; secondly, by giving to him the means of enlightenment, Pharaoh's very opportunities being perverted by him into occasions of more virulent wickedness, and good resisted being thus made to result in greater evil; thirdly, by judicially forsaking Pharaoh, when it became manifest that he would not do God's will, and thus making it morally certain, though not necessary, that he would do evil; and fourthly, by so directing Pharaoh's surroundings that his sin would manifest itself in one way rather than in another. Sin is like the lava of the volcano, which will certainly come out, but which God directs in its course down the mountain-side so that it will do least harm. The gravitation downward is due to man's evil will; the direction to this side or to that is due to God's providence. SeeRom. 9:17, 18—“For this very purpose did I raise thee up, that I might show in thee my power, and that my name might be published abroad in all the earth. So then he hath mercy on whom he will, and whom he will he hardeneth.”Thus the very passions which[pg 425]excite men to rebel against God are made completely subservient to his purposes: see Annotated Paragraph Bible, onPs. 76:10.God hardens Pharaoh's heart only after all the earlier plagues have been sent. Pharaoh had hardened his own heart before. God hardens no man's heart who has not first hardened it himself. Crane, Religion of To-morrow, 140—“Jehovah is never said to harden the heart of a good man, or of one who is set to do righteousness. It is always those who are bent on evil whom God hardens. Pharaoh hardens his own heart before the Lord is said to harden it. Nature is God, and it is the nature of human beings to harden when they resist softening influences.”The Watchman, Dec. 5, 1901:11—“God decreed to Pharaoh what Pharaoh had chosen for himself. Persistence in certain inclinations and volitions awakens within the body and soul forces which are not under the control of the will, and which drive the man on in the way he has chosen. After a time nature hardens the hearts of men to do evil.”(d) Determinative,—God determines the bounds reached by the evil passions of his creatures, and the measure of their effects. Since moral evil is a germ capable of indefinite expansion, God's determining the measure of its growth does not alter its character or involve God's complicity with the perverse wills which cherish it.Job 1:12—“And Jehovah said unto Satan, Behold, all that he hath is in thy power; only upon himself put not forth thy hand”;2:6—“Behold, he is in thy hand; only spare his life”;Ps. 124:2—“If it had not been Jehovah who was on our side, when men rose up against us; Then had they swallowed us up alive”;1 Cor. 10:13—“will not suffer you to be tempted above that ye are able; but will with the temptation make also the way of escape, that ye may be able to endure it”;2 Thess. 2:7—“For the mystery of lawlessness doth already work; only there is one that restraineth now, until he be taken out of the way”;Rev. 20:2, 3—“And he laid hold on the dragon, the old serpent, which is the Devil and Satan, and bound him for a thousand years.”Pepper, Outlines of Syst. Theol., 76—The union of God's will and man's will is“such that, while in one view all can be ascribed to God, in another all can be ascribed to the creature. But how God and the creature are united in operation is doubtless known and knowable only to God. A very dim analogy is furnished in the union of the soul and body in men. The hand retains its own physical laws, yet is obedient to the human will. This theory recognizes the veracity of consciousness in its witness to personal freedom, and yet the completeness of God's control of both the bad and the good. Free beings are ruled, but are ruled as free and in their freedom. The freedom is not sacrificed to the control. The two coëxist, each in its integrity. Any doctrine which does not allow this is false to Scripture and destructive of religion.”2. Rational proof.A. Argumentsa priorifrom the divine attributes. (a) From the immutability of God. This makes it certain that he will execute his eternal plan of the universe and its history. But the execution of this plan involves not only creation and preservation, but also providence. (b) From the benevolence of God. This renders it certain that he will care for the intelligent universe he has created. What it was worth his while to create, it is worth his while to care for. But this care is providence. (c) From the justice of God. As the source of moral law, God must assure the vindication of law by administering justice in the universe and punishing the rebellious. But this administration of justice is providence.For heathen ideas of providence, see Cicero, De Natura Deorum, 11:30, where Balbus speaks of the existence of the gods as that,“quo concesso, confitendum est eorum consilio mundum administrari.”Epictetus, sec. 41—“The principal and most important duty in religion is to possess your mind with just and becoming notions of the gods—to believe that there are such supreme beings, and that they govern and dispose of all the affairs of the world with a just and good providence.”Marcus Antoninus:“If there are no gods, or if they have no regard for human affairs, why should I desire to live in a world without gods and without a providence? But gods undoubtedly there are, and they regard human affairs.”See also Bib. Sac., 16:374. As we shall see, however, many of the heathen writers believed in a general, rather than in a particular, providence.[pg 426]On the argument for providence derived from God's benevolence, see Appleton, Works, 1:146—“Is indolence more consistent with God's majesty than action would be? The happiness of creatures is a good. Does it honor God to say that he is indifferent to that which he knows to be good and valuable? Even if the world had come into existence without his agency, it would become God's moral character to pay some attention to creatures so numerous and so susceptible to pleasure and pain, especially when he might have so great and favorable an influence on their moral condition.”John 5:17—“My Father worketh even until now, and I work”—is as applicable to providence as to preservation.The complexity of God's providential arrangements may be illustrated by Tyndall's explanation of the fact that heartsease does not grow in the neighborhood of English villages: 1. In English villages dogs run loose. 2. Where dogs run loose, cats must stay at home. 3. Where cats stay at home, field mice abound. 4. Where field mice abound, the nests of bumble-bees are destroyed. 5. Where bumble-bees' nests are destroyed, there is no fertilization of pollen. Therefore, where dogs go loose, no heartsease grows.B. Argumentsa posteriorifrom the facts of nature and of history. (a) The outward lot of individuals and nations is not wholly in their own hands, but is in many acknowledged respects subject to the disposal of a higher power. (b) The observed moral order of the world, although imperfect, cannot be accounted for without recognition of a divine providence. Vice is discouraged and virtue rewarded, in ways which are beyond the power of mere nature. There must be a governing mind and will, and this mind and will must be the mind and will of God.The birthplace of individuals and of nations, the natural powers with which they are endowed, the opportunities and immunities they enjoy, are beyond their own control. A man's destiny for time and for eternity may be practically decided for him by his birth in a Christian home, rather than in a tenement-house at the Five Points, or in a kraal of the Hottentots. Progress largely depends upon“variety of environment”(H. Spencer). But this variety of environment is in great part independent of our own efforts.“There's a Divinity that shapes our ends, Rough hew them how we will.”Shakespeare here expounds human consciousness.“Man proposes and God disposes”has become a proverb. Experience teaches that success and failure are not wholly due to us. Men often labor and lose; they consult and nothing ensues; they“embattle and are broken.”Providence is not always on the side of the heaviest battalions. Not arms but ideas have decided the fate of the world—as Xerxes found at Thermopylæ, and Napoleon at Waterloo. Great movements are generally begun without consciousness of their greatness.Cf.Is. 42:16—“I will bring the blind by a way that they know not”;1 Cor. 5:37, 38—“thou sowest ... a bare grain ... but God giveth it a body even as it pleased him.”The deed returns to the doer, and character shapes destiny. This is true in the long run. Eternity will show the truth of the maxim. But here in time a sufficient number of apparent exceptions are permitted to render possible a moral probation. If evil were always immediately followed by penalty, righteousness would have a compelling power upon the will and the highest virtue would be impossible. Job's friends accuse Job of acting upon this principle. The Hebrew children deny its truth, when they say:“But if not”—even if God does not deliver us—“we will not serve thy gods, nor worship the golden image which thou hast set up”(Dan. 3:18.)Martineau, Seat of Authority, 298—“Through some misdirection or infirmity, most of the larger agencies in history have failed to reach their own ideal, yet have accomplished revolutions greater and more beneficent; the conquests of Alexander, the empire of Rome, the Crusades, the ecclesiastical persecutions, the monastic asceticisms, the missionary zeal of Christendom, have all played a momentous part in the drama of the world, yet a part which is a surprise to each. All this shows the controlling presence of a Reason and a Will transcendent and divine.”Kidd, Social Evolution, 99, declares that the progress of the race has taken place only under conditions which have had no sanction from the reason of the great proportion of the individuals who submit to them. He concludes that a rational religion is a scientific impossibility, and that the function of religion is to provide a super-rational sanction for social progress. We prefer to say that Providence pushes the race forward even against its will.James Russell Lowell, Letters, 2:51, suggests that God's calm control of the forces[pg 427]of the universe, both physical and mental, should give us confidence when evil seems impending:“How many times have I seen the fire-engines of church and state clanging and lumbering along to put out—a false alarm! And when the heavens are cloudy, what a glare can be cast by a burning shanty!”See Sermon on Providence in Political Revolutions, in Farrar's Science and Theology, 228. On the moral order of the world, notwithstanding its imperfections, see Butler, Analogy, Bohn's ed., 98; King, in Baptist Review, 1884:202-222.
Section III.—Providence.I. Definition of Providence.Providence is that continuous agency of God by which he makes all the events of the physical and moral universe fulfill the original design with which he created it.As Creation explains the existence of the universe, and as Preservation explains its continuance, so Providence explains its evolution and progress.In explanation notice:(a) Providence is not to be taken merely in its etymological sense offoreseeing. It isforseeing also, or a positive agency in connection with all the events of history.(b) Providence is to be distinguished from preservation. While preservation is a maintenance of the existence and powers of created things, providence is an actual care and control of them.(c) Since the original plan of God is all-comprehending, the providence which executes the plan is all-comprehending also, embracing within its scope things small and great, and exercising care over individuals as well as over classes.(d) In respect to the good acts of men, providence embraces all those natural influences of birth and surroundings which prepare men for the operation of God's word and Spirit, and which constitute motives to obedience.(e) In respect to the evil acts of men, providence is never the efficient cause of sin, but is by turns preventive, permissive, directive, and determinative.(f) Since Christ is the only revealer of God, and he is the medium of every divine activity, providence is to be regarded as the work of Christ; see 1 Cor. 8:6—“one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things”;cf.John 5:17—“My Father worketh even until now, and I work.”The Germans have the wordFürsehung, forseeing, looking out for, as well as the wordVorsehung, foreseeing, seeing beforehand. Our word“providence”embraces the meanings of both these words. On the general subject of providence, see Philippi,[pg 420]Glaubenslehre, 2:272-284; Calvin, Institutes, 1:182-219; Dick, Theology, 1:416-446; Hodge, Syst. Theol., 1:581-616; Bib. Sac., 12:179; 21:584; 26:315; 30:593; N. W. Taylor, Moral Government, 2:294-326.Providence is God's attention concentrated everywhere. His care is microscopic as well as telescopic. Robert Browning, Pippa Passes,ad finem:“All service is the same with God—With God, whose puppets, best and worst, Are we: there is no last nor first.”Canon Farrar:“In one chapter of the Koran is the story how Gabriel, as he waited by the gates of gold, was sent by God to earth to do two things. One was to prevent king Solomon from the sin of forgetting the hour of prayer in exultation over his royal steeds; the other to help a little yellow ant on the slope of Ararat, which had grown weary in getting food for its nest, and which would otherwise perish in the rain. To Gabriel the one behest seemed just as kingly as the other, since God had ordered it.‘Silently he left The Presence, and prevented the king's sin, And holp the little ant at entering in.’‘Nothing is too high or low, Too mean or mighty, if God wills it so.’”Yet a preacher began his sermon on Mat. 10:30—“The very hairs of your head are are all numbered”—by saying:“Why, some of you, my hearers, do not believe that even your heads are all numbered!”A modern prophet of unbelief in God's providence is William Watson. In his poem entitled The Unknown God, we read:“When overarched by gorgeous night, I wave my trivial self away; When all I was to all men's sight Shares the erasure of the day: Then do I cast my cumbering load, Then do I gain a sense of God.”Then he likens the God of the Old Testament to Odin and Zeus, and continues:“O streaming worlds, O crowded sky, O life, and mine own soul's abyss, Myself am scarce so small that I Should bow to Deity like this! This my Begetter? This was what Man in his violent youth begot. The God I know of I shall ne'er Know, though he dwells exceeding nigh. Raise thou the stone and find me there. Cleave thou the wood and there am I. Yea, in my flesh his Spirit doth flow, Too near, too far, for me to know. Whate'er my deeds, I am not sure That I can pleasure him or vex: I, that must use a speech so poor It narrows the Supreme with sex. Notes he the good or ill in man? To hope he cares is all I can. I hope with fear. For did I trust This vision granted me at birth, The sire of heaven would seem less just Than many a faulty son of earth. And so he seems indeed! But then, I trust it not, this bounded ken. And dreaming much, I never dare To dream that in my prisoned soul The flutter of a trembling prayer Can move the Mind that is the Whole. Though kneeling nations watch and yearn, Does the primeval Purpose turn? Best by remembering God, say some. We keep our high imperial lot. Fortune, I fear, hath oftenest come When we forgot—when we forgot! A lovelier faith their happier crown, But history laughs and weeps it down: Know they not well how seven times seven, Wronging our mighty arms with rust, We dared not do the work of heaven, Lest heaven should hurl us in the dust? The work of heaven! 'Tis waiting still The sanction of the heavenly will. Unmeet to be profaned by praise Is he whose coils the world enfold; The God on whom I ever gaze, The God I never once behold: Above the cloud, above the clod, The unknown God, the unknown God.”In pleasing contrast to William Watson's Unknown God, is the God of Rudyard Kipling's Recessional:“God of our fathers, known of old—Lord of our far-flung battle-line—Beneath whose awful hand we hold Dominion over palm and pine—Lord God of hosts, be with us yet, Lest we forget—lest we forget! The tumult and the shouting dies—The captains and the kings depart—Still stands thine ancient Sacrifice, An humble and a contrite heart. Lord God of hosts, be with us yet. Lest we forget—lest we forget! Far-called our navies melt away—On dune and headland sinks the fire—So, all our pomp of yesterday Is one with Nineveh and Tyre! Judge of the nations, spare us yet, Lest we forget—lest we forget! If, drunk with sight of power, we loose Wild tongues that have not thee in awe—Such boasting as the Gentiles use, Or lesser breeds without the Law—Lord God of hosts, be with us yet, Lest we forget—lest we forget! For heathen heart that puts her trust In reeking tube and iron shard—All valiant dust that builds on dust, And guarding calls not thee to guard—For frantic boast and foolish word, Thy mercy on thy people, Lord!”These problems of God's providential dealings are intelligible only when we consider that Christ is the revealer of God, and that his suffering for sin opens to us the heart of God. All history is the progressive manifestation of Christ's holiness and love, and in the cross we have the key that unlocks the secret of the universe. With the cross in view, we can believe that Love rules over all, and that“all things work together for good to them that love God.”(Rom. 8:28).[pg 421]II. Proof of the Doctrine of Providence.1. Scriptural Proof.The Scripture witnesses toA. A general providential government and control (a) over the universe at large; (b) over the physical world; (c) over the brute creation; (d) over the affairs of nations; (e) over man's birth and lot in life; (f) over the outward successes and failures of men's lives; (g) over things seemingly accidental or insignificant; (h) in the protection of the righteous; (i) in the supply of the wants of God's people; (j) in the arrangement of answers to prayer; (k) in the exposure and punishment of the wicked.(a)Ps. 103:19—“his kingdom ruleth over all”;Dan. 4:35—“doeth according to his will in the army of heaven, and among the inhabitants of the earth”;Eph. 1:11—“worketh all things after the counsel of his will.”(b)Job 37:5, 10—“God thundereth ... By the breath of God ice is given”;Ps. 104:14—“causeth the grass to grow for the cattle”;135:6, 7—“Whatsoever Jehovah pleased, that hath he done, In heaven and in earth, in the seas and in all deeps ... vapors ... lightnings ... wind”;Mat. 5:45—“maketh his sun to rise ... sendeth rain”;Ps. 104:16—“The trees of Jehovah are filled”—are planted and tended by God as carefully as those which come under human cultivation;cf.Mat. 6:30—“if God so clothe the grass of the field.”(c)Ps. 104:21, 28—“young lions roar ... seek their food from God ... that thou givest them they gather”;Mat. 6:26—“birds of the heaven ... your heavenly Father feedeth them”;10:29—“two sparrows ... not one of them shall fall on the ground without your Father.”(d)Job 12:23—“He increaseth the nations, and he destroyeth them: He enlargeth the nations, and he leadeth them captive”;Ps. 22:28—“the kingdom is Jehovah's; And he is the ruler over the nations”;66:7—“He ruleth by his might for ever; His eyes observe the nations”;Acts 17:26—“made of one every nation of men to dwell on all the face of the earth, having determined their appointed seasons, and the bounds of their habitation”(instance Palestine, Greece, England).(e)1 Sam. 16:1—“fill thy horn with oil, and go: I will send thee to Jesse the Bethlehemite; for I have provided me a king among his sons”;Ps. 139:16—“Thine eyes did see mine unformed substance, And in thy book were all my members written”;Is. 45:5—“I will gird thee, though thou hast not known me”;Jer. 1:5—“Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee ... sanctified thee ... appointed thee”;Gal. 1:15, 16—“God, who separated me, even from my mother's womb, and called me through his grace, to reveal his Son in me, that I might preach him among the Gentiles.”(f)Ps. 75:6, 7—“neither from the east, nor from the west, Nor yet from the south cometh lifting up. But God is the judge, He putteth down one, and lifteth up another”;Luke 1:52—“He hath put down princes from their thrones, And hath exalted them of low degree.”(g)Prov. 16:33—“The lot is cast into the lap; But the whole disposing thereof is of Jehovah”;Mat. 10:30—“the very hairs of your head are all numbered.”(h)Ps. 4:8—“In peace will I both lay me down and sleep; For thou, Jehovah, alone makest me dwell in safety”;5:12—“thou wilt compass him with favor as with a shield”;63:8—“Thy right hand upholdeth me”;121:3—“He that keepeth thee will not slumber”;Rom. 8:28—“to them that love God all things work together for good.”(i)Gen. 22:8, 14—“God will provide himself the lamb ... Jehovah-jireh”(marg.: that is,“Jehovah will see,”or“provide”);Deut. 8:3—“man doth not live by bread only, but by every thing that proceedeth out of the mouth of Jehovah doth man live”;Phil. 4:19—“my God shall supply every need of yours.”(j)Ps. 68:10—“Thou, O God, didst prepare of thy goodness for the poor”;Is. 64:4—“neither hath the eye seen a God besides thee, who worketh for him that waiteth for him”;Mat. 6:8—“your Father knoweth what things ye have need of, before ye ask him”;32, 33—“all these things shall be added unto you.”(k)Ps. 7:12, 13—“If a man turn not, he will whet his sword; He hath bent his bow and made it ready; He hath also prepared for him the instruments of death; He maketh his arrows fiery shafts”;11:6—“Upon the wicked he will rain snares; Fire and brimstone and burning wind shall be the portion of their cup.”The statements of Scripture with regard to God's providence are strikingly confirmed by recent studies in physiography. In the early stages of human development man was almost wholly subject to nature, and environment was a determining factor in his progress. This is the element of truth in Buckle's view. But Buckle ignored the fact that, as civilization advanced, ideas, at least at times, played a greater part than environment. Thermopylæ cannot be explained by climate. In the later stages of human development, nature is largely subject to man, and environment counts for comparatively little.“There shall be no Alps!”says Napoleon. Charles Kingsley:[pg 422]“The spirit of ancient tragedy was man conquered by circumstance; the spirit of modern tragedy is man conquering circumstance.”Yet many national characteristics can be attributed to physical surroundings, and so far as this is the case they are due to the ordering of God's providence. Man's need of fresh water leads him to rivers,—hence the original location of London. Commerce requires seaports,—hence New York. The need of defense leads man to bluffs and hills,—hence Jerusalem, Athens, Rome, Edinburgh. These places of defense became also places of worship and of appeal to God.Goldwin Smith, in his Lectures and Essays, maintains that national characteristics are not congenital, but are the result of environment. The greatness of Rome and the greatness of England have been due to position. The Romans owed their successes to being at first less warlike than their neighbors. They were traders in the centre of the Italian seacoast, and had to depend on discipline to make headway against marauders on the surrounding hills. Only when drawn into foreign conquest did the ascendency of the military spirit become complete, and then the military spirit brought despotism as its natural penalty. Brought into contact with varied races, Rome was led to the founding of colonies. She adopted and assimilated the nations which she conquered, and in governing them learned organization and law.Parcere subjectiswas her rule, as well asdebellare superbos. In a similiar manner Goldwin Smith maintains that the greatness of England is due to position. Britain being an island, only a bold and enterprising race could settle it. Maritime migration strengthened freedom. Insular position gave freedom from invasion. Isolation however gave rise to arrogance and self-assertion. The island became a natural centre of commerce. There is a steadiness of political progress which would have been impossible upon the continent. Yet consolidation was tardy, owing to the fact that Great Britain consists ofseveralislands. Scotland was always liberal, and Ireland foredoomed to subjection.Isaac Taylor, Spirit of Hebrew Poetry, has a valuable chapter on Palestine as the providential theatre of divine revelation. A little land, yet a sample-land of all lands, and a thoroughfare between the greatest lands of antiquity, it was fitted by God to receive and to communicate his truth. George Adam Smith's Historical Geography of the Holy Land is a repertory of information on this subject. Stanley, Life and Letters, 1:269-271, treats of Greek landscape and history. Shaler, Interpretation of Nature, sees such difference between Greek curiosity and search for causes on the one hand, and Roman indifference to scientific explanation of facts on the other, that he cannot think of the Greeks and the Romans as cognate peoples. He believes that Italy was first peopled by Etrurians, a Semitic race from Africa, and that from them the Romans descended. The Romans had as little of the spirit of the naturalist as had the Hebrews. The Jews and the Romans originated and propagated Christianity, but they had no interest in science.On God's pre-arrangement of the physical conditions of national life, striking suggestions may be found in Shaler, Nature and Man in America. Instance the settlement of Massachusetts Bay between 1629 and 1639, the only decade in which such men as John Winthrop could be found and the only one in which they actually emigrated from England. After 1639 there was too much to do at home, and with Charles II the spirit which animated the Pilgrims no longer existed in England. The colonists builded better than they knew, for though they sought a place to worship God themselves, they had no idea of giving this same religious liberty to others. R. E. Thompson, The Hand of God in American History, holds that the American Republic would long since have broken in pieces by its own weight and bulk, if the invention of steam-boat in 1807, railroad locomotive in 1829, telegraph in 1837, and telephone in 1877, had not bound the remote parts of the country together. A woman invented the reaper by combining the action of a row of scissors in cutting. This was as early as 1835. Only in 1855 the competition on the Emperor's farm at Compiègne gave supremacy to the reaper. Without it farming would have been impossible during our civil war, when our men were in the field and women and boys had to gather in the crops.B. A government and control extending to the free actions of men—(a) to men's free acts in general; (b) to the sinful acts of men also.(a)Ex. 12:36—“Jehovah gave the people favor in the sight of the Egyptians, so that they let them have what they asked. And they despoiled the Egyptians”;1 Sam. 24:18—“Jehovah had delivered me up into thy hand”(Saul to David);Ps. 33:14, 15—“He looketh forth Upon all the inhabitants of the earth, He that fashioneth the hearts of them all”(i. e., equally, one as well as another);Prov. 16:1—“The plans of the heart belong to man; But the answer of the tongue is from Jehovah”;19:21—“There are many devices in a man's heart; But the counsel of Jehovah,[pg 423]that shall stand”;20:24—“A man's goings are of Jehovah; How then can man understand his way?”21:1—“The king's heart is in the hand of Jehovah as the watercourses: He turneth it whithersoever he will”(i. e., as easily as the rivulets of the eastern fields are turned by the slightest motion of the hand or the foot of the husbandman);Jer. 10:23—“O Jehovah, I know that the way of man is not in himself; it is not in man that walketh to direct his steps”;Phil. 2:13—“it is God who worketh in you both to will and to work, for his good pleasure”;Eph. 2:10—“we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God afore prepared that we should walk in them”;James 4:13-15—“If the Lord will, we shall both live, and do this or that.”(b)2 Sam. 16:10—“because Jehovah hath said unto him[Shimei]:Curse David”;24:1—“the anger of Jehovah was kindled against Israel, and he moved David against them, saying, Go, number Israel and Judah”;Rom. 11:32—“God hath shut up all unto disobedience, that he might have mercy upon all”;2 Thess. 2:11, 12—“God sendeth them a working of error, that they should believe a lie: that they all might be judged who believed not the truth, but had pleasure in unrighteousness.”Henry Ward Beecher:“There seems to be no order in the movements of the bees of a hive, but the honey-comb shows that there was a plan in them all.”John Hunter compared his own brain to a hive in which there was a great deal of buzzing and apparent disorder, while yet a real order underlay it all.“As bees gather their stores of sweets against a time of need, but are colonized by man's superior intelligence for his own purposes, so men plan and work yet are overruled by infinite Wisdom for his own glory.”Dr. Deems:“The world is wide In Time and Tide, And God is guide: Then do not hurry. That man is blest Who does his best And leaves the rest: Then do not worry.”See Bruce, Providential Order, 183sq.; Providence in the Individual Life, 231sq.God's providence with respect to men's evil acts is described in Scripture as of four sorts:(a) Preventive,—God by his providence prevents sin which would otherwise be committed. That he thus prevents sin is to be regarded as matter, not of obligation, but of grace.Gen. 20:6—Of Abimelech:“I also withheld thee from sinning against me”;31:24—“And God came to Laban the Syrian in a dream of the night, and said unto him, Take heed to thyself that thou speak not to Jacob either good or bad”;Psalm 19:13—“Keep back thy servant also from presumptuous sins; Let them not have dominion over me”;Hosea 2:6—“Behold, I will hedge up thy way with thorns, and I will build a wall against her, that she shall not find her paths”—here the“thorns”and the“wall”may represent the restraints and sufferings by which God mercifully checks the fatal pursuit of sin (see Annotated Par. Biblein loco). Parents, government, church, traditions, customs, laws, age, disease, death, are all of them preventive influences. Man sometimes finds himself on the brink of a precipice of sin, and strong temptation hurries him on to make the fatal leap. Suddenly every nerve relaxes, all desire for the evil thing is gone, and he recoils from the fearful brink over which he was just now going to plunge. God has interfered by the voice of conscience and the Spirit. This too is a part of his preventive providence. Men at sixty years of age are eight times less likely to commit crime than at the age of twenty-five. Passion has subsided; fear of punishment has increased. The manager of a great department store, when asked what could prevent its absorbing all the trade of the city, replied:“Death!”Death certainly limits aggregations of property, and so constitutes a means of God's preventive providence. In the life of John G. Paton, the rain sent by God prevented the natives from murdering him and taking his goods.(b) Permissive,—God permits men to cherish and to manifest the evil dispositions of their hearts. God's permissive providence is simply the negative act of withholding impediments from the path of the sinner, instead of preventing his sin by the exercise of divine power. It implies no ignorance, passivity, or indulgence, but consists with hatred of the sin and determination to punish it.2 Chron. 32:31—“God left him[Hezekiah],to try him, that he might know all that was in his heart”;cf.Deut. 8:2—“that he might humble thee, to prove thee, to know what was in thine heart.”Ps. 17:13, 14—“Deliver my soul from the wicked, who is thy sword, from men who are thy hand, O Jehovah”;Ps. 81:12, 13—“So I let them go after the stubbornness of their heart, That they might walk in their own counsels. Oh that my people would hearken unto me!”Is. 53:4, 10—“Surely he hath borne our griefs.... Yet it pleased Jehovah to bruise him.”Hosea 4:17—“Ephraim[pg 424]Ephraim is joined to idols; let him alone”;Acts 14:16—“who in the generations gone by suffered all the nations to walk in their own ways”;Rom. 1:24, 28—“God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts unto uncleanness... God gave them up unto a reprobate mind, to do those things which are not fitting”;3:25—“to show his righteousness, because of the passing over of the sins done aforetime, in the forbearance of God.”To this head of permissive providence is possibly to be referred1 Sam. 18:10—“an evil spirit from God came mightily upon Saul.”As the Hebrew writers saw in second causes the operation of the great first Cause, and said:“The God of glory thundereth”(Ps. 29:3), so, because even the acts of the wicked entered into God's plan, the Hebrew writers sometimes represented God as doing what he merely permitted finite spirits to do. In2 Sam. 24:1, God moves David to number Israel, but in1 Chron. 21:1the same thing is referred to Satan. God's providence in these cases, however, may be directive as well as permissive.Tennyson, The Higher Pantheism:“God is law, say the wise; O Soul, and let us rejoice, For if he thunder by law the thunder is yet his voice.”Fisher, Nature and Method of Revelation, 56—“The clear separation of God's efficiency from God's permissive act was reserved to a later day. All emphasis was in the Old Testament laid upon the sovereign power of God.”Coleridge, in his Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit, letter II, speaks of“the habit, universal with the Hebrew doctors, of referring all excellent or extraordinary things to the great first Cause, without mention of the proximate and instrumental causes—a striking illustration of which may be found by comparing the narratives of the same events in the Psalms and in the historical books.... The distinction between the providential and the miraculous did not enter into their forms of thinking—at any rate, not into their mode of conveying their thoughts.”The woman who had been slandered rebelled when told that God had permitted it for her good; she maintained that Satan had inspired her accuser; she needed to learn that God had permitted the work of Satan.(c) Directive,—God directs the evil acts of men to ends unforeseen and unintended by the agents. When evil is in the heart and will certainly come out, God orders its flow in one direction rather than in another, so that its course can be best controlled and least harm may result. This is sometimes called overruling providence.Gen. 50:20—“as for you, ye meant evil against me; but God meant it for good, to bring to pass, as it is this day, to save much people alive”;Ps. 76:10—“the wrath of man shall praise thee: The residue of wrath shalt thou gird upon thee”—put on as an ornament—clothe thyself with it for thine own glory;Is. 10:5—“Ho Assyrian, the rod of mine anger, and the staff in whose hand is mine indignation”;John 13:27—“What thou doest, do quickly”—do in a particular way what is actually being done (Westcott, Bib. Com.,in loco);Acts 4:27, 28—“against thy holy Servant Jesus, whom thou didst anoint, both Herod and Pontius Pilate, with the Gentiles and the peoples of Israel, were gathered together, to do whatsoever thy hand and thy counsel fore-ordained to come to pass.”To this head of directive providence should probably be referred the passages with regard to Pharaoh inEx. 4:21—“I will harden his heart, and he will not let the people go”;7:13—“and Pharaoh's heart was hardened”;8:15—“he hardened his heart”—i. e., Pharaoh hardened his own heart. Here the controlling agency of God did not interfere with the liberty of Pharaoh or oblige him to sin; but in judgment for his previous cruelty and impiety God withdrew the external restraints which had hitherto kept his sin within bounds, and placed him in circumstances which would have influenced to right action a well-disposed mind, but which God foresaw would lead a disposition like Pharaoh's to the peculiar course of wickedness which he actually pursued.God hardened Pharaoh's heart, then, first, by permitting him to harden his own heart, God being the author of his sin only in the sense that he is the author of a free being who is himself the direct author of his sin; secondly, by giving to him the means of enlightenment, Pharaoh's very opportunities being perverted by him into occasions of more virulent wickedness, and good resisted being thus made to result in greater evil; thirdly, by judicially forsaking Pharaoh, when it became manifest that he would not do God's will, and thus making it morally certain, though not necessary, that he would do evil; and fourthly, by so directing Pharaoh's surroundings that his sin would manifest itself in one way rather than in another. Sin is like the lava of the volcano, which will certainly come out, but which God directs in its course down the mountain-side so that it will do least harm. The gravitation downward is due to man's evil will; the direction to this side or to that is due to God's providence. SeeRom. 9:17, 18—“For this very purpose did I raise thee up, that I might show in thee my power, and that my name might be published abroad in all the earth. So then he hath mercy on whom he will, and whom he will he hardeneth.”Thus the very passions which[pg 425]excite men to rebel against God are made completely subservient to his purposes: see Annotated Paragraph Bible, onPs. 76:10.God hardens Pharaoh's heart only after all the earlier plagues have been sent. Pharaoh had hardened his own heart before. God hardens no man's heart who has not first hardened it himself. Crane, Religion of To-morrow, 140—“Jehovah is never said to harden the heart of a good man, or of one who is set to do righteousness. It is always those who are bent on evil whom God hardens. Pharaoh hardens his own heart before the Lord is said to harden it. Nature is God, and it is the nature of human beings to harden when they resist softening influences.”The Watchman, Dec. 5, 1901:11—“God decreed to Pharaoh what Pharaoh had chosen for himself. Persistence in certain inclinations and volitions awakens within the body and soul forces which are not under the control of the will, and which drive the man on in the way he has chosen. After a time nature hardens the hearts of men to do evil.”(d) Determinative,—God determines the bounds reached by the evil passions of his creatures, and the measure of their effects. Since moral evil is a germ capable of indefinite expansion, God's determining the measure of its growth does not alter its character or involve God's complicity with the perverse wills which cherish it.Job 1:12—“And Jehovah said unto Satan, Behold, all that he hath is in thy power; only upon himself put not forth thy hand”;2:6—“Behold, he is in thy hand; only spare his life”;Ps. 124:2—“If it had not been Jehovah who was on our side, when men rose up against us; Then had they swallowed us up alive”;1 Cor. 10:13—“will not suffer you to be tempted above that ye are able; but will with the temptation make also the way of escape, that ye may be able to endure it”;2 Thess. 2:7—“For the mystery of lawlessness doth already work; only there is one that restraineth now, until he be taken out of the way”;Rev. 20:2, 3—“And he laid hold on the dragon, the old serpent, which is the Devil and Satan, and bound him for a thousand years.”Pepper, Outlines of Syst. Theol., 76—The union of God's will and man's will is“such that, while in one view all can be ascribed to God, in another all can be ascribed to the creature. But how God and the creature are united in operation is doubtless known and knowable only to God. A very dim analogy is furnished in the union of the soul and body in men. The hand retains its own physical laws, yet is obedient to the human will. This theory recognizes the veracity of consciousness in its witness to personal freedom, and yet the completeness of God's control of both the bad and the good. Free beings are ruled, but are ruled as free and in their freedom. The freedom is not sacrificed to the control. The two coëxist, each in its integrity. Any doctrine which does not allow this is false to Scripture and destructive of religion.”2. Rational proof.A. Argumentsa priorifrom the divine attributes. (a) From the immutability of God. This makes it certain that he will execute his eternal plan of the universe and its history. But the execution of this plan involves not only creation and preservation, but also providence. (b) From the benevolence of God. This renders it certain that he will care for the intelligent universe he has created. What it was worth his while to create, it is worth his while to care for. But this care is providence. (c) From the justice of God. As the source of moral law, God must assure the vindication of law by administering justice in the universe and punishing the rebellious. But this administration of justice is providence.For heathen ideas of providence, see Cicero, De Natura Deorum, 11:30, where Balbus speaks of the existence of the gods as that,“quo concesso, confitendum est eorum consilio mundum administrari.”Epictetus, sec. 41—“The principal and most important duty in religion is to possess your mind with just and becoming notions of the gods—to believe that there are such supreme beings, and that they govern and dispose of all the affairs of the world with a just and good providence.”Marcus Antoninus:“If there are no gods, or if they have no regard for human affairs, why should I desire to live in a world without gods and without a providence? But gods undoubtedly there are, and they regard human affairs.”See also Bib. Sac., 16:374. As we shall see, however, many of the heathen writers believed in a general, rather than in a particular, providence.[pg 426]On the argument for providence derived from God's benevolence, see Appleton, Works, 1:146—“Is indolence more consistent with God's majesty than action would be? The happiness of creatures is a good. Does it honor God to say that he is indifferent to that which he knows to be good and valuable? Even if the world had come into existence without his agency, it would become God's moral character to pay some attention to creatures so numerous and so susceptible to pleasure and pain, especially when he might have so great and favorable an influence on their moral condition.”John 5:17—“My Father worketh even until now, and I work”—is as applicable to providence as to preservation.The complexity of God's providential arrangements may be illustrated by Tyndall's explanation of the fact that heartsease does not grow in the neighborhood of English villages: 1. In English villages dogs run loose. 2. Where dogs run loose, cats must stay at home. 3. Where cats stay at home, field mice abound. 4. Where field mice abound, the nests of bumble-bees are destroyed. 5. Where bumble-bees' nests are destroyed, there is no fertilization of pollen. Therefore, where dogs go loose, no heartsease grows.B. Argumentsa posteriorifrom the facts of nature and of history. (a) The outward lot of individuals and nations is not wholly in their own hands, but is in many acknowledged respects subject to the disposal of a higher power. (b) The observed moral order of the world, although imperfect, cannot be accounted for without recognition of a divine providence. Vice is discouraged and virtue rewarded, in ways which are beyond the power of mere nature. There must be a governing mind and will, and this mind and will must be the mind and will of God.The birthplace of individuals and of nations, the natural powers with which they are endowed, the opportunities and immunities they enjoy, are beyond their own control. A man's destiny for time and for eternity may be practically decided for him by his birth in a Christian home, rather than in a tenement-house at the Five Points, or in a kraal of the Hottentots. Progress largely depends upon“variety of environment”(H. Spencer). But this variety of environment is in great part independent of our own efforts.“There's a Divinity that shapes our ends, Rough hew them how we will.”Shakespeare here expounds human consciousness.“Man proposes and God disposes”has become a proverb. Experience teaches that success and failure are not wholly due to us. Men often labor and lose; they consult and nothing ensues; they“embattle and are broken.”Providence is not always on the side of the heaviest battalions. Not arms but ideas have decided the fate of the world—as Xerxes found at Thermopylæ, and Napoleon at Waterloo. Great movements are generally begun without consciousness of their greatness.Cf.Is. 42:16—“I will bring the blind by a way that they know not”;1 Cor. 5:37, 38—“thou sowest ... a bare grain ... but God giveth it a body even as it pleased him.”The deed returns to the doer, and character shapes destiny. This is true in the long run. Eternity will show the truth of the maxim. But here in time a sufficient number of apparent exceptions are permitted to render possible a moral probation. If evil were always immediately followed by penalty, righteousness would have a compelling power upon the will and the highest virtue would be impossible. Job's friends accuse Job of acting upon this principle. The Hebrew children deny its truth, when they say:“But if not”—even if God does not deliver us—“we will not serve thy gods, nor worship the golden image which thou hast set up”(Dan. 3:18.)Martineau, Seat of Authority, 298—“Through some misdirection or infirmity, most of the larger agencies in history have failed to reach their own ideal, yet have accomplished revolutions greater and more beneficent; the conquests of Alexander, the empire of Rome, the Crusades, the ecclesiastical persecutions, the monastic asceticisms, the missionary zeal of Christendom, have all played a momentous part in the drama of the world, yet a part which is a surprise to each. All this shows the controlling presence of a Reason and a Will transcendent and divine.”Kidd, Social Evolution, 99, declares that the progress of the race has taken place only under conditions which have had no sanction from the reason of the great proportion of the individuals who submit to them. He concludes that a rational religion is a scientific impossibility, and that the function of religion is to provide a super-rational sanction for social progress. We prefer to say that Providence pushes the race forward even against its will.James Russell Lowell, Letters, 2:51, suggests that God's calm control of the forces[pg 427]of the universe, both physical and mental, should give us confidence when evil seems impending:“How many times have I seen the fire-engines of church and state clanging and lumbering along to put out—a false alarm! And when the heavens are cloudy, what a glare can be cast by a burning shanty!”See Sermon on Providence in Political Revolutions, in Farrar's Science and Theology, 228. On the moral order of the world, notwithstanding its imperfections, see Butler, Analogy, Bohn's ed., 98; King, in Baptist Review, 1884:202-222.
Section III.—Providence.I. Definition of Providence.Providence is that continuous agency of God by which he makes all the events of the physical and moral universe fulfill the original design with which he created it.As Creation explains the existence of the universe, and as Preservation explains its continuance, so Providence explains its evolution and progress.In explanation notice:(a) Providence is not to be taken merely in its etymological sense offoreseeing. It isforseeing also, or a positive agency in connection with all the events of history.(b) Providence is to be distinguished from preservation. While preservation is a maintenance of the existence and powers of created things, providence is an actual care and control of them.(c) Since the original plan of God is all-comprehending, the providence which executes the plan is all-comprehending also, embracing within its scope things small and great, and exercising care over individuals as well as over classes.(d) In respect to the good acts of men, providence embraces all those natural influences of birth and surroundings which prepare men for the operation of God's word and Spirit, and which constitute motives to obedience.(e) In respect to the evil acts of men, providence is never the efficient cause of sin, but is by turns preventive, permissive, directive, and determinative.(f) Since Christ is the only revealer of God, and he is the medium of every divine activity, providence is to be regarded as the work of Christ; see 1 Cor. 8:6—“one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things”;cf.John 5:17—“My Father worketh even until now, and I work.”The Germans have the wordFürsehung, forseeing, looking out for, as well as the wordVorsehung, foreseeing, seeing beforehand. Our word“providence”embraces the meanings of both these words. On the general subject of providence, see Philippi,[pg 420]Glaubenslehre, 2:272-284; Calvin, Institutes, 1:182-219; Dick, Theology, 1:416-446; Hodge, Syst. Theol., 1:581-616; Bib. Sac., 12:179; 21:584; 26:315; 30:593; N. W. Taylor, Moral Government, 2:294-326.Providence is God's attention concentrated everywhere. His care is microscopic as well as telescopic. Robert Browning, Pippa Passes,ad finem:“All service is the same with God—With God, whose puppets, best and worst, Are we: there is no last nor first.”Canon Farrar:“In one chapter of the Koran is the story how Gabriel, as he waited by the gates of gold, was sent by God to earth to do two things. One was to prevent king Solomon from the sin of forgetting the hour of prayer in exultation over his royal steeds; the other to help a little yellow ant on the slope of Ararat, which had grown weary in getting food for its nest, and which would otherwise perish in the rain. To Gabriel the one behest seemed just as kingly as the other, since God had ordered it.‘Silently he left The Presence, and prevented the king's sin, And holp the little ant at entering in.’‘Nothing is too high or low, Too mean or mighty, if God wills it so.’”Yet a preacher began his sermon on Mat. 10:30—“The very hairs of your head are are all numbered”—by saying:“Why, some of you, my hearers, do not believe that even your heads are all numbered!”A modern prophet of unbelief in God's providence is William Watson. In his poem entitled The Unknown God, we read:“When overarched by gorgeous night, I wave my trivial self away; When all I was to all men's sight Shares the erasure of the day: Then do I cast my cumbering load, Then do I gain a sense of God.”Then he likens the God of the Old Testament to Odin and Zeus, and continues:“O streaming worlds, O crowded sky, O life, and mine own soul's abyss, Myself am scarce so small that I Should bow to Deity like this! This my Begetter? This was what Man in his violent youth begot. The God I know of I shall ne'er Know, though he dwells exceeding nigh. Raise thou the stone and find me there. Cleave thou the wood and there am I. Yea, in my flesh his Spirit doth flow, Too near, too far, for me to know. Whate'er my deeds, I am not sure That I can pleasure him or vex: I, that must use a speech so poor It narrows the Supreme with sex. Notes he the good or ill in man? To hope he cares is all I can. I hope with fear. For did I trust This vision granted me at birth, The sire of heaven would seem less just Than many a faulty son of earth. And so he seems indeed! But then, I trust it not, this bounded ken. And dreaming much, I never dare To dream that in my prisoned soul The flutter of a trembling prayer Can move the Mind that is the Whole. Though kneeling nations watch and yearn, Does the primeval Purpose turn? Best by remembering God, say some. We keep our high imperial lot. Fortune, I fear, hath oftenest come When we forgot—when we forgot! A lovelier faith their happier crown, But history laughs and weeps it down: Know they not well how seven times seven, Wronging our mighty arms with rust, We dared not do the work of heaven, Lest heaven should hurl us in the dust? The work of heaven! 'Tis waiting still The sanction of the heavenly will. Unmeet to be profaned by praise Is he whose coils the world enfold; The God on whom I ever gaze, The God I never once behold: Above the cloud, above the clod, The unknown God, the unknown God.”In pleasing contrast to William Watson's Unknown God, is the God of Rudyard Kipling's Recessional:“God of our fathers, known of old—Lord of our far-flung battle-line—Beneath whose awful hand we hold Dominion over palm and pine—Lord God of hosts, be with us yet, Lest we forget—lest we forget! The tumult and the shouting dies—The captains and the kings depart—Still stands thine ancient Sacrifice, An humble and a contrite heart. Lord God of hosts, be with us yet. Lest we forget—lest we forget! Far-called our navies melt away—On dune and headland sinks the fire—So, all our pomp of yesterday Is one with Nineveh and Tyre! Judge of the nations, spare us yet, Lest we forget—lest we forget! If, drunk with sight of power, we loose Wild tongues that have not thee in awe—Such boasting as the Gentiles use, Or lesser breeds without the Law—Lord God of hosts, be with us yet, Lest we forget—lest we forget! For heathen heart that puts her trust In reeking tube and iron shard—All valiant dust that builds on dust, And guarding calls not thee to guard—For frantic boast and foolish word, Thy mercy on thy people, Lord!”These problems of God's providential dealings are intelligible only when we consider that Christ is the revealer of God, and that his suffering for sin opens to us the heart of God. All history is the progressive manifestation of Christ's holiness and love, and in the cross we have the key that unlocks the secret of the universe. With the cross in view, we can believe that Love rules over all, and that“all things work together for good to them that love God.”(Rom. 8:28).[pg 421]II. Proof of the Doctrine of Providence.1. Scriptural Proof.The Scripture witnesses toA. A general providential government and control (a) over the universe at large; (b) over the physical world; (c) over the brute creation; (d) over the affairs of nations; (e) over man's birth and lot in life; (f) over the outward successes and failures of men's lives; (g) over things seemingly accidental or insignificant; (h) in the protection of the righteous; (i) in the supply of the wants of God's people; (j) in the arrangement of answers to prayer; (k) in the exposure and punishment of the wicked.(a)Ps. 103:19—“his kingdom ruleth over all”;Dan. 4:35—“doeth according to his will in the army of heaven, and among the inhabitants of the earth”;Eph. 1:11—“worketh all things after the counsel of his will.”(b)Job 37:5, 10—“God thundereth ... By the breath of God ice is given”;Ps. 104:14—“causeth the grass to grow for the cattle”;135:6, 7—“Whatsoever Jehovah pleased, that hath he done, In heaven and in earth, in the seas and in all deeps ... vapors ... lightnings ... wind”;Mat. 5:45—“maketh his sun to rise ... sendeth rain”;Ps. 104:16—“The trees of Jehovah are filled”—are planted and tended by God as carefully as those which come under human cultivation;cf.Mat. 6:30—“if God so clothe the grass of the field.”(c)Ps. 104:21, 28—“young lions roar ... seek their food from God ... that thou givest them they gather”;Mat. 6:26—“birds of the heaven ... your heavenly Father feedeth them”;10:29—“two sparrows ... not one of them shall fall on the ground without your Father.”(d)Job 12:23—“He increaseth the nations, and he destroyeth them: He enlargeth the nations, and he leadeth them captive”;Ps. 22:28—“the kingdom is Jehovah's; And he is the ruler over the nations”;66:7—“He ruleth by his might for ever; His eyes observe the nations”;Acts 17:26—“made of one every nation of men to dwell on all the face of the earth, having determined their appointed seasons, and the bounds of their habitation”(instance Palestine, Greece, England).(e)1 Sam. 16:1—“fill thy horn with oil, and go: I will send thee to Jesse the Bethlehemite; for I have provided me a king among his sons”;Ps. 139:16—“Thine eyes did see mine unformed substance, And in thy book were all my members written”;Is. 45:5—“I will gird thee, though thou hast not known me”;Jer. 1:5—“Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee ... sanctified thee ... appointed thee”;Gal. 1:15, 16—“God, who separated me, even from my mother's womb, and called me through his grace, to reveal his Son in me, that I might preach him among the Gentiles.”(f)Ps. 75:6, 7—“neither from the east, nor from the west, Nor yet from the south cometh lifting up. But God is the judge, He putteth down one, and lifteth up another”;Luke 1:52—“He hath put down princes from their thrones, And hath exalted them of low degree.”(g)Prov. 16:33—“The lot is cast into the lap; But the whole disposing thereof is of Jehovah”;Mat. 10:30—“the very hairs of your head are all numbered.”(h)Ps. 4:8—“In peace will I both lay me down and sleep; For thou, Jehovah, alone makest me dwell in safety”;5:12—“thou wilt compass him with favor as with a shield”;63:8—“Thy right hand upholdeth me”;121:3—“He that keepeth thee will not slumber”;Rom. 8:28—“to them that love God all things work together for good.”(i)Gen. 22:8, 14—“God will provide himself the lamb ... Jehovah-jireh”(marg.: that is,“Jehovah will see,”or“provide”);Deut. 8:3—“man doth not live by bread only, but by every thing that proceedeth out of the mouth of Jehovah doth man live”;Phil. 4:19—“my God shall supply every need of yours.”(j)Ps. 68:10—“Thou, O God, didst prepare of thy goodness for the poor”;Is. 64:4—“neither hath the eye seen a God besides thee, who worketh for him that waiteth for him”;Mat. 6:8—“your Father knoweth what things ye have need of, before ye ask him”;32, 33—“all these things shall be added unto you.”(k)Ps. 7:12, 13—“If a man turn not, he will whet his sword; He hath bent his bow and made it ready; He hath also prepared for him the instruments of death; He maketh his arrows fiery shafts”;11:6—“Upon the wicked he will rain snares; Fire and brimstone and burning wind shall be the portion of their cup.”The statements of Scripture with regard to God's providence are strikingly confirmed by recent studies in physiography. In the early stages of human development man was almost wholly subject to nature, and environment was a determining factor in his progress. This is the element of truth in Buckle's view. But Buckle ignored the fact that, as civilization advanced, ideas, at least at times, played a greater part than environment. Thermopylæ cannot be explained by climate. In the later stages of human development, nature is largely subject to man, and environment counts for comparatively little.“There shall be no Alps!”says Napoleon. Charles Kingsley:[pg 422]“The spirit of ancient tragedy was man conquered by circumstance; the spirit of modern tragedy is man conquering circumstance.”Yet many national characteristics can be attributed to physical surroundings, and so far as this is the case they are due to the ordering of God's providence. Man's need of fresh water leads him to rivers,—hence the original location of London. Commerce requires seaports,—hence New York. The need of defense leads man to bluffs and hills,—hence Jerusalem, Athens, Rome, Edinburgh. These places of defense became also places of worship and of appeal to God.Goldwin Smith, in his Lectures and Essays, maintains that national characteristics are not congenital, but are the result of environment. The greatness of Rome and the greatness of England have been due to position. The Romans owed their successes to being at first less warlike than their neighbors. They were traders in the centre of the Italian seacoast, and had to depend on discipline to make headway against marauders on the surrounding hills. Only when drawn into foreign conquest did the ascendency of the military spirit become complete, and then the military spirit brought despotism as its natural penalty. Brought into contact with varied races, Rome was led to the founding of colonies. She adopted and assimilated the nations which she conquered, and in governing them learned organization and law.Parcere subjectiswas her rule, as well asdebellare superbos. In a similiar manner Goldwin Smith maintains that the greatness of England is due to position. Britain being an island, only a bold and enterprising race could settle it. Maritime migration strengthened freedom. Insular position gave freedom from invasion. Isolation however gave rise to arrogance and self-assertion. The island became a natural centre of commerce. There is a steadiness of political progress which would have been impossible upon the continent. Yet consolidation was tardy, owing to the fact that Great Britain consists ofseveralislands. Scotland was always liberal, and Ireland foredoomed to subjection.Isaac Taylor, Spirit of Hebrew Poetry, has a valuable chapter on Palestine as the providential theatre of divine revelation. A little land, yet a sample-land of all lands, and a thoroughfare between the greatest lands of antiquity, it was fitted by God to receive and to communicate his truth. George Adam Smith's Historical Geography of the Holy Land is a repertory of information on this subject. Stanley, Life and Letters, 1:269-271, treats of Greek landscape and history. Shaler, Interpretation of Nature, sees such difference between Greek curiosity and search for causes on the one hand, and Roman indifference to scientific explanation of facts on the other, that he cannot think of the Greeks and the Romans as cognate peoples. He believes that Italy was first peopled by Etrurians, a Semitic race from Africa, and that from them the Romans descended. The Romans had as little of the spirit of the naturalist as had the Hebrews. The Jews and the Romans originated and propagated Christianity, but they had no interest in science.On God's pre-arrangement of the physical conditions of national life, striking suggestions may be found in Shaler, Nature and Man in America. Instance the settlement of Massachusetts Bay between 1629 and 1639, the only decade in which such men as John Winthrop could be found and the only one in which they actually emigrated from England. After 1639 there was too much to do at home, and with Charles II the spirit which animated the Pilgrims no longer existed in England. The colonists builded better than they knew, for though they sought a place to worship God themselves, they had no idea of giving this same religious liberty to others. R. E. Thompson, The Hand of God in American History, holds that the American Republic would long since have broken in pieces by its own weight and bulk, if the invention of steam-boat in 1807, railroad locomotive in 1829, telegraph in 1837, and telephone in 1877, had not bound the remote parts of the country together. A woman invented the reaper by combining the action of a row of scissors in cutting. This was as early as 1835. Only in 1855 the competition on the Emperor's farm at Compiègne gave supremacy to the reaper. Without it farming would have been impossible during our civil war, when our men were in the field and women and boys had to gather in the crops.B. A government and control extending to the free actions of men—(a) to men's free acts in general; (b) to the sinful acts of men also.(a)Ex. 12:36—“Jehovah gave the people favor in the sight of the Egyptians, so that they let them have what they asked. And they despoiled the Egyptians”;1 Sam. 24:18—“Jehovah had delivered me up into thy hand”(Saul to David);Ps. 33:14, 15—“He looketh forth Upon all the inhabitants of the earth, He that fashioneth the hearts of them all”(i. e., equally, one as well as another);Prov. 16:1—“The plans of the heart belong to man; But the answer of the tongue is from Jehovah”;19:21—“There are many devices in a man's heart; But the counsel of Jehovah,[pg 423]that shall stand”;20:24—“A man's goings are of Jehovah; How then can man understand his way?”21:1—“The king's heart is in the hand of Jehovah as the watercourses: He turneth it whithersoever he will”(i. e., as easily as the rivulets of the eastern fields are turned by the slightest motion of the hand or the foot of the husbandman);Jer. 10:23—“O Jehovah, I know that the way of man is not in himself; it is not in man that walketh to direct his steps”;Phil. 2:13—“it is God who worketh in you both to will and to work, for his good pleasure”;Eph. 2:10—“we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God afore prepared that we should walk in them”;James 4:13-15—“If the Lord will, we shall both live, and do this or that.”(b)2 Sam. 16:10—“because Jehovah hath said unto him[Shimei]:Curse David”;24:1—“the anger of Jehovah was kindled against Israel, and he moved David against them, saying, Go, number Israel and Judah”;Rom. 11:32—“God hath shut up all unto disobedience, that he might have mercy upon all”;2 Thess. 2:11, 12—“God sendeth them a working of error, that they should believe a lie: that they all might be judged who believed not the truth, but had pleasure in unrighteousness.”Henry Ward Beecher:“There seems to be no order in the movements of the bees of a hive, but the honey-comb shows that there was a plan in them all.”John Hunter compared his own brain to a hive in which there was a great deal of buzzing and apparent disorder, while yet a real order underlay it all.“As bees gather their stores of sweets against a time of need, but are colonized by man's superior intelligence for his own purposes, so men plan and work yet are overruled by infinite Wisdom for his own glory.”Dr. Deems:“The world is wide In Time and Tide, And God is guide: Then do not hurry. That man is blest Who does his best And leaves the rest: Then do not worry.”See Bruce, Providential Order, 183sq.; Providence in the Individual Life, 231sq.God's providence with respect to men's evil acts is described in Scripture as of four sorts:(a) Preventive,—God by his providence prevents sin which would otherwise be committed. That he thus prevents sin is to be regarded as matter, not of obligation, but of grace.Gen. 20:6—Of Abimelech:“I also withheld thee from sinning against me”;31:24—“And God came to Laban the Syrian in a dream of the night, and said unto him, Take heed to thyself that thou speak not to Jacob either good or bad”;Psalm 19:13—“Keep back thy servant also from presumptuous sins; Let them not have dominion over me”;Hosea 2:6—“Behold, I will hedge up thy way with thorns, and I will build a wall against her, that she shall not find her paths”—here the“thorns”and the“wall”may represent the restraints and sufferings by which God mercifully checks the fatal pursuit of sin (see Annotated Par. Biblein loco). Parents, government, church, traditions, customs, laws, age, disease, death, are all of them preventive influences. Man sometimes finds himself on the brink of a precipice of sin, and strong temptation hurries him on to make the fatal leap. Suddenly every nerve relaxes, all desire for the evil thing is gone, and he recoils from the fearful brink over which he was just now going to plunge. God has interfered by the voice of conscience and the Spirit. This too is a part of his preventive providence. Men at sixty years of age are eight times less likely to commit crime than at the age of twenty-five. Passion has subsided; fear of punishment has increased. The manager of a great department store, when asked what could prevent its absorbing all the trade of the city, replied:“Death!”Death certainly limits aggregations of property, and so constitutes a means of God's preventive providence. In the life of John G. Paton, the rain sent by God prevented the natives from murdering him and taking his goods.(b) Permissive,—God permits men to cherish and to manifest the evil dispositions of their hearts. God's permissive providence is simply the negative act of withholding impediments from the path of the sinner, instead of preventing his sin by the exercise of divine power. It implies no ignorance, passivity, or indulgence, but consists with hatred of the sin and determination to punish it.2 Chron. 32:31—“God left him[Hezekiah],to try him, that he might know all that was in his heart”;cf.Deut. 8:2—“that he might humble thee, to prove thee, to know what was in thine heart.”Ps. 17:13, 14—“Deliver my soul from the wicked, who is thy sword, from men who are thy hand, O Jehovah”;Ps. 81:12, 13—“So I let them go after the stubbornness of their heart, That they might walk in their own counsels. Oh that my people would hearken unto me!”Is. 53:4, 10—“Surely he hath borne our griefs.... Yet it pleased Jehovah to bruise him.”Hosea 4:17—“Ephraim[pg 424]Ephraim is joined to idols; let him alone”;Acts 14:16—“who in the generations gone by suffered all the nations to walk in their own ways”;Rom. 1:24, 28—“God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts unto uncleanness... God gave them up unto a reprobate mind, to do those things which are not fitting”;3:25—“to show his righteousness, because of the passing over of the sins done aforetime, in the forbearance of God.”To this head of permissive providence is possibly to be referred1 Sam. 18:10—“an evil spirit from God came mightily upon Saul.”As the Hebrew writers saw in second causes the operation of the great first Cause, and said:“The God of glory thundereth”(Ps. 29:3), so, because even the acts of the wicked entered into God's plan, the Hebrew writers sometimes represented God as doing what he merely permitted finite spirits to do. In2 Sam. 24:1, God moves David to number Israel, but in1 Chron. 21:1the same thing is referred to Satan. God's providence in these cases, however, may be directive as well as permissive.Tennyson, The Higher Pantheism:“God is law, say the wise; O Soul, and let us rejoice, For if he thunder by law the thunder is yet his voice.”Fisher, Nature and Method of Revelation, 56—“The clear separation of God's efficiency from God's permissive act was reserved to a later day. All emphasis was in the Old Testament laid upon the sovereign power of God.”Coleridge, in his Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit, letter II, speaks of“the habit, universal with the Hebrew doctors, of referring all excellent or extraordinary things to the great first Cause, without mention of the proximate and instrumental causes—a striking illustration of which may be found by comparing the narratives of the same events in the Psalms and in the historical books.... The distinction between the providential and the miraculous did not enter into their forms of thinking—at any rate, not into their mode of conveying their thoughts.”The woman who had been slandered rebelled when told that God had permitted it for her good; she maintained that Satan had inspired her accuser; she needed to learn that God had permitted the work of Satan.(c) Directive,—God directs the evil acts of men to ends unforeseen and unintended by the agents. When evil is in the heart and will certainly come out, God orders its flow in one direction rather than in another, so that its course can be best controlled and least harm may result. This is sometimes called overruling providence.Gen. 50:20—“as for you, ye meant evil against me; but God meant it for good, to bring to pass, as it is this day, to save much people alive”;Ps. 76:10—“the wrath of man shall praise thee: The residue of wrath shalt thou gird upon thee”—put on as an ornament—clothe thyself with it for thine own glory;Is. 10:5—“Ho Assyrian, the rod of mine anger, and the staff in whose hand is mine indignation”;John 13:27—“What thou doest, do quickly”—do in a particular way what is actually being done (Westcott, Bib. Com.,in loco);Acts 4:27, 28—“against thy holy Servant Jesus, whom thou didst anoint, both Herod and Pontius Pilate, with the Gentiles and the peoples of Israel, were gathered together, to do whatsoever thy hand and thy counsel fore-ordained to come to pass.”To this head of directive providence should probably be referred the passages with regard to Pharaoh inEx. 4:21—“I will harden his heart, and he will not let the people go”;7:13—“and Pharaoh's heart was hardened”;8:15—“he hardened his heart”—i. e., Pharaoh hardened his own heart. Here the controlling agency of God did not interfere with the liberty of Pharaoh or oblige him to sin; but in judgment for his previous cruelty and impiety God withdrew the external restraints which had hitherto kept his sin within bounds, and placed him in circumstances which would have influenced to right action a well-disposed mind, but which God foresaw would lead a disposition like Pharaoh's to the peculiar course of wickedness which he actually pursued.God hardened Pharaoh's heart, then, first, by permitting him to harden his own heart, God being the author of his sin only in the sense that he is the author of a free being who is himself the direct author of his sin; secondly, by giving to him the means of enlightenment, Pharaoh's very opportunities being perverted by him into occasions of more virulent wickedness, and good resisted being thus made to result in greater evil; thirdly, by judicially forsaking Pharaoh, when it became manifest that he would not do God's will, and thus making it morally certain, though not necessary, that he would do evil; and fourthly, by so directing Pharaoh's surroundings that his sin would manifest itself in one way rather than in another. Sin is like the lava of the volcano, which will certainly come out, but which God directs in its course down the mountain-side so that it will do least harm. The gravitation downward is due to man's evil will; the direction to this side or to that is due to God's providence. SeeRom. 9:17, 18—“For this very purpose did I raise thee up, that I might show in thee my power, and that my name might be published abroad in all the earth. So then he hath mercy on whom he will, and whom he will he hardeneth.”Thus the very passions which[pg 425]excite men to rebel against God are made completely subservient to his purposes: see Annotated Paragraph Bible, onPs. 76:10.God hardens Pharaoh's heart only after all the earlier plagues have been sent. Pharaoh had hardened his own heart before. God hardens no man's heart who has not first hardened it himself. Crane, Religion of To-morrow, 140—“Jehovah is never said to harden the heart of a good man, or of one who is set to do righteousness. It is always those who are bent on evil whom God hardens. Pharaoh hardens his own heart before the Lord is said to harden it. Nature is God, and it is the nature of human beings to harden when they resist softening influences.”The Watchman, Dec. 5, 1901:11—“God decreed to Pharaoh what Pharaoh had chosen for himself. Persistence in certain inclinations and volitions awakens within the body and soul forces which are not under the control of the will, and which drive the man on in the way he has chosen. After a time nature hardens the hearts of men to do evil.”(d) Determinative,—God determines the bounds reached by the evil passions of his creatures, and the measure of their effects. Since moral evil is a germ capable of indefinite expansion, God's determining the measure of its growth does not alter its character or involve God's complicity with the perverse wills which cherish it.Job 1:12—“And Jehovah said unto Satan, Behold, all that he hath is in thy power; only upon himself put not forth thy hand”;2:6—“Behold, he is in thy hand; only spare his life”;Ps. 124:2—“If it had not been Jehovah who was on our side, when men rose up against us; Then had they swallowed us up alive”;1 Cor. 10:13—“will not suffer you to be tempted above that ye are able; but will with the temptation make also the way of escape, that ye may be able to endure it”;2 Thess. 2:7—“For the mystery of lawlessness doth already work; only there is one that restraineth now, until he be taken out of the way”;Rev. 20:2, 3—“And he laid hold on the dragon, the old serpent, which is the Devil and Satan, and bound him for a thousand years.”Pepper, Outlines of Syst. Theol., 76—The union of God's will and man's will is“such that, while in one view all can be ascribed to God, in another all can be ascribed to the creature. But how God and the creature are united in operation is doubtless known and knowable only to God. A very dim analogy is furnished in the union of the soul and body in men. The hand retains its own physical laws, yet is obedient to the human will. This theory recognizes the veracity of consciousness in its witness to personal freedom, and yet the completeness of God's control of both the bad and the good. Free beings are ruled, but are ruled as free and in their freedom. The freedom is not sacrificed to the control. The two coëxist, each in its integrity. Any doctrine which does not allow this is false to Scripture and destructive of religion.”2. Rational proof.A. Argumentsa priorifrom the divine attributes. (a) From the immutability of God. This makes it certain that he will execute his eternal plan of the universe and its history. But the execution of this plan involves not only creation and preservation, but also providence. (b) From the benevolence of God. This renders it certain that he will care for the intelligent universe he has created. What it was worth his while to create, it is worth his while to care for. But this care is providence. (c) From the justice of God. As the source of moral law, God must assure the vindication of law by administering justice in the universe and punishing the rebellious. But this administration of justice is providence.For heathen ideas of providence, see Cicero, De Natura Deorum, 11:30, where Balbus speaks of the existence of the gods as that,“quo concesso, confitendum est eorum consilio mundum administrari.”Epictetus, sec. 41—“The principal and most important duty in religion is to possess your mind with just and becoming notions of the gods—to believe that there are such supreme beings, and that they govern and dispose of all the affairs of the world with a just and good providence.”Marcus Antoninus:“If there are no gods, or if they have no regard for human affairs, why should I desire to live in a world without gods and without a providence? But gods undoubtedly there are, and they regard human affairs.”See also Bib. Sac., 16:374. As we shall see, however, many of the heathen writers believed in a general, rather than in a particular, providence.[pg 426]On the argument for providence derived from God's benevolence, see Appleton, Works, 1:146—“Is indolence more consistent with God's majesty than action would be? The happiness of creatures is a good. Does it honor God to say that he is indifferent to that which he knows to be good and valuable? Even if the world had come into existence without his agency, it would become God's moral character to pay some attention to creatures so numerous and so susceptible to pleasure and pain, especially when he might have so great and favorable an influence on their moral condition.”John 5:17—“My Father worketh even until now, and I work”—is as applicable to providence as to preservation.The complexity of God's providential arrangements may be illustrated by Tyndall's explanation of the fact that heartsease does not grow in the neighborhood of English villages: 1. In English villages dogs run loose. 2. Where dogs run loose, cats must stay at home. 3. Where cats stay at home, field mice abound. 4. Where field mice abound, the nests of bumble-bees are destroyed. 5. Where bumble-bees' nests are destroyed, there is no fertilization of pollen. Therefore, where dogs go loose, no heartsease grows.B. Argumentsa posteriorifrom the facts of nature and of history. (a) The outward lot of individuals and nations is not wholly in their own hands, but is in many acknowledged respects subject to the disposal of a higher power. (b) The observed moral order of the world, although imperfect, cannot be accounted for without recognition of a divine providence. Vice is discouraged and virtue rewarded, in ways which are beyond the power of mere nature. There must be a governing mind and will, and this mind and will must be the mind and will of God.The birthplace of individuals and of nations, the natural powers with which they are endowed, the opportunities and immunities they enjoy, are beyond their own control. A man's destiny for time and for eternity may be practically decided for him by his birth in a Christian home, rather than in a tenement-house at the Five Points, or in a kraal of the Hottentots. Progress largely depends upon“variety of environment”(H. Spencer). But this variety of environment is in great part independent of our own efforts.“There's a Divinity that shapes our ends, Rough hew them how we will.”Shakespeare here expounds human consciousness.“Man proposes and God disposes”has become a proverb. Experience teaches that success and failure are not wholly due to us. Men often labor and lose; they consult and nothing ensues; they“embattle and are broken.”Providence is not always on the side of the heaviest battalions. Not arms but ideas have decided the fate of the world—as Xerxes found at Thermopylæ, and Napoleon at Waterloo. Great movements are generally begun without consciousness of their greatness.Cf.Is. 42:16—“I will bring the blind by a way that they know not”;1 Cor. 5:37, 38—“thou sowest ... a bare grain ... but God giveth it a body even as it pleased him.”The deed returns to the doer, and character shapes destiny. This is true in the long run. Eternity will show the truth of the maxim. But here in time a sufficient number of apparent exceptions are permitted to render possible a moral probation. If evil were always immediately followed by penalty, righteousness would have a compelling power upon the will and the highest virtue would be impossible. Job's friends accuse Job of acting upon this principle. The Hebrew children deny its truth, when they say:“But if not”—even if God does not deliver us—“we will not serve thy gods, nor worship the golden image which thou hast set up”(Dan. 3:18.)Martineau, Seat of Authority, 298—“Through some misdirection or infirmity, most of the larger agencies in history have failed to reach their own ideal, yet have accomplished revolutions greater and more beneficent; the conquests of Alexander, the empire of Rome, the Crusades, the ecclesiastical persecutions, the monastic asceticisms, the missionary zeal of Christendom, have all played a momentous part in the drama of the world, yet a part which is a surprise to each. All this shows the controlling presence of a Reason and a Will transcendent and divine.”Kidd, Social Evolution, 99, declares that the progress of the race has taken place only under conditions which have had no sanction from the reason of the great proportion of the individuals who submit to them. He concludes that a rational religion is a scientific impossibility, and that the function of religion is to provide a super-rational sanction for social progress. We prefer to say that Providence pushes the race forward even against its will.James Russell Lowell, Letters, 2:51, suggests that God's calm control of the forces[pg 427]of the universe, both physical and mental, should give us confidence when evil seems impending:“How many times have I seen the fire-engines of church and state clanging and lumbering along to put out—a false alarm! And when the heavens are cloudy, what a glare can be cast by a burning shanty!”See Sermon on Providence in Political Revolutions, in Farrar's Science and Theology, 228. On the moral order of the world, notwithstanding its imperfections, see Butler, Analogy, Bohn's ed., 98; King, in Baptist Review, 1884:202-222.
Section III.—Providence.I. Definition of Providence.Providence is that continuous agency of God by which he makes all the events of the physical and moral universe fulfill the original design with which he created it.As Creation explains the existence of the universe, and as Preservation explains its continuance, so Providence explains its evolution and progress.In explanation notice:(a) Providence is not to be taken merely in its etymological sense offoreseeing. It isforseeing also, or a positive agency in connection with all the events of history.(b) Providence is to be distinguished from preservation. While preservation is a maintenance of the existence and powers of created things, providence is an actual care and control of them.(c) Since the original plan of God is all-comprehending, the providence which executes the plan is all-comprehending also, embracing within its scope things small and great, and exercising care over individuals as well as over classes.(d) In respect to the good acts of men, providence embraces all those natural influences of birth and surroundings which prepare men for the operation of God's word and Spirit, and which constitute motives to obedience.(e) In respect to the evil acts of men, providence is never the efficient cause of sin, but is by turns preventive, permissive, directive, and determinative.(f) Since Christ is the only revealer of God, and he is the medium of every divine activity, providence is to be regarded as the work of Christ; see 1 Cor. 8:6—“one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things”;cf.John 5:17—“My Father worketh even until now, and I work.”The Germans have the wordFürsehung, forseeing, looking out for, as well as the wordVorsehung, foreseeing, seeing beforehand. Our word“providence”embraces the meanings of both these words. On the general subject of providence, see Philippi,[pg 420]Glaubenslehre, 2:272-284; Calvin, Institutes, 1:182-219; Dick, Theology, 1:416-446; Hodge, Syst. Theol., 1:581-616; Bib. Sac., 12:179; 21:584; 26:315; 30:593; N. W. Taylor, Moral Government, 2:294-326.Providence is God's attention concentrated everywhere. His care is microscopic as well as telescopic. Robert Browning, Pippa Passes,ad finem:“All service is the same with God—With God, whose puppets, best and worst, Are we: there is no last nor first.”Canon Farrar:“In one chapter of the Koran is the story how Gabriel, as he waited by the gates of gold, was sent by God to earth to do two things. One was to prevent king Solomon from the sin of forgetting the hour of prayer in exultation over his royal steeds; the other to help a little yellow ant on the slope of Ararat, which had grown weary in getting food for its nest, and which would otherwise perish in the rain. To Gabriel the one behest seemed just as kingly as the other, since God had ordered it.‘Silently he left The Presence, and prevented the king's sin, And holp the little ant at entering in.’‘Nothing is too high or low, Too mean or mighty, if God wills it so.’”Yet a preacher began his sermon on Mat. 10:30—“The very hairs of your head are are all numbered”—by saying:“Why, some of you, my hearers, do not believe that even your heads are all numbered!”A modern prophet of unbelief in God's providence is William Watson. In his poem entitled The Unknown God, we read:“When overarched by gorgeous night, I wave my trivial self away; When all I was to all men's sight Shares the erasure of the day: Then do I cast my cumbering load, Then do I gain a sense of God.”Then he likens the God of the Old Testament to Odin and Zeus, and continues:“O streaming worlds, O crowded sky, O life, and mine own soul's abyss, Myself am scarce so small that I Should bow to Deity like this! This my Begetter? This was what Man in his violent youth begot. The God I know of I shall ne'er Know, though he dwells exceeding nigh. Raise thou the stone and find me there. Cleave thou the wood and there am I. Yea, in my flesh his Spirit doth flow, Too near, too far, for me to know. Whate'er my deeds, I am not sure That I can pleasure him or vex: I, that must use a speech so poor It narrows the Supreme with sex. Notes he the good or ill in man? To hope he cares is all I can. I hope with fear. For did I trust This vision granted me at birth, The sire of heaven would seem less just Than many a faulty son of earth. And so he seems indeed! But then, I trust it not, this bounded ken. And dreaming much, I never dare To dream that in my prisoned soul The flutter of a trembling prayer Can move the Mind that is the Whole. Though kneeling nations watch and yearn, Does the primeval Purpose turn? Best by remembering God, say some. We keep our high imperial lot. Fortune, I fear, hath oftenest come When we forgot—when we forgot! A lovelier faith their happier crown, But history laughs and weeps it down: Know they not well how seven times seven, Wronging our mighty arms with rust, We dared not do the work of heaven, Lest heaven should hurl us in the dust? The work of heaven! 'Tis waiting still The sanction of the heavenly will. Unmeet to be profaned by praise Is he whose coils the world enfold; The God on whom I ever gaze, The God I never once behold: Above the cloud, above the clod, The unknown God, the unknown God.”In pleasing contrast to William Watson's Unknown God, is the God of Rudyard Kipling's Recessional:“God of our fathers, known of old—Lord of our far-flung battle-line—Beneath whose awful hand we hold Dominion over palm and pine—Lord God of hosts, be with us yet, Lest we forget—lest we forget! The tumult and the shouting dies—The captains and the kings depart—Still stands thine ancient Sacrifice, An humble and a contrite heart. Lord God of hosts, be with us yet. Lest we forget—lest we forget! Far-called our navies melt away—On dune and headland sinks the fire—So, all our pomp of yesterday Is one with Nineveh and Tyre! Judge of the nations, spare us yet, Lest we forget—lest we forget! If, drunk with sight of power, we loose Wild tongues that have not thee in awe—Such boasting as the Gentiles use, Or lesser breeds without the Law—Lord God of hosts, be with us yet, Lest we forget—lest we forget! For heathen heart that puts her trust In reeking tube and iron shard—All valiant dust that builds on dust, And guarding calls not thee to guard—For frantic boast and foolish word, Thy mercy on thy people, Lord!”These problems of God's providential dealings are intelligible only when we consider that Christ is the revealer of God, and that his suffering for sin opens to us the heart of God. All history is the progressive manifestation of Christ's holiness and love, and in the cross we have the key that unlocks the secret of the universe. With the cross in view, we can believe that Love rules over all, and that“all things work together for good to them that love God.”(Rom. 8:28).[pg 421]II. Proof of the Doctrine of Providence.1. Scriptural Proof.The Scripture witnesses toA. A general providential government and control (a) over the universe at large; (b) over the physical world; (c) over the brute creation; (d) over the affairs of nations; (e) over man's birth and lot in life; (f) over the outward successes and failures of men's lives; (g) over things seemingly accidental or insignificant; (h) in the protection of the righteous; (i) in the supply of the wants of God's people; (j) in the arrangement of answers to prayer; (k) in the exposure and punishment of the wicked.(a)Ps. 103:19—“his kingdom ruleth over all”;Dan. 4:35—“doeth according to his will in the army of heaven, and among the inhabitants of the earth”;Eph. 1:11—“worketh all things after the counsel of his will.”(b)Job 37:5, 10—“God thundereth ... By the breath of God ice is given”;Ps. 104:14—“causeth the grass to grow for the cattle”;135:6, 7—“Whatsoever Jehovah pleased, that hath he done, In heaven and in earth, in the seas and in all deeps ... vapors ... lightnings ... wind”;Mat. 5:45—“maketh his sun to rise ... sendeth rain”;Ps. 104:16—“The trees of Jehovah are filled”—are planted and tended by God as carefully as those which come under human cultivation;cf.Mat. 6:30—“if God so clothe the grass of the field.”(c)Ps. 104:21, 28—“young lions roar ... seek their food from God ... that thou givest them they gather”;Mat. 6:26—“birds of the heaven ... your heavenly Father feedeth them”;10:29—“two sparrows ... not one of them shall fall on the ground without your Father.”(d)Job 12:23—“He increaseth the nations, and he destroyeth them: He enlargeth the nations, and he leadeth them captive”;Ps. 22:28—“the kingdom is Jehovah's; And he is the ruler over the nations”;66:7—“He ruleth by his might for ever; His eyes observe the nations”;Acts 17:26—“made of one every nation of men to dwell on all the face of the earth, having determined their appointed seasons, and the bounds of their habitation”(instance Palestine, Greece, England).(e)1 Sam. 16:1—“fill thy horn with oil, and go: I will send thee to Jesse the Bethlehemite; for I have provided me a king among his sons”;Ps. 139:16—“Thine eyes did see mine unformed substance, And in thy book were all my members written”;Is. 45:5—“I will gird thee, though thou hast not known me”;Jer. 1:5—“Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee ... sanctified thee ... appointed thee”;Gal. 1:15, 16—“God, who separated me, even from my mother's womb, and called me through his grace, to reveal his Son in me, that I might preach him among the Gentiles.”(f)Ps. 75:6, 7—“neither from the east, nor from the west, Nor yet from the south cometh lifting up. But God is the judge, He putteth down one, and lifteth up another”;Luke 1:52—“He hath put down princes from their thrones, And hath exalted them of low degree.”(g)Prov. 16:33—“The lot is cast into the lap; But the whole disposing thereof is of Jehovah”;Mat. 10:30—“the very hairs of your head are all numbered.”(h)Ps. 4:8—“In peace will I both lay me down and sleep; For thou, Jehovah, alone makest me dwell in safety”;5:12—“thou wilt compass him with favor as with a shield”;63:8—“Thy right hand upholdeth me”;121:3—“He that keepeth thee will not slumber”;Rom. 8:28—“to them that love God all things work together for good.”(i)Gen. 22:8, 14—“God will provide himself the lamb ... Jehovah-jireh”(marg.: that is,“Jehovah will see,”or“provide”);Deut. 8:3—“man doth not live by bread only, but by every thing that proceedeth out of the mouth of Jehovah doth man live”;Phil. 4:19—“my God shall supply every need of yours.”(j)Ps. 68:10—“Thou, O God, didst prepare of thy goodness for the poor”;Is. 64:4—“neither hath the eye seen a God besides thee, who worketh for him that waiteth for him”;Mat. 6:8—“your Father knoweth what things ye have need of, before ye ask him”;32, 33—“all these things shall be added unto you.”(k)Ps. 7:12, 13—“If a man turn not, he will whet his sword; He hath bent his bow and made it ready; He hath also prepared for him the instruments of death; He maketh his arrows fiery shafts”;11:6—“Upon the wicked he will rain snares; Fire and brimstone and burning wind shall be the portion of their cup.”The statements of Scripture with regard to God's providence are strikingly confirmed by recent studies in physiography. In the early stages of human development man was almost wholly subject to nature, and environment was a determining factor in his progress. This is the element of truth in Buckle's view. But Buckle ignored the fact that, as civilization advanced, ideas, at least at times, played a greater part than environment. Thermopylæ cannot be explained by climate. In the later stages of human development, nature is largely subject to man, and environment counts for comparatively little.“There shall be no Alps!”says Napoleon. Charles Kingsley:[pg 422]“The spirit of ancient tragedy was man conquered by circumstance; the spirit of modern tragedy is man conquering circumstance.”Yet many national characteristics can be attributed to physical surroundings, and so far as this is the case they are due to the ordering of God's providence. Man's need of fresh water leads him to rivers,—hence the original location of London. Commerce requires seaports,—hence New York. The need of defense leads man to bluffs and hills,—hence Jerusalem, Athens, Rome, Edinburgh. These places of defense became also places of worship and of appeal to God.Goldwin Smith, in his Lectures and Essays, maintains that national characteristics are not congenital, but are the result of environment. The greatness of Rome and the greatness of England have been due to position. The Romans owed their successes to being at first less warlike than their neighbors. They were traders in the centre of the Italian seacoast, and had to depend on discipline to make headway against marauders on the surrounding hills. Only when drawn into foreign conquest did the ascendency of the military spirit become complete, and then the military spirit brought despotism as its natural penalty. Brought into contact with varied races, Rome was led to the founding of colonies. She adopted and assimilated the nations which she conquered, and in governing them learned organization and law.Parcere subjectiswas her rule, as well asdebellare superbos. In a similiar manner Goldwin Smith maintains that the greatness of England is due to position. Britain being an island, only a bold and enterprising race could settle it. Maritime migration strengthened freedom. Insular position gave freedom from invasion. Isolation however gave rise to arrogance and self-assertion. The island became a natural centre of commerce. There is a steadiness of political progress which would have been impossible upon the continent. Yet consolidation was tardy, owing to the fact that Great Britain consists ofseveralislands. Scotland was always liberal, and Ireland foredoomed to subjection.Isaac Taylor, Spirit of Hebrew Poetry, has a valuable chapter on Palestine as the providential theatre of divine revelation. A little land, yet a sample-land of all lands, and a thoroughfare between the greatest lands of antiquity, it was fitted by God to receive and to communicate his truth. George Adam Smith's Historical Geography of the Holy Land is a repertory of information on this subject. Stanley, Life and Letters, 1:269-271, treats of Greek landscape and history. Shaler, Interpretation of Nature, sees such difference between Greek curiosity and search for causes on the one hand, and Roman indifference to scientific explanation of facts on the other, that he cannot think of the Greeks and the Romans as cognate peoples. He believes that Italy was first peopled by Etrurians, a Semitic race from Africa, and that from them the Romans descended. The Romans had as little of the spirit of the naturalist as had the Hebrews. The Jews and the Romans originated and propagated Christianity, but they had no interest in science.On God's pre-arrangement of the physical conditions of national life, striking suggestions may be found in Shaler, Nature and Man in America. Instance the settlement of Massachusetts Bay between 1629 and 1639, the only decade in which such men as John Winthrop could be found and the only one in which they actually emigrated from England. After 1639 there was too much to do at home, and with Charles II the spirit which animated the Pilgrims no longer existed in England. The colonists builded better than they knew, for though they sought a place to worship God themselves, they had no idea of giving this same religious liberty to others. R. E. Thompson, The Hand of God in American History, holds that the American Republic would long since have broken in pieces by its own weight and bulk, if the invention of steam-boat in 1807, railroad locomotive in 1829, telegraph in 1837, and telephone in 1877, had not bound the remote parts of the country together. A woman invented the reaper by combining the action of a row of scissors in cutting. This was as early as 1835. Only in 1855 the competition on the Emperor's farm at Compiègne gave supremacy to the reaper. Without it farming would have been impossible during our civil war, when our men were in the field and women and boys had to gather in the crops.B. A government and control extending to the free actions of men—(a) to men's free acts in general; (b) to the sinful acts of men also.(a)Ex. 12:36—“Jehovah gave the people favor in the sight of the Egyptians, so that they let them have what they asked. And they despoiled the Egyptians”;1 Sam. 24:18—“Jehovah had delivered me up into thy hand”(Saul to David);Ps. 33:14, 15—“He looketh forth Upon all the inhabitants of the earth, He that fashioneth the hearts of them all”(i. e., equally, one as well as another);Prov. 16:1—“The plans of the heart belong to man; But the answer of the tongue is from Jehovah”;19:21—“There are many devices in a man's heart; But the counsel of Jehovah,[pg 423]that shall stand”;20:24—“A man's goings are of Jehovah; How then can man understand his way?”21:1—“The king's heart is in the hand of Jehovah as the watercourses: He turneth it whithersoever he will”(i. e., as easily as the rivulets of the eastern fields are turned by the slightest motion of the hand or the foot of the husbandman);Jer. 10:23—“O Jehovah, I know that the way of man is not in himself; it is not in man that walketh to direct his steps”;Phil. 2:13—“it is God who worketh in you both to will and to work, for his good pleasure”;Eph. 2:10—“we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God afore prepared that we should walk in them”;James 4:13-15—“If the Lord will, we shall both live, and do this or that.”(b)2 Sam. 16:10—“because Jehovah hath said unto him[Shimei]:Curse David”;24:1—“the anger of Jehovah was kindled against Israel, and he moved David against them, saying, Go, number Israel and Judah”;Rom. 11:32—“God hath shut up all unto disobedience, that he might have mercy upon all”;2 Thess. 2:11, 12—“God sendeth them a working of error, that they should believe a lie: that they all might be judged who believed not the truth, but had pleasure in unrighteousness.”Henry Ward Beecher:“There seems to be no order in the movements of the bees of a hive, but the honey-comb shows that there was a plan in them all.”John Hunter compared his own brain to a hive in which there was a great deal of buzzing and apparent disorder, while yet a real order underlay it all.“As bees gather their stores of sweets against a time of need, but are colonized by man's superior intelligence for his own purposes, so men plan and work yet are overruled by infinite Wisdom for his own glory.”Dr. Deems:“The world is wide In Time and Tide, And God is guide: Then do not hurry. That man is blest Who does his best And leaves the rest: Then do not worry.”See Bruce, Providential Order, 183sq.; Providence in the Individual Life, 231sq.God's providence with respect to men's evil acts is described in Scripture as of four sorts:(a) Preventive,—God by his providence prevents sin which would otherwise be committed. That he thus prevents sin is to be regarded as matter, not of obligation, but of grace.Gen. 20:6—Of Abimelech:“I also withheld thee from sinning against me”;31:24—“And God came to Laban the Syrian in a dream of the night, and said unto him, Take heed to thyself that thou speak not to Jacob either good or bad”;Psalm 19:13—“Keep back thy servant also from presumptuous sins; Let them not have dominion over me”;Hosea 2:6—“Behold, I will hedge up thy way with thorns, and I will build a wall against her, that she shall not find her paths”—here the“thorns”and the“wall”may represent the restraints and sufferings by which God mercifully checks the fatal pursuit of sin (see Annotated Par. Biblein loco). Parents, government, church, traditions, customs, laws, age, disease, death, are all of them preventive influences. Man sometimes finds himself on the brink of a precipice of sin, and strong temptation hurries him on to make the fatal leap. Suddenly every nerve relaxes, all desire for the evil thing is gone, and he recoils from the fearful brink over which he was just now going to plunge. God has interfered by the voice of conscience and the Spirit. This too is a part of his preventive providence. Men at sixty years of age are eight times less likely to commit crime than at the age of twenty-five. Passion has subsided; fear of punishment has increased. The manager of a great department store, when asked what could prevent its absorbing all the trade of the city, replied:“Death!”Death certainly limits aggregations of property, and so constitutes a means of God's preventive providence. In the life of John G. Paton, the rain sent by God prevented the natives from murdering him and taking his goods.(b) Permissive,—God permits men to cherish and to manifest the evil dispositions of their hearts. God's permissive providence is simply the negative act of withholding impediments from the path of the sinner, instead of preventing his sin by the exercise of divine power. It implies no ignorance, passivity, or indulgence, but consists with hatred of the sin and determination to punish it.2 Chron. 32:31—“God left him[Hezekiah],to try him, that he might know all that was in his heart”;cf.Deut. 8:2—“that he might humble thee, to prove thee, to know what was in thine heart.”Ps. 17:13, 14—“Deliver my soul from the wicked, who is thy sword, from men who are thy hand, O Jehovah”;Ps. 81:12, 13—“So I let them go after the stubbornness of their heart, That they might walk in their own counsels. Oh that my people would hearken unto me!”Is. 53:4, 10—“Surely he hath borne our griefs.... Yet it pleased Jehovah to bruise him.”Hosea 4:17—“Ephraim[pg 424]Ephraim is joined to idols; let him alone”;Acts 14:16—“who in the generations gone by suffered all the nations to walk in their own ways”;Rom. 1:24, 28—“God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts unto uncleanness... God gave them up unto a reprobate mind, to do those things which are not fitting”;3:25—“to show his righteousness, because of the passing over of the sins done aforetime, in the forbearance of God.”To this head of permissive providence is possibly to be referred1 Sam. 18:10—“an evil spirit from God came mightily upon Saul.”As the Hebrew writers saw in second causes the operation of the great first Cause, and said:“The God of glory thundereth”(Ps. 29:3), so, because even the acts of the wicked entered into God's plan, the Hebrew writers sometimes represented God as doing what he merely permitted finite spirits to do. In2 Sam. 24:1, God moves David to number Israel, but in1 Chron. 21:1the same thing is referred to Satan. God's providence in these cases, however, may be directive as well as permissive.Tennyson, The Higher Pantheism:“God is law, say the wise; O Soul, and let us rejoice, For if he thunder by law the thunder is yet his voice.”Fisher, Nature and Method of Revelation, 56—“The clear separation of God's efficiency from God's permissive act was reserved to a later day. All emphasis was in the Old Testament laid upon the sovereign power of God.”Coleridge, in his Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit, letter II, speaks of“the habit, universal with the Hebrew doctors, of referring all excellent or extraordinary things to the great first Cause, without mention of the proximate and instrumental causes—a striking illustration of which may be found by comparing the narratives of the same events in the Psalms and in the historical books.... The distinction between the providential and the miraculous did not enter into their forms of thinking—at any rate, not into their mode of conveying their thoughts.”The woman who had been slandered rebelled when told that God had permitted it for her good; she maintained that Satan had inspired her accuser; she needed to learn that God had permitted the work of Satan.(c) Directive,—God directs the evil acts of men to ends unforeseen and unintended by the agents. When evil is in the heart and will certainly come out, God orders its flow in one direction rather than in another, so that its course can be best controlled and least harm may result. This is sometimes called overruling providence.Gen. 50:20—“as for you, ye meant evil against me; but God meant it for good, to bring to pass, as it is this day, to save much people alive”;Ps. 76:10—“the wrath of man shall praise thee: The residue of wrath shalt thou gird upon thee”—put on as an ornament—clothe thyself with it for thine own glory;Is. 10:5—“Ho Assyrian, the rod of mine anger, and the staff in whose hand is mine indignation”;John 13:27—“What thou doest, do quickly”—do in a particular way what is actually being done (Westcott, Bib. Com.,in loco);Acts 4:27, 28—“against thy holy Servant Jesus, whom thou didst anoint, both Herod and Pontius Pilate, with the Gentiles and the peoples of Israel, were gathered together, to do whatsoever thy hand and thy counsel fore-ordained to come to pass.”To this head of directive providence should probably be referred the passages with regard to Pharaoh inEx. 4:21—“I will harden his heart, and he will not let the people go”;7:13—“and Pharaoh's heart was hardened”;8:15—“he hardened his heart”—i. e., Pharaoh hardened his own heart. Here the controlling agency of God did not interfere with the liberty of Pharaoh or oblige him to sin; but in judgment for his previous cruelty and impiety God withdrew the external restraints which had hitherto kept his sin within bounds, and placed him in circumstances which would have influenced to right action a well-disposed mind, but which God foresaw would lead a disposition like Pharaoh's to the peculiar course of wickedness which he actually pursued.God hardened Pharaoh's heart, then, first, by permitting him to harden his own heart, God being the author of his sin only in the sense that he is the author of a free being who is himself the direct author of his sin; secondly, by giving to him the means of enlightenment, Pharaoh's very opportunities being perverted by him into occasions of more virulent wickedness, and good resisted being thus made to result in greater evil; thirdly, by judicially forsaking Pharaoh, when it became manifest that he would not do God's will, and thus making it morally certain, though not necessary, that he would do evil; and fourthly, by so directing Pharaoh's surroundings that his sin would manifest itself in one way rather than in another. Sin is like the lava of the volcano, which will certainly come out, but which God directs in its course down the mountain-side so that it will do least harm. The gravitation downward is due to man's evil will; the direction to this side or to that is due to God's providence. SeeRom. 9:17, 18—“For this very purpose did I raise thee up, that I might show in thee my power, and that my name might be published abroad in all the earth. So then he hath mercy on whom he will, and whom he will he hardeneth.”Thus the very passions which[pg 425]excite men to rebel against God are made completely subservient to his purposes: see Annotated Paragraph Bible, onPs. 76:10.God hardens Pharaoh's heart only after all the earlier plagues have been sent. Pharaoh had hardened his own heart before. God hardens no man's heart who has not first hardened it himself. Crane, Religion of To-morrow, 140—“Jehovah is never said to harden the heart of a good man, or of one who is set to do righteousness. It is always those who are bent on evil whom God hardens. Pharaoh hardens his own heart before the Lord is said to harden it. Nature is God, and it is the nature of human beings to harden when they resist softening influences.”The Watchman, Dec. 5, 1901:11—“God decreed to Pharaoh what Pharaoh had chosen for himself. Persistence in certain inclinations and volitions awakens within the body and soul forces which are not under the control of the will, and which drive the man on in the way he has chosen. After a time nature hardens the hearts of men to do evil.”(d) Determinative,—God determines the bounds reached by the evil passions of his creatures, and the measure of their effects. Since moral evil is a germ capable of indefinite expansion, God's determining the measure of its growth does not alter its character or involve God's complicity with the perverse wills which cherish it.Job 1:12—“And Jehovah said unto Satan, Behold, all that he hath is in thy power; only upon himself put not forth thy hand”;2:6—“Behold, he is in thy hand; only spare his life”;Ps. 124:2—“If it had not been Jehovah who was on our side, when men rose up against us; Then had they swallowed us up alive”;1 Cor. 10:13—“will not suffer you to be tempted above that ye are able; but will with the temptation make also the way of escape, that ye may be able to endure it”;2 Thess. 2:7—“For the mystery of lawlessness doth already work; only there is one that restraineth now, until he be taken out of the way”;Rev. 20:2, 3—“And he laid hold on the dragon, the old serpent, which is the Devil and Satan, and bound him for a thousand years.”Pepper, Outlines of Syst. Theol., 76—The union of God's will and man's will is“such that, while in one view all can be ascribed to God, in another all can be ascribed to the creature. But how God and the creature are united in operation is doubtless known and knowable only to God. A very dim analogy is furnished in the union of the soul and body in men. The hand retains its own physical laws, yet is obedient to the human will. This theory recognizes the veracity of consciousness in its witness to personal freedom, and yet the completeness of God's control of both the bad and the good. Free beings are ruled, but are ruled as free and in their freedom. The freedom is not sacrificed to the control. The two coëxist, each in its integrity. Any doctrine which does not allow this is false to Scripture and destructive of religion.”2. Rational proof.A. Argumentsa priorifrom the divine attributes. (a) From the immutability of God. This makes it certain that he will execute his eternal plan of the universe and its history. But the execution of this plan involves not only creation and preservation, but also providence. (b) From the benevolence of God. This renders it certain that he will care for the intelligent universe he has created. What it was worth his while to create, it is worth his while to care for. But this care is providence. (c) From the justice of God. As the source of moral law, God must assure the vindication of law by administering justice in the universe and punishing the rebellious. But this administration of justice is providence.For heathen ideas of providence, see Cicero, De Natura Deorum, 11:30, where Balbus speaks of the existence of the gods as that,“quo concesso, confitendum est eorum consilio mundum administrari.”Epictetus, sec. 41—“The principal and most important duty in religion is to possess your mind with just and becoming notions of the gods—to believe that there are such supreme beings, and that they govern and dispose of all the affairs of the world with a just and good providence.”Marcus Antoninus:“If there are no gods, or if they have no regard for human affairs, why should I desire to live in a world without gods and without a providence? But gods undoubtedly there are, and they regard human affairs.”See also Bib. Sac., 16:374. As we shall see, however, many of the heathen writers believed in a general, rather than in a particular, providence.[pg 426]On the argument for providence derived from God's benevolence, see Appleton, Works, 1:146—“Is indolence more consistent with God's majesty than action would be? The happiness of creatures is a good. Does it honor God to say that he is indifferent to that which he knows to be good and valuable? Even if the world had come into existence without his agency, it would become God's moral character to pay some attention to creatures so numerous and so susceptible to pleasure and pain, especially when he might have so great and favorable an influence on their moral condition.”John 5:17—“My Father worketh even until now, and I work”—is as applicable to providence as to preservation.The complexity of God's providential arrangements may be illustrated by Tyndall's explanation of the fact that heartsease does not grow in the neighborhood of English villages: 1. In English villages dogs run loose. 2. Where dogs run loose, cats must stay at home. 3. Where cats stay at home, field mice abound. 4. Where field mice abound, the nests of bumble-bees are destroyed. 5. Where bumble-bees' nests are destroyed, there is no fertilization of pollen. Therefore, where dogs go loose, no heartsease grows.B. Argumentsa posteriorifrom the facts of nature and of history. (a) The outward lot of individuals and nations is not wholly in their own hands, but is in many acknowledged respects subject to the disposal of a higher power. (b) The observed moral order of the world, although imperfect, cannot be accounted for without recognition of a divine providence. Vice is discouraged and virtue rewarded, in ways which are beyond the power of mere nature. There must be a governing mind and will, and this mind and will must be the mind and will of God.The birthplace of individuals and of nations, the natural powers with which they are endowed, the opportunities and immunities they enjoy, are beyond their own control. A man's destiny for time and for eternity may be practically decided for him by his birth in a Christian home, rather than in a tenement-house at the Five Points, or in a kraal of the Hottentots. Progress largely depends upon“variety of environment”(H. Spencer). But this variety of environment is in great part independent of our own efforts.“There's a Divinity that shapes our ends, Rough hew them how we will.”Shakespeare here expounds human consciousness.“Man proposes and God disposes”has become a proverb. Experience teaches that success and failure are not wholly due to us. Men often labor and lose; they consult and nothing ensues; they“embattle and are broken.”Providence is not always on the side of the heaviest battalions. Not arms but ideas have decided the fate of the world—as Xerxes found at Thermopylæ, and Napoleon at Waterloo. Great movements are generally begun without consciousness of their greatness.Cf.Is. 42:16—“I will bring the blind by a way that they know not”;1 Cor. 5:37, 38—“thou sowest ... a bare grain ... but God giveth it a body even as it pleased him.”The deed returns to the doer, and character shapes destiny. This is true in the long run. Eternity will show the truth of the maxim. But here in time a sufficient number of apparent exceptions are permitted to render possible a moral probation. If evil were always immediately followed by penalty, righteousness would have a compelling power upon the will and the highest virtue would be impossible. Job's friends accuse Job of acting upon this principle. The Hebrew children deny its truth, when they say:“But if not”—even if God does not deliver us—“we will not serve thy gods, nor worship the golden image which thou hast set up”(Dan. 3:18.)Martineau, Seat of Authority, 298—“Through some misdirection or infirmity, most of the larger agencies in history have failed to reach their own ideal, yet have accomplished revolutions greater and more beneficent; the conquests of Alexander, the empire of Rome, the Crusades, the ecclesiastical persecutions, the monastic asceticisms, the missionary zeal of Christendom, have all played a momentous part in the drama of the world, yet a part which is a surprise to each. All this shows the controlling presence of a Reason and a Will transcendent and divine.”Kidd, Social Evolution, 99, declares that the progress of the race has taken place only under conditions which have had no sanction from the reason of the great proportion of the individuals who submit to them. He concludes that a rational religion is a scientific impossibility, and that the function of religion is to provide a super-rational sanction for social progress. We prefer to say that Providence pushes the race forward even against its will.James Russell Lowell, Letters, 2:51, suggests that God's calm control of the forces[pg 427]of the universe, both physical and mental, should give us confidence when evil seems impending:“How many times have I seen the fire-engines of church and state clanging and lumbering along to put out—a false alarm! And when the heavens are cloudy, what a glare can be cast by a burning shanty!”See Sermon on Providence in Political Revolutions, in Farrar's Science and Theology, 228. On the moral order of the world, notwithstanding its imperfections, see Butler, Analogy, Bohn's ed., 98; King, in Baptist Review, 1884:202-222.
I. Definition of Providence.Providence is that continuous agency of God by which he makes all the events of the physical and moral universe fulfill the original design with which he created it.As Creation explains the existence of the universe, and as Preservation explains its continuance, so Providence explains its evolution and progress.In explanation notice:(a) Providence is not to be taken merely in its etymological sense offoreseeing. It isforseeing also, or a positive agency in connection with all the events of history.(b) Providence is to be distinguished from preservation. While preservation is a maintenance of the existence and powers of created things, providence is an actual care and control of them.(c) Since the original plan of God is all-comprehending, the providence which executes the plan is all-comprehending also, embracing within its scope things small and great, and exercising care over individuals as well as over classes.(d) In respect to the good acts of men, providence embraces all those natural influences of birth and surroundings which prepare men for the operation of God's word and Spirit, and which constitute motives to obedience.(e) In respect to the evil acts of men, providence is never the efficient cause of sin, but is by turns preventive, permissive, directive, and determinative.(f) Since Christ is the only revealer of God, and he is the medium of every divine activity, providence is to be regarded as the work of Christ; see 1 Cor. 8:6—“one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things”;cf.John 5:17—“My Father worketh even until now, and I work.”The Germans have the wordFürsehung, forseeing, looking out for, as well as the wordVorsehung, foreseeing, seeing beforehand. Our word“providence”embraces the meanings of both these words. On the general subject of providence, see Philippi,[pg 420]Glaubenslehre, 2:272-284; Calvin, Institutes, 1:182-219; Dick, Theology, 1:416-446; Hodge, Syst. Theol., 1:581-616; Bib. Sac., 12:179; 21:584; 26:315; 30:593; N. W. Taylor, Moral Government, 2:294-326.Providence is God's attention concentrated everywhere. His care is microscopic as well as telescopic. Robert Browning, Pippa Passes,ad finem:“All service is the same with God—With God, whose puppets, best and worst, Are we: there is no last nor first.”Canon Farrar:“In one chapter of the Koran is the story how Gabriel, as he waited by the gates of gold, was sent by God to earth to do two things. One was to prevent king Solomon from the sin of forgetting the hour of prayer in exultation over his royal steeds; the other to help a little yellow ant on the slope of Ararat, which had grown weary in getting food for its nest, and which would otherwise perish in the rain. To Gabriel the one behest seemed just as kingly as the other, since God had ordered it.‘Silently he left The Presence, and prevented the king's sin, And holp the little ant at entering in.’‘Nothing is too high or low, Too mean or mighty, if God wills it so.’”Yet a preacher began his sermon on Mat. 10:30—“The very hairs of your head are are all numbered”—by saying:“Why, some of you, my hearers, do not believe that even your heads are all numbered!”A modern prophet of unbelief in God's providence is William Watson. In his poem entitled The Unknown God, we read:“When overarched by gorgeous night, I wave my trivial self away; When all I was to all men's sight Shares the erasure of the day: Then do I cast my cumbering load, Then do I gain a sense of God.”Then he likens the God of the Old Testament to Odin and Zeus, and continues:“O streaming worlds, O crowded sky, O life, and mine own soul's abyss, Myself am scarce so small that I Should bow to Deity like this! This my Begetter? This was what Man in his violent youth begot. The God I know of I shall ne'er Know, though he dwells exceeding nigh. Raise thou the stone and find me there. Cleave thou the wood and there am I. Yea, in my flesh his Spirit doth flow, Too near, too far, for me to know. Whate'er my deeds, I am not sure That I can pleasure him or vex: I, that must use a speech so poor It narrows the Supreme with sex. Notes he the good or ill in man? To hope he cares is all I can. I hope with fear. For did I trust This vision granted me at birth, The sire of heaven would seem less just Than many a faulty son of earth. And so he seems indeed! But then, I trust it not, this bounded ken. And dreaming much, I never dare To dream that in my prisoned soul The flutter of a trembling prayer Can move the Mind that is the Whole. Though kneeling nations watch and yearn, Does the primeval Purpose turn? Best by remembering God, say some. We keep our high imperial lot. Fortune, I fear, hath oftenest come When we forgot—when we forgot! A lovelier faith their happier crown, But history laughs and weeps it down: Know they not well how seven times seven, Wronging our mighty arms with rust, We dared not do the work of heaven, Lest heaven should hurl us in the dust? The work of heaven! 'Tis waiting still The sanction of the heavenly will. Unmeet to be profaned by praise Is he whose coils the world enfold; The God on whom I ever gaze, The God I never once behold: Above the cloud, above the clod, The unknown God, the unknown God.”In pleasing contrast to William Watson's Unknown God, is the God of Rudyard Kipling's Recessional:“God of our fathers, known of old—Lord of our far-flung battle-line—Beneath whose awful hand we hold Dominion over palm and pine—Lord God of hosts, be with us yet, Lest we forget—lest we forget! The tumult and the shouting dies—The captains and the kings depart—Still stands thine ancient Sacrifice, An humble and a contrite heart. Lord God of hosts, be with us yet. Lest we forget—lest we forget! Far-called our navies melt away—On dune and headland sinks the fire—So, all our pomp of yesterday Is one with Nineveh and Tyre! Judge of the nations, spare us yet, Lest we forget—lest we forget! If, drunk with sight of power, we loose Wild tongues that have not thee in awe—Such boasting as the Gentiles use, Or lesser breeds without the Law—Lord God of hosts, be with us yet, Lest we forget—lest we forget! For heathen heart that puts her trust In reeking tube and iron shard—All valiant dust that builds on dust, And guarding calls not thee to guard—For frantic boast and foolish word, Thy mercy on thy people, Lord!”These problems of God's providential dealings are intelligible only when we consider that Christ is the revealer of God, and that his suffering for sin opens to us the heart of God. All history is the progressive manifestation of Christ's holiness and love, and in the cross we have the key that unlocks the secret of the universe. With the cross in view, we can believe that Love rules over all, and that“all things work together for good to them that love God.”(Rom. 8:28).
Providence is that continuous agency of God by which he makes all the events of the physical and moral universe fulfill the original design with which he created it.
As Creation explains the existence of the universe, and as Preservation explains its continuance, so Providence explains its evolution and progress.
In explanation notice:
(a) Providence is not to be taken merely in its etymological sense offoreseeing. It isforseeing also, or a positive agency in connection with all the events of history.
(b) Providence is to be distinguished from preservation. While preservation is a maintenance of the existence and powers of created things, providence is an actual care and control of them.
(c) Since the original plan of God is all-comprehending, the providence which executes the plan is all-comprehending also, embracing within its scope things small and great, and exercising care over individuals as well as over classes.
(d) In respect to the good acts of men, providence embraces all those natural influences of birth and surroundings which prepare men for the operation of God's word and Spirit, and which constitute motives to obedience.
(e) In respect to the evil acts of men, providence is never the efficient cause of sin, but is by turns preventive, permissive, directive, and determinative.
(f) Since Christ is the only revealer of God, and he is the medium of every divine activity, providence is to be regarded as the work of Christ; see 1 Cor. 8:6—“one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things”;cf.John 5:17—“My Father worketh even until now, and I work.”
The Germans have the wordFürsehung, forseeing, looking out for, as well as the wordVorsehung, foreseeing, seeing beforehand. Our word“providence”embraces the meanings of both these words. On the general subject of providence, see Philippi,[pg 420]Glaubenslehre, 2:272-284; Calvin, Institutes, 1:182-219; Dick, Theology, 1:416-446; Hodge, Syst. Theol., 1:581-616; Bib. Sac., 12:179; 21:584; 26:315; 30:593; N. W. Taylor, Moral Government, 2:294-326.Providence is God's attention concentrated everywhere. His care is microscopic as well as telescopic. Robert Browning, Pippa Passes,ad finem:“All service is the same with God—With God, whose puppets, best and worst, Are we: there is no last nor first.”Canon Farrar:“In one chapter of the Koran is the story how Gabriel, as he waited by the gates of gold, was sent by God to earth to do two things. One was to prevent king Solomon from the sin of forgetting the hour of prayer in exultation over his royal steeds; the other to help a little yellow ant on the slope of Ararat, which had grown weary in getting food for its nest, and which would otherwise perish in the rain. To Gabriel the one behest seemed just as kingly as the other, since God had ordered it.‘Silently he left The Presence, and prevented the king's sin, And holp the little ant at entering in.’‘Nothing is too high or low, Too mean or mighty, if God wills it so.’”Yet a preacher began his sermon on Mat. 10:30—“The very hairs of your head are are all numbered”—by saying:“Why, some of you, my hearers, do not believe that even your heads are all numbered!”A modern prophet of unbelief in God's providence is William Watson. In his poem entitled The Unknown God, we read:“When overarched by gorgeous night, I wave my trivial self away; When all I was to all men's sight Shares the erasure of the day: Then do I cast my cumbering load, Then do I gain a sense of God.”Then he likens the God of the Old Testament to Odin and Zeus, and continues:“O streaming worlds, O crowded sky, O life, and mine own soul's abyss, Myself am scarce so small that I Should bow to Deity like this! This my Begetter? This was what Man in his violent youth begot. The God I know of I shall ne'er Know, though he dwells exceeding nigh. Raise thou the stone and find me there. Cleave thou the wood and there am I. Yea, in my flesh his Spirit doth flow, Too near, too far, for me to know. Whate'er my deeds, I am not sure That I can pleasure him or vex: I, that must use a speech so poor It narrows the Supreme with sex. Notes he the good or ill in man? To hope he cares is all I can. I hope with fear. For did I trust This vision granted me at birth, The sire of heaven would seem less just Than many a faulty son of earth. And so he seems indeed! But then, I trust it not, this bounded ken. And dreaming much, I never dare To dream that in my prisoned soul The flutter of a trembling prayer Can move the Mind that is the Whole. Though kneeling nations watch and yearn, Does the primeval Purpose turn? Best by remembering God, say some. We keep our high imperial lot. Fortune, I fear, hath oftenest come When we forgot—when we forgot! A lovelier faith their happier crown, But history laughs and weeps it down: Know they not well how seven times seven, Wronging our mighty arms with rust, We dared not do the work of heaven, Lest heaven should hurl us in the dust? The work of heaven! 'Tis waiting still The sanction of the heavenly will. Unmeet to be profaned by praise Is he whose coils the world enfold; The God on whom I ever gaze, The God I never once behold: Above the cloud, above the clod, The unknown God, the unknown God.”In pleasing contrast to William Watson's Unknown God, is the God of Rudyard Kipling's Recessional:“God of our fathers, known of old—Lord of our far-flung battle-line—Beneath whose awful hand we hold Dominion over palm and pine—Lord God of hosts, be with us yet, Lest we forget—lest we forget! The tumult and the shouting dies—The captains and the kings depart—Still stands thine ancient Sacrifice, An humble and a contrite heart. Lord God of hosts, be with us yet. Lest we forget—lest we forget! Far-called our navies melt away—On dune and headland sinks the fire—So, all our pomp of yesterday Is one with Nineveh and Tyre! Judge of the nations, spare us yet, Lest we forget—lest we forget! If, drunk with sight of power, we loose Wild tongues that have not thee in awe—Such boasting as the Gentiles use, Or lesser breeds without the Law—Lord God of hosts, be with us yet, Lest we forget—lest we forget! For heathen heart that puts her trust In reeking tube and iron shard—All valiant dust that builds on dust, And guarding calls not thee to guard—For frantic boast and foolish word, Thy mercy on thy people, Lord!”These problems of God's providential dealings are intelligible only when we consider that Christ is the revealer of God, and that his suffering for sin opens to us the heart of God. All history is the progressive manifestation of Christ's holiness and love, and in the cross we have the key that unlocks the secret of the universe. With the cross in view, we can believe that Love rules over all, and that“all things work together for good to them that love God.”(Rom. 8:28).
The Germans have the wordFürsehung, forseeing, looking out for, as well as the wordVorsehung, foreseeing, seeing beforehand. Our word“providence”embraces the meanings of both these words. On the general subject of providence, see Philippi,[pg 420]Glaubenslehre, 2:272-284; Calvin, Institutes, 1:182-219; Dick, Theology, 1:416-446; Hodge, Syst. Theol., 1:581-616; Bib. Sac., 12:179; 21:584; 26:315; 30:593; N. W. Taylor, Moral Government, 2:294-326.
Providence is God's attention concentrated everywhere. His care is microscopic as well as telescopic. Robert Browning, Pippa Passes,ad finem:“All service is the same with God—With God, whose puppets, best and worst, Are we: there is no last nor first.”Canon Farrar:“In one chapter of the Koran is the story how Gabriel, as he waited by the gates of gold, was sent by God to earth to do two things. One was to prevent king Solomon from the sin of forgetting the hour of prayer in exultation over his royal steeds; the other to help a little yellow ant on the slope of Ararat, which had grown weary in getting food for its nest, and which would otherwise perish in the rain. To Gabriel the one behest seemed just as kingly as the other, since God had ordered it.‘Silently he left The Presence, and prevented the king's sin, And holp the little ant at entering in.’‘Nothing is too high or low, Too mean or mighty, if God wills it so.’”Yet a preacher began his sermon on Mat. 10:30—“The very hairs of your head are are all numbered”—by saying:“Why, some of you, my hearers, do not believe that even your heads are all numbered!”
A modern prophet of unbelief in God's providence is William Watson. In his poem entitled The Unknown God, we read:“When overarched by gorgeous night, I wave my trivial self away; When all I was to all men's sight Shares the erasure of the day: Then do I cast my cumbering load, Then do I gain a sense of God.”Then he likens the God of the Old Testament to Odin and Zeus, and continues:“O streaming worlds, O crowded sky, O life, and mine own soul's abyss, Myself am scarce so small that I Should bow to Deity like this! This my Begetter? This was what Man in his violent youth begot. The God I know of I shall ne'er Know, though he dwells exceeding nigh. Raise thou the stone and find me there. Cleave thou the wood and there am I. Yea, in my flesh his Spirit doth flow, Too near, too far, for me to know. Whate'er my deeds, I am not sure That I can pleasure him or vex: I, that must use a speech so poor It narrows the Supreme with sex. Notes he the good or ill in man? To hope he cares is all I can. I hope with fear. For did I trust This vision granted me at birth, The sire of heaven would seem less just Than many a faulty son of earth. And so he seems indeed! But then, I trust it not, this bounded ken. And dreaming much, I never dare To dream that in my prisoned soul The flutter of a trembling prayer Can move the Mind that is the Whole. Though kneeling nations watch and yearn, Does the primeval Purpose turn? Best by remembering God, say some. We keep our high imperial lot. Fortune, I fear, hath oftenest come When we forgot—when we forgot! A lovelier faith their happier crown, But history laughs and weeps it down: Know they not well how seven times seven, Wronging our mighty arms with rust, We dared not do the work of heaven, Lest heaven should hurl us in the dust? The work of heaven! 'Tis waiting still The sanction of the heavenly will. Unmeet to be profaned by praise Is he whose coils the world enfold; The God on whom I ever gaze, The God I never once behold: Above the cloud, above the clod, The unknown God, the unknown God.”
In pleasing contrast to William Watson's Unknown God, is the God of Rudyard Kipling's Recessional:“God of our fathers, known of old—Lord of our far-flung battle-line—Beneath whose awful hand we hold Dominion over palm and pine—Lord God of hosts, be with us yet, Lest we forget—lest we forget! The tumult and the shouting dies—The captains and the kings depart—Still stands thine ancient Sacrifice, An humble and a contrite heart. Lord God of hosts, be with us yet. Lest we forget—lest we forget! Far-called our navies melt away—On dune and headland sinks the fire—So, all our pomp of yesterday Is one with Nineveh and Tyre! Judge of the nations, spare us yet, Lest we forget—lest we forget! If, drunk with sight of power, we loose Wild tongues that have not thee in awe—Such boasting as the Gentiles use, Or lesser breeds without the Law—Lord God of hosts, be with us yet, Lest we forget—lest we forget! For heathen heart that puts her trust In reeking tube and iron shard—All valiant dust that builds on dust, And guarding calls not thee to guard—For frantic boast and foolish word, Thy mercy on thy people, Lord!”
These problems of God's providential dealings are intelligible only when we consider that Christ is the revealer of God, and that his suffering for sin opens to us the heart of God. All history is the progressive manifestation of Christ's holiness and love, and in the cross we have the key that unlocks the secret of the universe. With the cross in view, we can believe that Love rules over all, and that“all things work together for good to them that love God.”(Rom. 8:28).
II. Proof of the Doctrine of Providence.1. Scriptural Proof.The Scripture witnesses toA. A general providential government and control (a) over the universe at large; (b) over the physical world; (c) over the brute creation; (d) over the affairs of nations; (e) over man's birth and lot in life; (f) over the outward successes and failures of men's lives; (g) over things seemingly accidental or insignificant; (h) in the protection of the righteous; (i) in the supply of the wants of God's people; (j) in the arrangement of answers to prayer; (k) in the exposure and punishment of the wicked.(a)Ps. 103:19—“his kingdom ruleth over all”;Dan. 4:35—“doeth according to his will in the army of heaven, and among the inhabitants of the earth”;Eph. 1:11—“worketh all things after the counsel of his will.”(b)Job 37:5, 10—“God thundereth ... By the breath of God ice is given”;Ps. 104:14—“causeth the grass to grow for the cattle”;135:6, 7—“Whatsoever Jehovah pleased, that hath he done, In heaven and in earth, in the seas and in all deeps ... vapors ... lightnings ... wind”;Mat. 5:45—“maketh his sun to rise ... sendeth rain”;Ps. 104:16—“The trees of Jehovah are filled”—are planted and tended by God as carefully as those which come under human cultivation;cf.Mat. 6:30—“if God so clothe the grass of the field.”(c)Ps. 104:21, 28—“young lions roar ... seek their food from God ... that thou givest them they gather”;Mat. 6:26—“birds of the heaven ... your heavenly Father feedeth them”;10:29—“two sparrows ... not one of them shall fall on the ground without your Father.”(d)Job 12:23—“He increaseth the nations, and he destroyeth them: He enlargeth the nations, and he leadeth them captive”;Ps. 22:28—“the kingdom is Jehovah's; And he is the ruler over the nations”;66:7—“He ruleth by his might for ever; His eyes observe the nations”;Acts 17:26—“made of one every nation of men to dwell on all the face of the earth, having determined their appointed seasons, and the bounds of their habitation”(instance Palestine, Greece, England).(e)1 Sam. 16:1—“fill thy horn with oil, and go: I will send thee to Jesse the Bethlehemite; for I have provided me a king among his sons”;Ps. 139:16—“Thine eyes did see mine unformed substance, And in thy book were all my members written”;Is. 45:5—“I will gird thee, though thou hast not known me”;Jer. 1:5—“Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee ... sanctified thee ... appointed thee”;Gal. 1:15, 16—“God, who separated me, even from my mother's womb, and called me through his grace, to reveal his Son in me, that I might preach him among the Gentiles.”(f)Ps. 75:6, 7—“neither from the east, nor from the west, Nor yet from the south cometh lifting up. But God is the judge, He putteth down one, and lifteth up another”;Luke 1:52—“He hath put down princes from their thrones, And hath exalted them of low degree.”(g)Prov. 16:33—“The lot is cast into the lap; But the whole disposing thereof is of Jehovah”;Mat. 10:30—“the very hairs of your head are all numbered.”(h)Ps. 4:8—“In peace will I both lay me down and sleep; For thou, Jehovah, alone makest me dwell in safety”;5:12—“thou wilt compass him with favor as with a shield”;63:8—“Thy right hand upholdeth me”;121:3—“He that keepeth thee will not slumber”;Rom. 8:28—“to them that love God all things work together for good.”(i)Gen. 22:8, 14—“God will provide himself the lamb ... Jehovah-jireh”(marg.: that is,“Jehovah will see,”or“provide”);Deut. 8:3—“man doth not live by bread only, but by every thing that proceedeth out of the mouth of Jehovah doth man live”;Phil. 4:19—“my God shall supply every need of yours.”(j)Ps. 68:10—“Thou, O God, didst prepare of thy goodness for the poor”;Is. 64:4—“neither hath the eye seen a God besides thee, who worketh for him that waiteth for him”;Mat. 6:8—“your Father knoweth what things ye have need of, before ye ask him”;32, 33—“all these things shall be added unto you.”(k)Ps. 7:12, 13—“If a man turn not, he will whet his sword; He hath bent his bow and made it ready; He hath also prepared for him the instruments of death; He maketh his arrows fiery shafts”;11:6—“Upon the wicked he will rain snares; Fire and brimstone and burning wind shall be the portion of their cup.”The statements of Scripture with regard to God's providence are strikingly confirmed by recent studies in physiography. In the early stages of human development man was almost wholly subject to nature, and environment was a determining factor in his progress. This is the element of truth in Buckle's view. But Buckle ignored the fact that, as civilization advanced, ideas, at least at times, played a greater part than environment. Thermopylæ cannot be explained by climate. In the later stages of human development, nature is largely subject to man, and environment counts for comparatively little.“There shall be no Alps!”says Napoleon. Charles Kingsley:[pg 422]“The spirit of ancient tragedy was man conquered by circumstance; the spirit of modern tragedy is man conquering circumstance.”Yet many national characteristics can be attributed to physical surroundings, and so far as this is the case they are due to the ordering of God's providence. Man's need of fresh water leads him to rivers,—hence the original location of London. Commerce requires seaports,—hence New York. The need of defense leads man to bluffs and hills,—hence Jerusalem, Athens, Rome, Edinburgh. These places of defense became also places of worship and of appeal to God.Goldwin Smith, in his Lectures and Essays, maintains that national characteristics are not congenital, but are the result of environment. The greatness of Rome and the greatness of England have been due to position. The Romans owed their successes to being at first less warlike than their neighbors. They were traders in the centre of the Italian seacoast, and had to depend on discipline to make headway against marauders on the surrounding hills. Only when drawn into foreign conquest did the ascendency of the military spirit become complete, and then the military spirit brought despotism as its natural penalty. Brought into contact with varied races, Rome was led to the founding of colonies. She adopted and assimilated the nations which she conquered, and in governing them learned organization and law.Parcere subjectiswas her rule, as well asdebellare superbos. In a similiar manner Goldwin Smith maintains that the greatness of England is due to position. Britain being an island, only a bold and enterprising race could settle it. Maritime migration strengthened freedom. Insular position gave freedom from invasion. Isolation however gave rise to arrogance and self-assertion. The island became a natural centre of commerce. There is a steadiness of political progress which would have been impossible upon the continent. Yet consolidation was tardy, owing to the fact that Great Britain consists ofseveralislands. Scotland was always liberal, and Ireland foredoomed to subjection.Isaac Taylor, Spirit of Hebrew Poetry, has a valuable chapter on Palestine as the providential theatre of divine revelation. A little land, yet a sample-land of all lands, and a thoroughfare between the greatest lands of antiquity, it was fitted by God to receive and to communicate his truth. George Adam Smith's Historical Geography of the Holy Land is a repertory of information on this subject. Stanley, Life and Letters, 1:269-271, treats of Greek landscape and history. Shaler, Interpretation of Nature, sees such difference between Greek curiosity and search for causes on the one hand, and Roman indifference to scientific explanation of facts on the other, that he cannot think of the Greeks and the Romans as cognate peoples. He believes that Italy was first peopled by Etrurians, a Semitic race from Africa, and that from them the Romans descended. The Romans had as little of the spirit of the naturalist as had the Hebrews. The Jews and the Romans originated and propagated Christianity, but they had no interest in science.On God's pre-arrangement of the physical conditions of national life, striking suggestions may be found in Shaler, Nature and Man in America. Instance the settlement of Massachusetts Bay between 1629 and 1639, the only decade in which such men as John Winthrop could be found and the only one in which they actually emigrated from England. After 1639 there was too much to do at home, and with Charles II the spirit which animated the Pilgrims no longer existed in England. The colonists builded better than they knew, for though they sought a place to worship God themselves, they had no idea of giving this same religious liberty to others. R. E. Thompson, The Hand of God in American History, holds that the American Republic would long since have broken in pieces by its own weight and bulk, if the invention of steam-boat in 1807, railroad locomotive in 1829, telegraph in 1837, and telephone in 1877, had not bound the remote parts of the country together. A woman invented the reaper by combining the action of a row of scissors in cutting. This was as early as 1835. Only in 1855 the competition on the Emperor's farm at Compiègne gave supremacy to the reaper. Without it farming would have been impossible during our civil war, when our men were in the field and women and boys had to gather in the crops.B. A government and control extending to the free actions of men—(a) to men's free acts in general; (b) to the sinful acts of men also.(a)Ex. 12:36—“Jehovah gave the people favor in the sight of the Egyptians, so that they let them have what they asked. And they despoiled the Egyptians”;1 Sam. 24:18—“Jehovah had delivered me up into thy hand”(Saul to David);Ps. 33:14, 15—“He looketh forth Upon all the inhabitants of the earth, He that fashioneth the hearts of them all”(i. e., equally, one as well as another);Prov. 16:1—“The plans of the heart belong to man; But the answer of the tongue is from Jehovah”;19:21—“There are many devices in a man's heart; But the counsel of Jehovah,[pg 423]that shall stand”;20:24—“A man's goings are of Jehovah; How then can man understand his way?”21:1—“The king's heart is in the hand of Jehovah as the watercourses: He turneth it whithersoever he will”(i. e., as easily as the rivulets of the eastern fields are turned by the slightest motion of the hand or the foot of the husbandman);Jer. 10:23—“O Jehovah, I know that the way of man is not in himself; it is not in man that walketh to direct his steps”;Phil. 2:13—“it is God who worketh in you both to will and to work, for his good pleasure”;Eph. 2:10—“we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God afore prepared that we should walk in them”;James 4:13-15—“If the Lord will, we shall both live, and do this or that.”(b)2 Sam. 16:10—“because Jehovah hath said unto him[Shimei]:Curse David”;24:1—“the anger of Jehovah was kindled against Israel, and he moved David against them, saying, Go, number Israel and Judah”;Rom. 11:32—“God hath shut up all unto disobedience, that he might have mercy upon all”;2 Thess. 2:11, 12—“God sendeth them a working of error, that they should believe a lie: that they all might be judged who believed not the truth, but had pleasure in unrighteousness.”Henry Ward Beecher:“There seems to be no order in the movements of the bees of a hive, but the honey-comb shows that there was a plan in them all.”John Hunter compared his own brain to a hive in which there was a great deal of buzzing and apparent disorder, while yet a real order underlay it all.“As bees gather their stores of sweets against a time of need, but are colonized by man's superior intelligence for his own purposes, so men plan and work yet are overruled by infinite Wisdom for his own glory.”Dr. Deems:“The world is wide In Time and Tide, And God is guide: Then do not hurry. That man is blest Who does his best And leaves the rest: Then do not worry.”See Bruce, Providential Order, 183sq.; Providence in the Individual Life, 231sq.God's providence with respect to men's evil acts is described in Scripture as of four sorts:(a) Preventive,—God by his providence prevents sin which would otherwise be committed. That he thus prevents sin is to be regarded as matter, not of obligation, but of grace.Gen. 20:6—Of Abimelech:“I also withheld thee from sinning against me”;31:24—“And God came to Laban the Syrian in a dream of the night, and said unto him, Take heed to thyself that thou speak not to Jacob either good or bad”;Psalm 19:13—“Keep back thy servant also from presumptuous sins; Let them not have dominion over me”;Hosea 2:6—“Behold, I will hedge up thy way with thorns, and I will build a wall against her, that she shall not find her paths”—here the“thorns”and the“wall”may represent the restraints and sufferings by which God mercifully checks the fatal pursuit of sin (see Annotated Par. Biblein loco). Parents, government, church, traditions, customs, laws, age, disease, death, are all of them preventive influences. Man sometimes finds himself on the brink of a precipice of sin, and strong temptation hurries him on to make the fatal leap. Suddenly every nerve relaxes, all desire for the evil thing is gone, and he recoils from the fearful brink over which he was just now going to plunge. God has interfered by the voice of conscience and the Spirit. This too is a part of his preventive providence. Men at sixty years of age are eight times less likely to commit crime than at the age of twenty-five. Passion has subsided; fear of punishment has increased. The manager of a great department store, when asked what could prevent its absorbing all the trade of the city, replied:“Death!”Death certainly limits aggregations of property, and so constitutes a means of God's preventive providence. In the life of John G. Paton, the rain sent by God prevented the natives from murdering him and taking his goods.(b) Permissive,—God permits men to cherish and to manifest the evil dispositions of their hearts. God's permissive providence is simply the negative act of withholding impediments from the path of the sinner, instead of preventing his sin by the exercise of divine power. It implies no ignorance, passivity, or indulgence, but consists with hatred of the sin and determination to punish it.2 Chron. 32:31—“God left him[Hezekiah],to try him, that he might know all that was in his heart”;cf.Deut. 8:2—“that he might humble thee, to prove thee, to know what was in thine heart.”Ps. 17:13, 14—“Deliver my soul from the wicked, who is thy sword, from men who are thy hand, O Jehovah”;Ps. 81:12, 13—“So I let them go after the stubbornness of their heart, That they might walk in their own counsels. Oh that my people would hearken unto me!”Is. 53:4, 10—“Surely he hath borne our griefs.... Yet it pleased Jehovah to bruise him.”Hosea 4:17—“Ephraim[pg 424]Ephraim is joined to idols; let him alone”;Acts 14:16—“who in the generations gone by suffered all the nations to walk in their own ways”;Rom. 1:24, 28—“God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts unto uncleanness... God gave them up unto a reprobate mind, to do those things which are not fitting”;3:25—“to show his righteousness, because of the passing over of the sins done aforetime, in the forbearance of God.”To this head of permissive providence is possibly to be referred1 Sam. 18:10—“an evil spirit from God came mightily upon Saul.”As the Hebrew writers saw in second causes the operation of the great first Cause, and said:“The God of glory thundereth”(Ps. 29:3), so, because even the acts of the wicked entered into God's plan, the Hebrew writers sometimes represented God as doing what he merely permitted finite spirits to do. In2 Sam. 24:1, God moves David to number Israel, but in1 Chron. 21:1the same thing is referred to Satan. God's providence in these cases, however, may be directive as well as permissive.Tennyson, The Higher Pantheism:“God is law, say the wise; O Soul, and let us rejoice, For if he thunder by law the thunder is yet his voice.”Fisher, Nature and Method of Revelation, 56—“The clear separation of God's efficiency from God's permissive act was reserved to a later day. All emphasis was in the Old Testament laid upon the sovereign power of God.”Coleridge, in his Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit, letter II, speaks of“the habit, universal with the Hebrew doctors, of referring all excellent or extraordinary things to the great first Cause, without mention of the proximate and instrumental causes—a striking illustration of which may be found by comparing the narratives of the same events in the Psalms and in the historical books.... The distinction between the providential and the miraculous did not enter into their forms of thinking—at any rate, not into their mode of conveying their thoughts.”The woman who had been slandered rebelled when told that God had permitted it for her good; she maintained that Satan had inspired her accuser; she needed to learn that God had permitted the work of Satan.(c) Directive,—God directs the evil acts of men to ends unforeseen and unintended by the agents. When evil is in the heart and will certainly come out, God orders its flow in one direction rather than in another, so that its course can be best controlled and least harm may result. This is sometimes called overruling providence.Gen. 50:20—“as for you, ye meant evil against me; but God meant it for good, to bring to pass, as it is this day, to save much people alive”;Ps. 76:10—“the wrath of man shall praise thee: The residue of wrath shalt thou gird upon thee”—put on as an ornament—clothe thyself with it for thine own glory;Is. 10:5—“Ho Assyrian, the rod of mine anger, and the staff in whose hand is mine indignation”;John 13:27—“What thou doest, do quickly”—do in a particular way what is actually being done (Westcott, Bib. Com.,in loco);Acts 4:27, 28—“against thy holy Servant Jesus, whom thou didst anoint, both Herod and Pontius Pilate, with the Gentiles and the peoples of Israel, were gathered together, to do whatsoever thy hand and thy counsel fore-ordained to come to pass.”To this head of directive providence should probably be referred the passages with regard to Pharaoh inEx. 4:21—“I will harden his heart, and he will not let the people go”;7:13—“and Pharaoh's heart was hardened”;8:15—“he hardened his heart”—i. e., Pharaoh hardened his own heart. Here the controlling agency of God did not interfere with the liberty of Pharaoh or oblige him to sin; but in judgment for his previous cruelty and impiety God withdrew the external restraints which had hitherto kept his sin within bounds, and placed him in circumstances which would have influenced to right action a well-disposed mind, but which God foresaw would lead a disposition like Pharaoh's to the peculiar course of wickedness which he actually pursued.God hardened Pharaoh's heart, then, first, by permitting him to harden his own heart, God being the author of his sin only in the sense that he is the author of a free being who is himself the direct author of his sin; secondly, by giving to him the means of enlightenment, Pharaoh's very opportunities being perverted by him into occasions of more virulent wickedness, and good resisted being thus made to result in greater evil; thirdly, by judicially forsaking Pharaoh, when it became manifest that he would not do God's will, and thus making it morally certain, though not necessary, that he would do evil; and fourthly, by so directing Pharaoh's surroundings that his sin would manifest itself in one way rather than in another. Sin is like the lava of the volcano, which will certainly come out, but which God directs in its course down the mountain-side so that it will do least harm. The gravitation downward is due to man's evil will; the direction to this side or to that is due to God's providence. SeeRom. 9:17, 18—“For this very purpose did I raise thee up, that I might show in thee my power, and that my name might be published abroad in all the earth. So then he hath mercy on whom he will, and whom he will he hardeneth.”Thus the very passions which[pg 425]excite men to rebel against God are made completely subservient to his purposes: see Annotated Paragraph Bible, onPs. 76:10.God hardens Pharaoh's heart only after all the earlier plagues have been sent. Pharaoh had hardened his own heart before. God hardens no man's heart who has not first hardened it himself. Crane, Religion of To-morrow, 140—“Jehovah is never said to harden the heart of a good man, or of one who is set to do righteousness. It is always those who are bent on evil whom God hardens. Pharaoh hardens his own heart before the Lord is said to harden it. Nature is God, and it is the nature of human beings to harden when they resist softening influences.”The Watchman, Dec. 5, 1901:11—“God decreed to Pharaoh what Pharaoh had chosen for himself. Persistence in certain inclinations and volitions awakens within the body and soul forces which are not under the control of the will, and which drive the man on in the way he has chosen. After a time nature hardens the hearts of men to do evil.”(d) Determinative,—God determines the bounds reached by the evil passions of his creatures, and the measure of their effects. Since moral evil is a germ capable of indefinite expansion, God's determining the measure of its growth does not alter its character or involve God's complicity with the perverse wills which cherish it.Job 1:12—“And Jehovah said unto Satan, Behold, all that he hath is in thy power; only upon himself put not forth thy hand”;2:6—“Behold, he is in thy hand; only spare his life”;Ps. 124:2—“If it had not been Jehovah who was on our side, when men rose up against us; Then had they swallowed us up alive”;1 Cor. 10:13—“will not suffer you to be tempted above that ye are able; but will with the temptation make also the way of escape, that ye may be able to endure it”;2 Thess. 2:7—“For the mystery of lawlessness doth already work; only there is one that restraineth now, until he be taken out of the way”;Rev. 20:2, 3—“And he laid hold on the dragon, the old serpent, which is the Devil and Satan, and bound him for a thousand years.”Pepper, Outlines of Syst. Theol., 76—The union of God's will and man's will is“such that, while in one view all can be ascribed to God, in another all can be ascribed to the creature. But how God and the creature are united in operation is doubtless known and knowable only to God. A very dim analogy is furnished in the union of the soul and body in men. The hand retains its own physical laws, yet is obedient to the human will. This theory recognizes the veracity of consciousness in its witness to personal freedom, and yet the completeness of God's control of both the bad and the good. Free beings are ruled, but are ruled as free and in their freedom. The freedom is not sacrificed to the control. The two coëxist, each in its integrity. Any doctrine which does not allow this is false to Scripture and destructive of religion.”2. Rational proof.A. Argumentsa priorifrom the divine attributes. (a) From the immutability of God. This makes it certain that he will execute his eternal plan of the universe and its history. But the execution of this plan involves not only creation and preservation, but also providence. (b) From the benevolence of God. This renders it certain that he will care for the intelligent universe he has created. What it was worth his while to create, it is worth his while to care for. But this care is providence. (c) From the justice of God. As the source of moral law, God must assure the vindication of law by administering justice in the universe and punishing the rebellious. But this administration of justice is providence.For heathen ideas of providence, see Cicero, De Natura Deorum, 11:30, where Balbus speaks of the existence of the gods as that,“quo concesso, confitendum est eorum consilio mundum administrari.”Epictetus, sec. 41—“The principal and most important duty in religion is to possess your mind with just and becoming notions of the gods—to believe that there are such supreme beings, and that they govern and dispose of all the affairs of the world with a just and good providence.”Marcus Antoninus:“If there are no gods, or if they have no regard for human affairs, why should I desire to live in a world without gods and without a providence? But gods undoubtedly there are, and they regard human affairs.”See also Bib. Sac., 16:374. As we shall see, however, many of the heathen writers believed in a general, rather than in a particular, providence.[pg 426]On the argument for providence derived from God's benevolence, see Appleton, Works, 1:146—“Is indolence more consistent with God's majesty than action would be? The happiness of creatures is a good. Does it honor God to say that he is indifferent to that which he knows to be good and valuable? Even if the world had come into existence without his agency, it would become God's moral character to pay some attention to creatures so numerous and so susceptible to pleasure and pain, especially when he might have so great and favorable an influence on their moral condition.”John 5:17—“My Father worketh even until now, and I work”—is as applicable to providence as to preservation.The complexity of God's providential arrangements may be illustrated by Tyndall's explanation of the fact that heartsease does not grow in the neighborhood of English villages: 1. In English villages dogs run loose. 2. Where dogs run loose, cats must stay at home. 3. Where cats stay at home, field mice abound. 4. Where field mice abound, the nests of bumble-bees are destroyed. 5. Where bumble-bees' nests are destroyed, there is no fertilization of pollen. Therefore, where dogs go loose, no heartsease grows.B. Argumentsa posteriorifrom the facts of nature and of history. (a) The outward lot of individuals and nations is not wholly in their own hands, but is in many acknowledged respects subject to the disposal of a higher power. (b) The observed moral order of the world, although imperfect, cannot be accounted for without recognition of a divine providence. Vice is discouraged and virtue rewarded, in ways which are beyond the power of mere nature. There must be a governing mind and will, and this mind and will must be the mind and will of God.The birthplace of individuals and of nations, the natural powers with which they are endowed, the opportunities and immunities they enjoy, are beyond their own control. A man's destiny for time and for eternity may be practically decided for him by his birth in a Christian home, rather than in a tenement-house at the Five Points, or in a kraal of the Hottentots. Progress largely depends upon“variety of environment”(H. Spencer). But this variety of environment is in great part independent of our own efforts.“There's a Divinity that shapes our ends, Rough hew them how we will.”Shakespeare here expounds human consciousness.“Man proposes and God disposes”has become a proverb. Experience teaches that success and failure are not wholly due to us. Men often labor and lose; they consult and nothing ensues; they“embattle and are broken.”Providence is not always on the side of the heaviest battalions. Not arms but ideas have decided the fate of the world—as Xerxes found at Thermopylæ, and Napoleon at Waterloo. Great movements are generally begun without consciousness of their greatness.Cf.Is. 42:16—“I will bring the blind by a way that they know not”;1 Cor. 5:37, 38—“thou sowest ... a bare grain ... but God giveth it a body even as it pleased him.”The deed returns to the doer, and character shapes destiny. This is true in the long run. Eternity will show the truth of the maxim. But here in time a sufficient number of apparent exceptions are permitted to render possible a moral probation. If evil were always immediately followed by penalty, righteousness would have a compelling power upon the will and the highest virtue would be impossible. Job's friends accuse Job of acting upon this principle. The Hebrew children deny its truth, when they say:“But if not”—even if God does not deliver us—“we will not serve thy gods, nor worship the golden image which thou hast set up”(Dan. 3:18.)Martineau, Seat of Authority, 298—“Through some misdirection or infirmity, most of the larger agencies in history have failed to reach their own ideal, yet have accomplished revolutions greater and more beneficent; the conquests of Alexander, the empire of Rome, the Crusades, the ecclesiastical persecutions, the monastic asceticisms, the missionary zeal of Christendom, have all played a momentous part in the drama of the world, yet a part which is a surprise to each. All this shows the controlling presence of a Reason and a Will transcendent and divine.”Kidd, Social Evolution, 99, declares that the progress of the race has taken place only under conditions which have had no sanction from the reason of the great proportion of the individuals who submit to them. He concludes that a rational religion is a scientific impossibility, and that the function of religion is to provide a super-rational sanction for social progress. We prefer to say that Providence pushes the race forward even against its will.James Russell Lowell, Letters, 2:51, suggests that God's calm control of the forces[pg 427]of the universe, both physical and mental, should give us confidence when evil seems impending:“How many times have I seen the fire-engines of church and state clanging and lumbering along to put out—a false alarm! And when the heavens are cloudy, what a glare can be cast by a burning shanty!”See Sermon on Providence in Political Revolutions, in Farrar's Science and Theology, 228. On the moral order of the world, notwithstanding its imperfections, see Butler, Analogy, Bohn's ed., 98; King, in Baptist Review, 1884:202-222.
1. Scriptural Proof.The Scripture witnesses toA. A general providential government and control (a) over the universe at large; (b) over the physical world; (c) over the brute creation; (d) over the affairs of nations; (e) over man's birth and lot in life; (f) over the outward successes and failures of men's lives; (g) over things seemingly accidental or insignificant; (h) in the protection of the righteous; (i) in the supply of the wants of God's people; (j) in the arrangement of answers to prayer; (k) in the exposure and punishment of the wicked.(a)Ps. 103:19—“his kingdom ruleth over all”;Dan. 4:35—“doeth according to his will in the army of heaven, and among the inhabitants of the earth”;Eph. 1:11—“worketh all things after the counsel of his will.”(b)Job 37:5, 10—“God thundereth ... By the breath of God ice is given”;Ps. 104:14—“causeth the grass to grow for the cattle”;135:6, 7—“Whatsoever Jehovah pleased, that hath he done, In heaven and in earth, in the seas and in all deeps ... vapors ... lightnings ... wind”;Mat. 5:45—“maketh his sun to rise ... sendeth rain”;Ps. 104:16—“The trees of Jehovah are filled”—are planted and tended by God as carefully as those which come under human cultivation;cf.Mat. 6:30—“if God so clothe the grass of the field.”(c)Ps. 104:21, 28—“young lions roar ... seek their food from God ... that thou givest them they gather”;Mat. 6:26—“birds of the heaven ... your heavenly Father feedeth them”;10:29—“two sparrows ... not one of them shall fall on the ground without your Father.”(d)Job 12:23—“He increaseth the nations, and he destroyeth them: He enlargeth the nations, and he leadeth them captive”;Ps. 22:28—“the kingdom is Jehovah's; And he is the ruler over the nations”;66:7—“He ruleth by his might for ever; His eyes observe the nations”;Acts 17:26—“made of one every nation of men to dwell on all the face of the earth, having determined their appointed seasons, and the bounds of their habitation”(instance Palestine, Greece, England).(e)1 Sam. 16:1—“fill thy horn with oil, and go: I will send thee to Jesse the Bethlehemite; for I have provided me a king among his sons”;Ps. 139:16—“Thine eyes did see mine unformed substance, And in thy book were all my members written”;Is. 45:5—“I will gird thee, though thou hast not known me”;Jer. 1:5—“Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee ... sanctified thee ... appointed thee”;Gal. 1:15, 16—“God, who separated me, even from my mother's womb, and called me through his grace, to reveal his Son in me, that I might preach him among the Gentiles.”(f)Ps. 75:6, 7—“neither from the east, nor from the west, Nor yet from the south cometh lifting up. But God is the judge, He putteth down one, and lifteth up another”;Luke 1:52—“He hath put down princes from their thrones, And hath exalted them of low degree.”(g)Prov. 16:33—“The lot is cast into the lap; But the whole disposing thereof is of Jehovah”;Mat. 10:30—“the very hairs of your head are all numbered.”(h)Ps. 4:8—“In peace will I both lay me down and sleep; For thou, Jehovah, alone makest me dwell in safety”;5:12—“thou wilt compass him with favor as with a shield”;63:8—“Thy right hand upholdeth me”;121:3—“He that keepeth thee will not slumber”;Rom. 8:28—“to them that love God all things work together for good.”(i)Gen. 22:8, 14—“God will provide himself the lamb ... Jehovah-jireh”(marg.: that is,“Jehovah will see,”or“provide”);Deut. 8:3—“man doth not live by bread only, but by every thing that proceedeth out of the mouth of Jehovah doth man live”;Phil. 4:19—“my God shall supply every need of yours.”(j)Ps. 68:10—“Thou, O God, didst prepare of thy goodness for the poor”;Is. 64:4—“neither hath the eye seen a God besides thee, who worketh for him that waiteth for him”;Mat. 6:8—“your Father knoweth what things ye have need of, before ye ask him”;32, 33—“all these things shall be added unto you.”(k)Ps. 7:12, 13—“If a man turn not, he will whet his sword; He hath bent his bow and made it ready; He hath also prepared for him the instruments of death; He maketh his arrows fiery shafts”;11:6—“Upon the wicked he will rain snares; Fire and brimstone and burning wind shall be the portion of their cup.”The statements of Scripture with regard to God's providence are strikingly confirmed by recent studies in physiography. In the early stages of human development man was almost wholly subject to nature, and environment was a determining factor in his progress. This is the element of truth in Buckle's view. But Buckle ignored the fact that, as civilization advanced, ideas, at least at times, played a greater part than environment. Thermopylæ cannot be explained by climate. In the later stages of human development, nature is largely subject to man, and environment counts for comparatively little.“There shall be no Alps!”says Napoleon. Charles Kingsley:[pg 422]“The spirit of ancient tragedy was man conquered by circumstance; the spirit of modern tragedy is man conquering circumstance.”Yet many national characteristics can be attributed to physical surroundings, and so far as this is the case they are due to the ordering of God's providence. Man's need of fresh water leads him to rivers,—hence the original location of London. Commerce requires seaports,—hence New York. The need of defense leads man to bluffs and hills,—hence Jerusalem, Athens, Rome, Edinburgh. These places of defense became also places of worship and of appeal to God.Goldwin Smith, in his Lectures and Essays, maintains that national characteristics are not congenital, but are the result of environment. The greatness of Rome and the greatness of England have been due to position. The Romans owed their successes to being at first less warlike than their neighbors. They were traders in the centre of the Italian seacoast, and had to depend on discipline to make headway against marauders on the surrounding hills. Only when drawn into foreign conquest did the ascendency of the military spirit become complete, and then the military spirit brought despotism as its natural penalty. Brought into contact with varied races, Rome was led to the founding of colonies. She adopted and assimilated the nations which she conquered, and in governing them learned organization and law.Parcere subjectiswas her rule, as well asdebellare superbos. In a similiar manner Goldwin Smith maintains that the greatness of England is due to position. Britain being an island, only a bold and enterprising race could settle it. Maritime migration strengthened freedom. Insular position gave freedom from invasion. Isolation however gave rise to arrogance and self-assertion. The island became a natural centre of commerce. There is a steadiness of political progress which would have been impossible upon the continent. Yet consolidation was tardy, owing to the fact that Great Britain consists ofseveralislands. Scotland was always liberal, and Ireland foredoomed to subjection.Isaac Taylor, Spirit of Hebrew Poetry, has a valuable chapter on Palestine as the providential theatre of divine revelation. A little land, yet a sample-land of all lands, and a thoroughfare between the greatest lands of antiquity, it was fitted by God to receive and to communicate his truth. George Adam Smith's Historical Geography of the Holy Land is a repertory of information on this subject. Stanley, Life and Letters, 1:269-271, treats of Greek landscape and history. Shaler, Interpretation of Nature, sees such difference between Greek curiosity and search for causes on the one hand, and Roman indifference to scientific explanation of facts on the other, that he cannot think of the Greeks and the Romans as cognate peoples. He believes that Italy was first peopled by Etrurians, a Semitic race from Africa, and that from them the Romans descended. The Romans had as little of the spirit of the naturalist as had the Hebrews. The Jews and the Romans originated and propagated Christianity, but they had no interest in science.On God's pre-arrangement of the physical conditions of national life, striking suggestions may be found in Shaler, Nature and Man in America. Instance the settlement of Massachusetts Bay between 1629 and 1639, the only decade in which such men as John Winthrop could be found and the only one in which they actually emigrated from England. After 1639 there was too much to do at home, and with Charles II the spirit which animated the Pilgrims no longer existed in England. The colonists builded better than they knew, for though they sought a place to worship God themselves, they had no idea of giving this same religious liberty to others. R. E. Thompson, The Hand of God in American History, holds that the American Republic would long since have broken in pieces by its own weight and bulk, if the invention of steam-boat in 1807, railroad locomotive in 1829, telegraph in 1837, and telephone in 1877, had not bound the remote parts of the country together. A woman invented the reaper by combining the action of a row of scissors in cutting. This was as early as 1835. Only in 1855 the competition on the Emperor's farm at Compiègne gave supremacy to the reaper. Without it farming would have been impossible during our civil war, when our men were in the field and women and boys had to gather in the crops.B. A government and control extending to the free actions of men—(a) to men's free acts in general; (b) to the sinful acts of men also.(a)Ex. 12:36—“Jehovah gave the people favor in the sight of the Egyptians, so that they let them have what they asked. And they despoiled the Egyptians”;1 Sam. 24:18—“Jehovah had delivered me up into thy hand”(Saul to David);Ps. 33:14, 15—“He looketh forth Upon all the inhabitants of the earth, He that fashioneth the hearts of them all”(i. e., equally, one as well as another);Prov. 16:1—“The plans of the heart belong to man; But the answer of the tongue is from Jehovah”;19:21—“There are many devices in a man's heart; But the counsel of Jehovah,[pg 423]that shall stand”;20:24—“A man's goings are of Jehovah; How then can man understand his way?”21:1—“The king's heart is in the hand of Jehovah as the watercourses: He turneth it whithersoever he will”(i. e., as easily as the rivulets of the eastern fields are turned by the slightest motion of the hand or the foot of the husbandman);Jer. 10:23—“O Jehovah, I know that the way of man is not in himself; it is not in man that walketh to direct his steps”;Phil. 2:13—“it is God who worketh in you both to will and to work, for his good pleasure”;Eph. 2:10—“we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God afore prepared that we should walk in them”;James 4:13-15—“If the Lord will, we shall both live, and do this or that.”(b)2 Sam. 16:10—“because Jehovah hath said unto him[Shimei]:Curse David”;24:1—“the anger of Jehovah was kindled against Israel, and he moved David against them, saying, Go, number Israel and Judah”;Rom. 11:32—“God hath shut up all unto disobedience, that he might have mercy upon all”;2 Thess. 2:11, 12—“God sendeth them a working of error, that they should believe a lie: that they all might be judged who believed not the truth, but had pleasure in unrighteousness.”Henry Ward Beecher:“There seems to be no order in the movements of the bees of a hive, but the honey-comb shows that there was a plan in them all.”John Hunter compared his own brain to a hive in which there was a great deal of buzzing and apparent disorder, while yet a real order underlay it all.“As bees gather their stores of sweets against a time of need, but are colonized by man's superior intelligence for his own purposes, so men plan and work yet are overruled by infinite Wisdom for his own glory.”Dr. Deems:“The world is wide In Time and Tide, And God is guide: Then do not hurry. That man is blest Who does his best And leaves the rest: Then do not worry.”See Bruce, Providential Order, 183sq.; Providence in the Individual Life, 231sq.God's providence with respect to men's evil acts is described in Scripture as of four sorts:(a) Preventive,—God by his providence prevents sin which would otherwise be committed. That he thus prevents sin is to be regarded as matter, not of obligation, but of grace.Gen. 20:6—Of Abimelech:“I also withheld thee from sinning against me”;31:24—“And God came to Laban the Syrian in a dream of the night, and said unto him, Take heed to thyself that thou speak not to Jacob either good or bad”;Psalm 19:13—“Keep back thy servant also from presumptuous sins; Let them not have dominion over me”;Hosea 2:6—“Behold, I will hedge up thy way with thorns, and I will build a wall against her, that she shall not find her paths”—here the“thorns”and the“wall”may represent the restraints and sufferings by which God mercifully checks the fatal pursuit of sin (see Annotated Par. Biblein loco). Parents, government, church, traditions, customs, laws, age, disease, death, are all of them preventive influences. Man sometimes finds himself on the brink of a precipice of sin, and strong temptation hurries him on to make the fatal leap. Suddenly every nerve relaxes, all desire for the evil thing is gone, and he recoils from the fearful brink over which he was just now going to plunge. God has interfered by the voice of conscience and the Spirit. This too is a part of his preventive providence. Men at sixty years of age are eight times less likely to commit crime than at the age of twenty-five. Passion has subsided; fear of punishment has increased. The manager of a great department store, when asked what could prevent its absorbing all the trade of the city, replied:“Death!”Death certainly limits aggregations of property, and so constitutes a means of God's preventive providence. In the life of John G. Paton, the rain sent by God prevented the natives from murdering him and taking his goods.(b) Permissive,—God permits men to cherish and to manifest the evil dispositions of their hearts. God's permissive providence is simply the negative act of withholding impediments from the path of the sinner, instead of preventing his sin by the exercise of divine power. It implies no ignorance, passivity, or indulgence, but consists with hatred of the sin and determination to punish it.2 Chron. 32:31—“God left him[Hezekiah],to try him, that he might know all that was in his heart”;cf.Deut. 8:2—“that he might humble thee, to prove thee, to know what was in thine heart.”Ps. 17:13, 14—“Deliver my soul from the wicked, who is thy sword, from men who are thy hand, O Jehovah”;Ps. 81:12, 13—“So I let them go after the stubbornness of their heart, That they might walk in their own counsels. Oh that my people would hearken unto me!”Is. 53:4, 10—“Surely he hath borne our griefs.... Yet it pleased Jehovah to bruise him.”Hosea 4:17—“Ephraim[pg 424]Ephraim is joined to idols; let him alone”;Acts 14:16—“who in the generations gone by suffered all the nations to walk in their own ways”;Rom. 1:24, 28—“God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts unto uncleanness... God gave them up unto a reprobate mind, to do those things which are not fitting”;3:25—“to show his righteousness, because of the passing over of the sins done aforetime, in the forbearance of God.”To this head of permissive providence is possibly to be referred1 Sam. 18:10—“an evil spirit from God came mightily upon Saul.”As the Hebrew writers saw in second causes the operation of the great first Cause, and said:“The God of glory thundereth”(Ps. 29:3), so, because even the acts of the wicked entered into God's plan, the Hebrew writers sometimes represented God as doing what he merely permitted finite spirits to do. In2 Sam. 24:1, God moves David to number Israel, but in1 Chron. 21:1the same thing is referred to Satan. God's providence in these cases, however, may be directive as well as permissive.Tennyson, The Higher Pantheism:“God is law, say the wise; O Soul, and let us rejoice, For if he thunder by law the thunder is yet his voice.”Fisher, Nature and Method of Revelation, 56—“The clear separation of God's efficiency from God's permissive act was reserved to a later day. All emphasis was in the Old Testament laid upon the sovereign power of God.”Coleridge, in his Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit, letter II, speaks of“the habit, universal with the Hebrew doctors, of referring all excellent or extraordinary things to the great first Cause, without mention of the proximate and instrumental causes—a striking illustration of which may be found by comparing the narratives of the same events in the Psalms and in the historical books.... The distinction between the providential and the miraculous did not enter into their forms of thinking—at any rate, not into their mode of conveying their thoughts.”The woman who had been slandered rebelled when told that God had permitted it for her good; she maintained that Satan had inspired her accuser; she needed to learn that God had permitted the work of Satan.(c) Directive,—God directs the evil acts of men to ends unforeseen and unintended by the agents. When evil is in the heart and will certainly come out, God orders its flow in one direction rather than in another, so that its course can be best controlled and least harm may result. This is sometimes called overruling providence.Gen. 50:20—“as for you, ye meant evil against me; but God meant it for good, to bring to pass, as it is this day, to save much people alive”;Ps. 76:10—“the wrath of man shall praise thee: The residue of wrath shalt thou gird upon thee”—put on as an ornament—clothe thyself with it for thine own glory;Is. 10:5—“Ho Assyrian, the rod of mine anger, and the staff in whose hand is mine indignation”;John 13:27—“What thou doest, do quickly”—do in a particular way what is actually being done (Westcott, Bib. Com.,in loco);Acts 4:27, 28—“against thy holy Servant Jesus, whom thou didst anoint, both Herod and Pontius Pilate, with the Gentiles and the peoples of Israel, were gathered together, to do whatsoever thy hand and thy counsel fore-ordained to come to pass.”To this head of directive providence should probably be referred the passages with regard to Pharaoh inEx. 4:21—“I will harden his heart, and he will not let the people go”;7:13—“and Pharaoh's heart was hardened”;8:15—“he hardened his heart”—i. e., Pharaoh hardened his own heart. Here the controlling agency of God did not interfere with the liberty of Pharaoh or oblige him to sin; but in judgment for his previous cruelty and impiety God withdrew the external restraints which had hitherto kept his sin within bounds, and placed him in circumstances which would have influenced to right action a well-disposed mind, but which God foresaw would lead a disposition like Pharaoh's to the peculiar course of wickedness which he actually pursued.God hardened Pharaoh's heart, then, first, by permitting him to harden his own heart, God being the author of his sin only in the sense that he is the author of a free being who is himself the direct author of his sin; secondly, by giving to him the means of enlightenment, Pharaoh's very opportunities being perverted by him into occasions of more virulent wickedness, and good resisted being thus made to result in greater evil; thirdly, by judicially forsaking Pharaoh, when it became manifest that he would not do God's will, and thus making it morally certain, though not necessary, that he would do evil; and fourthly, by so directing Pharaoh's surroundings that his sin would manifest itself in one way rather than in another. Sin is like the lava of the volcano, which will certainly come out, but which God directs in its course down the mountain-side so that it will do least harm. The gravitation downward is due to man's evil will; the direction to this side or to that is due to God's providence. SeeRom. 9:17, 18—“For this very purpose did I raise thee up, that I might show in thee my power, and that my name might be published abroad in all the earth. So then he hath mercy on whom he will, and whom he will he hardeneth.”Thus the very passions which[pg 425]excite men to rebel against God are made completely subservient to his purposes: see Annotated Paragraph Bible, onPs. 76:10.God hardens Pharaoh's heart only after all the earlier plagues have been sent. Pharaoh had hardened his own heart before. God hardens no man's heart who has not first hardened it himself. Crane, Religion of To-morrow, 140—“Jehovah is never said to harden the heart of a good man, or of one who is set to do righteousness. It is always those who are bent on evil whom God hardens. Pharaoh hardens his own heart before the Lord is said to harden it. Nature is God, and it is the nature of human beings to harden when they resist softening influences.”The Watchman, Dec. 5, 1901:11—“God decreed to Pharaoh what Pharaoh had chosen for himself. Persistence in certain inclinations and volitions awakens within the body and soul forces which are not under the control of the will, and which drive the man on in the way he has chosen. After a time nature hardens the hearts of men to do evil.”(d) Determinative,—God determines the bounds reached by the evil passions of his creatures, and the measure of their effects. Since moral evil is a germ capable of indefinite expansion, God's determining the measure of its growth does not alter its character or involve God's complicity with the perverse wills which cherish it.Job 1:12—“And Jehovah said unto Satan, Behold, all that he hath is in thy power; only upon himself put not forth thy hand”;2:6—“Behold, he is in thy hand; only spare his life”;Ps. 124:2—“If it had not been Jehovah who was on our side, when men rose up against us; Then had they swallowed us up alive”;1 Cor. 10:13—“will not suffer you to be tempted above that ye are able; but will with the temptation make also the way of escape, that ye may be able to endure it”;2 Thess. 2:7—“For the mystery of lawlessness doth already work; only there is one that restraineth now, until he be taken out of the way”;Rev. 20:2, 3—“And he laid hold on the dragon, the old serpent, which is the Devil and Satan, and bound him for a thousand years.”Pepper, Outlines of Syst. Theol., 76—The union of God's will and man's will is“such that, while in one view all can be ascribed to God, in another all can be ascribed to the creature. But how God and the creature are united in operation is doubtless known and knowable only to God. A very dim analogy is furnished in the union of the soul and body in men. The hand retains its own physical laws, yet is obedient to the human will. This theory recognizes the veracity of consciousness in its witness to personal freedom, and yet the completeness of God's control of both the bad and the good. Free beings are ruled, but are ruled as free and in their freedom. The freedom is not sacrificed to the control. The two coëxist, each in its integrity. Any doctrine which does not allow this is false to Scripture and destructive of religion.”
The Scripture witnesses to
A. A general providential government and control (a) over the universe at large; (b) over the physical world; (c) over the brute creation; (d) over the affairs of nations; (e) over man's birth and lot in life; (f) over the outward successes and failures of men's lives; (g) over things seemingly accidental or insignificant; (h) in the protection of the righteous; (i) in the supply of the wants of God's people; (j) in the arrangement of answers to prayer; (k) in the exposure and punishment of the wicked.
(a)Ps. 103:19—“his kingdom ruleth over all”;Dan. 4:35—“doeth according to his will in the army of heaven, and among the inhabitants of the earth”;Eph. 1:11—“worketh all things after the counsel of his will.”(b)Job 37:5, 10—“God thundereth ... By the breath of God ice is given”;Ps. 104:14—“causeth the grass to grow for the cattle”;135:6, 7—“Whatsoever Jehovah pleased, that hath he done, In heaven and in earth, in the seas and in all deeps ... vapors ... lightnings ... wind”;Mat. 5:45—“maketh his sun to rise ... sendeth rain”;Ps. 104:16—“The trees of Jehovah are filled”—are planted and tended by God as carefully as those which come under human cultivation;cf.Mat. 6:30—“if God so clothe the grass of the field.”(c)Ps. 104:21, 28—“young lions roar ... seek their food from God ... that thou givest them they gather”;Mat. 6:26—“birds of the heaven ... your heavenly Father feedeth them”;10:29—“two sparrows ... not one of them shall fall on the ground without your Father.”(d)Job 12:23—“He increaseth the nations, and he destroyeth them: He enlargeth the nations, and he leadeth them captive”;Ps. 22:28—“the kingdom is Jehovah's; And he is the ruler over the nations”;66:7—“He ruleth by his might for ever; His eyes observe the nations”;Acts 17:26—“made of one every nation of men to dwell on all the face of the earth, having determined their appointed seasons, and the bounds of their habitation”(instance Palestine, Greece, England).(e)1 Sam. 16:1—“fill thy horn with oil, and go: I will send thee to Jesse the Bethlehemite; for I have provided me a king among his sons”;Ps. 139:16—“Thine eyes did see mine unformed substance, And in thy book were all my members written”;Is. 45:5—“I will gird thee, though thou hast not known me”;Jer. 1:5—“Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee ... sanctified thee ... appointed thee”;Gal. 1:15, 16—“God, who separated me, even from my mother's womb, and called me through his grace, to reveal his Son in me, that I might preach him among the Gentiles.”(f)Ps. 75:6, 7—“neither from the east, nor from the west, Nor yet from the south cometh lifting up. But God is the judge, He putteth down one, and lifteth up another”;Luke 1:52—“He hath put down princes from their thrones, And hath exalted them of low degree.”(g)Prov. 16:33—“The lot is cast into the lap; But the whole disposing thereof is of Jehovah”;Mat. 10:30—“the very hairs of your head are all numbered.”(h)Ps. 4:8—“In peace will I both lay me down and sleep; For thou, Jehovah, alone makest me dwell in safety”;5:12—“thou wilt compass him with favor as with a shield”;63:8—“Thy right hand upholdeth me”;121:3—“He that keepeth thee will not slumber”;Rom. 8:28—“to them that love God all things work together for good.”(i)Gen. 22:8, 14—“God will provide himself the lamb ... Jehovah-jireh”(marg.: that is,“Jehovah will see,”or“provide”);Deut. 8:3—“man doth not live by bread only, but by every thing that proceedeth out of the mouth of Jehovah doth man live”;Phil. 4:19—“my God shall supply every need of yours.”(j)Ps. 68:10—“Thou, O God, didst prepare of thy goodness for the poor”;Is. 64:4—“neither hath the eye seen a God besides thee, who worketh for him that waiteth for him”;Mat. 6:8—“your Father knoweth what things ye have need of, before ye ask him”;32, 33—“all these things shall be added unto you.”(k)Ps. 7:12, 13—“If a man turn not, he will whet his sword; He hath bent his bow and made it ready; He hath also prepared for him the instruments of death; He maketh his arrows fiery shafts”;11:6—“Upon the wicked he will rain snares; Fire and brimstone and burning wind shall be the portion of their cup.”
(a)Ps. 103:19—“his kingdom ruleth over all”;Dan. 4:35—“doeth according to his will in the army of heaven, and among the inhabitants of the earth”;Eph. 1:11—“worketh all things after the counsel of his will.”
(b)Job 37:5, 10—“God thundereth ... By the breath of God ice is given”;Ps. 104:14—“causeth the grass to grow for the cattle”;135:6, 7—“Whatsoever Jehovah pleased, that hath he done, In heaven and in earth, in the seas and in all deeps ... vapors ... lightnings ... wind”;Mat. 5:45—“maketh his sun to rise ... sendeth rain”;Ps. 104:16—“The trees of Jehovah are filled”—are planted and tended by God as carefully as those which come under human cultivation;cf.Mat. 6:30—“if God so clothe the grass of the field.”
(c)Ps. 104:21, 28—“young lions roar ... seek their food from God ... that thou givest them they gather”;Mat. 6:26—“birds of the heaven ... your heavenly Father feedeth them”;10:29—“two sparrows ... not one of them shall fall on the ground without your Father.”
(d)Job 12:23—“He increaseth the nations, and he destroyeth them: He enlargeth the nations, and he leadeth them captive”;Ps. 22:28—“the kingdom is Jehovah's; And he is the ruler over the nations”;66:7—“He ruleth by his might for ever; His eyes observe the nations”;Acts 17:26—“made of one every nation of men to dwell on all the face of the earth, having determined their appointed seasons, and the bounds of their habitation”(instance Palestine, Greece, England).
(e)1 Sam. 16:1—“fill thy horn with oil, and go: I will send thee to Jesse the Bethlehemite; for I have provided me a king among his sons”;Ps. 139:16—“Thine eyes did see mine unformed substance, And in thy book were all my members written”;Is. 45:5—“I will gird thee, though thou hast not known me”;Jer. 1:5—“Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee ... sanctified thee ... appointed thee”;Gal. 1:15, 16—“God, who separated me, even from my mother's womb, and called me through his grace, to reveal his Son in me, that I might preach him among the Gentiles.”
(f)Ps. 75:6, 7—“neither from the east, nor from the west, Nor yet from the south cometh lifting up. But God is the judge, He putteth down one, and lifteth up another”;Luke 1:52—“He hath put down princes from their thrones, And hath exalted them of low degree.”
(g)Prov. 16:33—“The lot is cast into the lap; But the whole disposing thereof is of Jehovah”;Mat. 10:30—“the very hairs of your head are all numbered.”
(h)Ps. 4:8—“In peace will I both lay me down and sleep; For thou, Jehovah, alone makest me dwell in safety”;5:12—“thou wilt compass him with favor as with a shield”;63:8—“Thy right hand upholdeth me”;121:3—“He that keepeth thee will not slumber”;Rom. 8:28—“to them that love God all things work together for good.”
(i)Gen. 22:8, 14—“God will provide himself the lamb ... Jehovah-jireh”(marg.: that is,“Jehovah will see,”or“provide”);Deut. 8:3—“man doth not live by bread only, but by every thing that proceedeth out of the mouth of Jehovah doth man live”;Phil. 4:19—“my God shall supply every need of yours.”
(j)Ps. 68:10—“Thou, O God, didst prepare of thy goodness for the poor”;Is. 64:4—“neither hath the eye seen a God besides thee, who worketh for him that waiteth for him”;Mat. 6:8—“your Father knoweth what things ye have need of, before ye ask him”;32, 33—“all these things shall be added unto you.”
(k)Ps. 7:12, 13—“If a man turn not, he will whet his sword; He hath bent his bow and made it ready; He hath also prepared for him the instruments of death; He maketh his arrows fiery shafts”;11:6—“Upon the wicked he will rain snares; Fire and brimstone and burning wind shall be the portion of their cup.”
The statements of Scripture with regard to God's providence are strikingly confirmed by recent studies in physiography. In the early stages of human development man was almost wholly subject to nature, and environment was a determining factor in his progress. This is the element of truth in Buckle's view. But Buckle ignored the fact that, as civilization advanced, ideas, at least at times, played a greater part than environment. Thermopylæ cannot be explained by climate. In the later stages of human development, nature is largely subject to man, and environment counts for comparatively little.“There shall be no Alps!”says Napoleon. Charles Kingsley:[pg 422]“The spirit of ancient tragedy was man conquered by circumstance; the spirit of modern tragedy is man conquering circumstance.”Yet many national characteristics can be attributed to physical surroundings, and so far as this is the case they are due to the ordering of God's providence. Man's need of fresh water leads him to rivers,—hence the original location of London. Commerce requires seaports,—hence New York. The need of defense leads man to bluffs and hills,—hence Jerusalem, Athens, Rome, Edinburgh. These places of defense became also places of worship and of appeal to God.
Goldwin Smith, in his Lectures and Essays, maintains that national characteristics are not congenital, but are the result of environment. The greatness of Rome and the greatness of England have been due to position. The Romans owed their successes to being at first less warlike than their neighbors. They were traders in the centre of the Italian seacoast, and had to depend on discipline to make headway against marauders on the surrounding hills. Only when drawn into foreign conquest did the ascendency of the military spirit become complete, and then the military spirit brought despotism as its natural penalty. Brought into contact with varied races, Rome was led to the founding of colonies. She adopted and assimilated the nations which she conquered, and in governing them learned organization and law.Parcere subjectiswas her rule, as well asdebellare superbos. In a similiar manner Goldwin Smith maintains that the greatness of England is due to position. Britain being an island, only a bold and enterprising race could settle it. Maritime migration strengthened freedom. Insular position gave freedom from invasion. Isolation however gave rise to arrogance and self-assertion. The island became a natural centre of commerce. There is a steadiness of political progress which would have been impossible upon the continent. Yet consolidation was tardy, owing to the fact that Great Britain consists ofseveralislands. Scotland was always liberal, and Ireland foredoomed to subjection.
Isaac Taylor, Spirit of Hebrew Poetry, has a valuable chapter on Palestine as the providential theatre of divine revelation. A little land, yet a sample-land of all lands, and a thoroughfare between the greatest lands of antiquity, it was fitted by God to receive and to communicate his truth. George Adam Smith's Historical Geography of the Holy Land is a repertory of information on this subject. Stanley, Life and Letters, 1:269-271, treats of Greek landscape and history. Shaler, Interpretation of Nature, sees such difference between Greek curiosity and search for causes on the one hand, and Roman indifference to scientific explanation of facts on the other, that he cannot think of the Greeks and the Romans as cognate peoples. He believes that Italy was first peopled by Etrurians, a Semitic race from Africa, and that from them the Romans descended. The Romans had as little of the spirit of the naturalist as had the Hebrews. The Jews and the Romans originated and propagated Christianity, but they had no interest in science.
On God's pre-arrangement of the physical conditions of national life, striking suggestions may be found in Shaler, Nature and Man in America. Instance the settlement of Massachusetts Bay between 1629 and 1639, the only decade in which such men as John Winthrop could be found and the only one in which they actually emigrated from England. After 1639 there was too much to do at home, and with Charles II the spirit which animated the Pilgrims no longer existed in England. The colonists builded better than they knew, for though they sought a place to worship God themselves, they had no idea of giving this same religious liberty to others. R. E. Thompson, The Hand of God in American History, holds that the American Republic would long since have broken in pieces by its own weight and bulk, if the invention of steam-boat in 1807, railroad locomotive in 1829, telegraph in 1837, and telephone in 1877, had not bound the remote parts of the country together. A woman invented the reaper by combining the action of a row of scissors in cutting. This was as early as 1835. Only in 1855 the competition on the Emperor's farm at Compiègne gave supremacy to the reaper. Without it farming would have been impossible during our civil war, when our men were in the field and women and boys had to gather in the crops.
B. A government and control extending to the free actions of men—(a) to men's free acts in general; (b) to the sinful acts of men also.
(a)Ex. 12:36—“Jehovah gave the people favor in the sight of the Egyptians, so that they let them have what they asked. And they despoiled the Egyptians”;1 Sam. 24:18—“Jehovah had delivered me up into thy hand”(Saul to David);Ps. 33:14, 15—“He looketh forth Upon all the inhabitants of the earth, He that fashioneth the hearts of them all”(i. e., equally, one as well as another);Prov. 16:1—“The plans of the heart belong to man; But the answer of the tongue is from Jehovah”;19:21—“There are many devices in a man's heart; But the counsel of Jehovah,[pg 423]that shall stand”;20:24—“A man's goings are of Jehovah; How then can man understand his way?”21:1—“The king's heart is in the hand of Jehovah as the watercourses: He turneth it whithersoever he will”(i. e., as easily as the rivulets of the eastern fields are turned by the slightest motion of the hand or the foot of the husbandman);Jer. 10:23—“O Jehovah, I know that the way of man is not in himself; it is not in man that walketh to direct his steps”;Phil. 2:13—“it is God who worketh in you both to will and to work, for his good pleasure”;Eph. 2:10—“we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God afore prepared that we should walk in them”;James 4:13-15—“If the Lord will, we shall both live, and do this or that.”(b)2 Sam. 16:10—“because Jehovah hath said unto him[Shimei]:Curse David”;24:1—“the anger of Jehovah was kindled against Israel, and he moved David against them, saying, Go, number Israel and Judah”;Rom. 11:32—“God hath shut up all unto disobedience, that he might have mercy upon all”;2 Thess. 2:11, 12—“God sendeth them a working of error, that they should believe a lie: that they all might be judged who believed not the truth, but had pleasure in unrighteousness.”Henry Ward Beecher:“There seems to be no order in the movements of the bees of a hive, but the honey-comb shows that there was a plan in them all.”John Hunter compared his own brain to a hive in which there was a great deal of buzzing and apparent disorder, while yet a real order underlay it all.“As bees gather their stores of sweets against a time of need, but are colonized by man's superior intelligence for his own purposes, so men plan and work yet are overruled by infinite Wisdom for his own glory.”Dr. Deems:“The world is wide In Time and Tide, And God is guide: Then do not hurry. That man is blest Who does his best And leaves the rest: Then do not worry.”See Bruce, Providential Order, 183sq.; Providence in the Individual Life, 231sq.
(a)Ex. 12:36—“Jehovah gave the people favor in the sight of the Egyptians, so that they let them have what they asked. And they despoiled the Egyptians”;1 Sam. 24:18—“Jehovah had delivered me up into thy hand”(Saul to David);Ps. 33:14, 15—“He looketh forth Upon all the inhabitants of the earth, He that fashioneth the hearts of them all”(i. e., equally, one as well as another);Prov. 16:1—“The plans of the heart belong to man; But the answer of the tongue is from Jehovah”;19:21—“There are many devices in a man's heart; But the counsel of Jehovah,[pg 423]that shall stand”;20:24—“A man's goings are of Jehovah; How then can man understand his way?”21:1—“The king's heart is in the hand of Jehovah as the watercourses: He turneth it whithersoever he will”(i. e., as easily as the rivulets of the eastern fields are turned by the slightest motion of the hand or the foot of the husbandman);Jer. 10:23—“O Jehovah, I know that the way of man is not in himself; it is not in man that walketh to direct his steps”;Phil. 2:13—“it is God who worketh in you both to will and to work, for his good pleasure”;Eph. 2:10—“we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God afore prepared that we should walk in them”;James 4:13-15—“If the Lord will, we shall both live, and do this or that.”
(b)2 Sam. 16:10—“because Jehovah hath said unto him[Shimei]:Curse David”;24:1—“the anger of Jehovah was kindled against Israel, and he moved David against them, saying, Go, number Israel and Judah”;Rom. 11:32—“God hath shut up all unto disobedience, that he might have mercy upon all”;2 Thess. 2:11, 12—“God sendeth them a working of error, that they should believe a lie: that they all might be judged who believed not the truth, but had pleasure in unrighteousness.”
Henry Ward Beecher:“There seems to be no order in the movements of the bees of a hive, but the honey-comb shows that there was a plan in them all.”John Hunter compared his own brain to a hive in which there was a great deal of buzzing and apparent disorder, while yet a real order underlay it all.“As bees gather their stores of sweets against a time of need, but are colonized by man's superior intelligence for his own purposes, so men plan and work yet are overruled by infinite Wisdom for his own glory.”Dr. Deems:“The world is wide In Time and Tide, And God is guide: Then do not hurry. That man is blest Who does his best And leaves the rest: Then do not worry.”See Bruce, Providential Order, 183sq.; Providence in the Individual Life, 231sq.
God's providence with respect to men's evil acts is described in Scripture as of four sorts:
(a) Preventive,—God by his providence prevents sin which would otherwise be committed. That he thus prevents sin is to be regarded as matter, not of obligation, but of grace.
Gen. 20:6—Of Abimelech:“I also withheld thee from sinning against me”;31:24—“And God came to Laban the Syrian in a dream of the night, and said unto him, Take heed to thyself that thou speak not to Jacob either good or bad”;Psalm 19:13—“Keep back thy servant also from presumptuous sins; Let them not have dominion over me”;Hosea 2:6—“Behold, I will hedge up thy way with thorns, and I will build a wall against her, that she shall not find her paths”—here the“thorns”and the“wall”may represent the restraints and sufferings by which God mercifully checks the fatal pursuit of sin (see Annotated Par. Biblein loco). Parents, government, church, traditions, customs, laws, age, disease, death, are all of them preventive influences. Man sometimes finds himself on the brink of a precipice of sin, and strong temptation hurries him on to make the fatal leap. Suddenly every nerve relaxes, all desire for the evil thing is gone, and he recoils from the fearful brink over which he was just now going to plunge. God has interfered by the voice of conscience and the Spirit. This too is a part of his preventive providence. Men at sixty years of age are eight times less likely to commit crime than at the age of twenty-five. Passion has subsided; fear of punishment has increased. The manager of a great department store, when asked what could prevent its absorbing all the trade of the city, replied:“Death!”Death certainly limits aggregations of property, and so constitutes a means of God's preventive providence. In the life of John G. Paton, the rain sent by God prevented the natives from murdering him and taking his goods.
Gen. 20:6—Of Abimelech:“I also withheld thee from sinning against me”;31:24—“And God came to Laban the Syrian in a dream of the night, and said unto him, Take heed to thyself that thou speak not to Jacob either good or bad”;Psalm 19:13—“Keep back thy servant also from presumptuous sins; Let them not have dominion over me”;Hosea 2:6—“Behold, I will hedge up thy way with thorns, and I will build a wall against her, that she shall not find her paths”—here the“thorns”and the“wall”may represent the restraints and sufferings by which God mercifully checks the fatal pursuit of sin (see Annotated Par. Biblein loco). Parents, government, church, traditions, customs, laws, age, disease, death, are all of them preventive influences. Man sometimes finds himself on the brink of a precipice of sin, and strong temptation hurries him on to make the fatal leap. Suddenly every nerve relaxes, all desire for the evil thing is gone, and he recoils from the fearful brink over which he was just now going to plunge. God has interfered by the voice of conscience and the Spirit. This too is a part of his preventive providence. Men at sixty years of age are eight times less likely to commit crime than at the age of twenty-five. Passion has subsided; fear of punishment has increased. The manager of a great department store, when asked what could prevent its absorbing all the trade of the city, replied:“Death!”Death certainly limits aggregations of property, and so constitutes a means of God's preventive providence. In the life of John G. Paton, the rain sent by God prevented the natives from murdering him and taking his goods.
(b) Permissive,—God permits men to cherish and to manifest the evil dispositions of their hearts. God's permissive providence is simply the negative act of withholding impediments from the path of the sinner, instead of preventing his sin by the exercise of divine power. It implies no ignorance, passivity, or indulgence, but consists with hatred of the sin and determination to punish it.
2 Chron. 32:31—“God left him[Hezekiah],to try him, that he might know all that was in his heart”;cf.Deut. 8:2—“that he might humble thee, to prove thee, to know what was in thine heart.”Ps. 17:13, 14—“Deliver my soul from the wicked, who is thy sword, from men who are thy hand, O Jehovah”;Ps. 81:12, 13—“So I let them go after the stubbornness of their heart, That they might walk in their own counsels. Oh that my people would hearken unto me!”Is. 53:4, 10—“Surely he hath borne our griefs.... Yet it pleased Jehovah to bruise him.”Hosea 4:17—“Ephraim[pg 424]Ephraim is joined to idols; let him alone”;Acts 14:16—“who in the generations gone by suffered all the nations to walk in their own ways”;Rom. 1:24, 28—“God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts unto uncleanness... God gave them up unto a reprobate mind, to do those things which are not fitting”;3:25—“to show his righteousness, because of the passing over of the sins done aforetime, in the forbearance of God.”To this head of permissive providence is possibly to be referred1 Sam. 18:10—“an evil spirit from God came mightily upon Saul.”As the Hebrew writers saw in second causes the operation of the great first Cause, and said:“The God of glory thundereth”(Ps. 29:3), so, because even the acts of the wicked entered into God's plan, the Hebrew writers sometimes represented God as doing what he merely permitted finite spirits to do. In2 Sam. 24:1, God moves David to number Israel, but in1 Chron. 21:1the same thing is referred to Satan. God's providence in these cases, however, may be directive as well as permissive.Tennyson, The Higher Pantheism:“God is law, say the wise; O Soul, and let us rejoice, For if he thunder by law the thunder is yet his voice.”Fisher, Nature and Method of Revelation, 56—“The clear separation of God's efficiency from God's permissive act was reserved to a later day. All emphasis was in the Old Testament laid upon the sovereign power of God.”Coleridge, in his Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit, letter II, speaks of“the habit, universal with the Hebrew doctors, of referring all excellent or extraordinary things to the great first Cause, without mention of the proximate and instrumental causes—a striking illustration of which may be found by comparing the narratives of the same events in the Psalms and in the historical books.... The distinction between the providential and the miraculous did not enter into their forms of thinking—at any rate, not into their mode of conveying their thoughts.”The woman who had been slandered rebelled when told that God had permitted it for her good; she maintained that Satan had inspired her accuser; she needed to learn that God had permitted the work of Satan.
2 Chron. 32:31—“God left him[Hezekiah],to try him, that he might know all that was in his heart”;cf.Deut. 8:2—“that he might humble thee, to prove thee, to know what was in thine heart.”Ps. 17:13, 14—“Deliver my soul from the wicked, who is thy sword, from men who are thy hand, O Jehovah”;Ps. 81:12, 13—“So I let them go after the stubbornness of their heart, That they might walk in their own counsels. Oh that my people would hearken unto me!”Is. 53:4, 10—“Surely he hath borne our griefs.... Yet it pleased Jehovah to bruise him.”Hosea 4:17—“Ephraim[pg 424]Ephraim is joined to idols; let him alone”;Acts 14:16—“who in the generations gone by suffered all the nations to walk in their own ways”;Rom. 1:24, 28—“God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts unto uncleanness... God gave them up unto a reprobate mind, to do those things which are not fitting”;3:25—“to show his righteousness, because of the passing over of the sins done aforetime, in the forbearance of God.”To this head of permissive providence is possibly to be referred1 Sam. 18:10—“an evil spirit from God came mightily upon Saul.”As the Hebrew writers saw in second causes the operation of the great first Cause, and said:“The God of glory thundereth”(Ps. 29:3), so, because even the acts of the wicked entered into God's plan, the Hebrew writers sometimes represented God as doing what he merely permitted finite spirits to do. In2 Sam. 24:1, God moves David to number Israel, but in1 Chron. 21:1the same thing is referred to Satan. God's providence in these cases, however, may be directive as well as permissive.
Tennyson, The Higher Pantheism:“God is law, say the wise; O Soul, and let us rejoice, For if he thunder by law the thunder is yet his voice.”Fisher, Nature and Method of Revelation, 56—“The clear separation of God's efficiency from God's permissive act was reserved to a later day. All emphasis was in the Old Testament laid upon the sovereign power of God.”Coleridge, in his Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit, letter II, speaks of“the habit, universal with the Hebrew doctors, of referring all excellent or extraordinary things to the great first Cause, without mention of the proximate and instrumental causes—a striking illustration of which may be found by comparing the narratives of the same events in the Psalms and in the historical books.... The distinction between the providential and the miraculous did not enter into their forms of thinking—at any rate, not into their mode of conveying their thoughts.”The woman who had been slandered rebelled when told that God had permitted it for her good; she maintained that Satan had inspired her accuser; she needed to learn that God had permitted the work of Satan.
(c) Directive,—God directs the evil acts of men to ends unforeseen and unintended by the agents. When evil is in the heart and will certainly come out, God orders its flow in one direction rather than in another, so that its course can be best controlled and least harm may result. This is sometimes called overruling providence.
Gen. 50:20—“as for you, ye meant evil against me; but God meant it for good, to bring to pass, as it is this day, to save much people alive”;Ps. 76:10—“the wrath of man shall praise thee: The residue of wrath shalt thou gird upon thee”—put on as an ornament—clothe thyself with it for thine own glory;Is. 10:5—“Ho Assyrian, the rod of mine anger, and the staff in whose hand is mine indignation”;John 13:27—“What thou doest, do quickly”—do in a particular way what is actually being done (Westcott, Bib. Com.,in loco);Acts 4:27, 28—“against thy holy Servant Jesus, whom thou didst anoint, both Herod and Pontius Pilate, with the Gentiles and the peoples of Israel, were gathered together, to do whatsoever thy hand and thy counsel fore-ordained to come to pass.”To this head of directive providence should probably be referred the passages with regard to Pharaoh inEx. 4:21—“I will harden his heart, and he will not let the people go”;7:13—“and Pharaoh's heart was hardened”;8:15—“he hardened his heart”—i. e., Pharaoh hardened his own heart. Here the controlling agency of God did not interfere with the liberty of Pharaoh or oblige him to sin; but in judgment for his previous cruelty and impiety God withdrew the external restraints which had hitherto kept his sin within bounds, and placed him in circumstances which would have influenced to right action a well-disposed mind, but which God foresaw would lead a disposition like Pharaoh's to the peculiar course of wickedness which he actually pursued.God hardened Pharaoh's heart, then, first, by permitting him to harden his own heart, God being the author of his sin only in the sense that he is the author of a free being who is himself the direct author of his sin; secondly, by giving to him the means of enlightenment, Pharaoh's very opportunities being perverted by him into occasions of more virulent wickedness, and good resisted being thus made to result in greater evil; thirdly, by judicially forsaking Pharaoh, when it became manifest that he would not do God's will, and thus making it morally certain, though not necessary, that he would do evil; and fourthly, by so directing Pharaoh's surroundings that his sin would manifest itself in one way rather than in another. Sin is like the lava of the volcano, which will certainly come out, but which God directs in its course down the mountain-side so that it will do least harm. The gravitation downward is due to man's evil will; the direction to this side or to that is due to God's providence. SeeRom. 9:17, 18—“For this very purpose did I raise thee up, that I might show in thee my power, and that my name might be published abroad in all the earth. So then he hath mercy on whom he will, and whom he will he hardeneth.”Thus the very passions which[pg 425]excite men to rebel against God are made completely subservient to his purposes: see Annotated Paragraph Bible, onPs. 76:10.God hardens Pharaoh's heart only after all the earlier plagues have been sent. Pharaoh had hardened his own heart before. God hardens no man's heart who has not first hardened it himself. Crane, Religion of To-morrow, 140—“Jehovah is never said to harden the heart of a good man, or of one who is set to do righteousness. It is always those who are bent on evil whom God hardens. Pharaoh hardens his own heart before the Lord is said to harden it. Nature is God, and it is the nature of human beings to harden when they resist softening influences.”The Watchman, Dec. 5, 1901:11—“God decreed to Pharaoh what Pharaoh had chosen for himself. Persistence in certain inclinations and volitions awakens within the body and soul forces which are not under the control of the will, and which drive the man on in the way he has chosen. After a time nature hardens the hearts of men to do evil.”
Gen. 50:20—“as for you, ye meant evil against me; but God meant it for good, to bring to pass, as it is this day, to save much people alive”;Ps. 76:10—“the wrath of man shall praise thee: The residue of wrath shalt thou gird upon thee”—put on as an ornament—clothe thyself with it for thine own glory;Is. 10:5—“Ho Assyrian, the rod of mine anger, and the staff in whose hand is mine indignation”;John 13:27—“What thou doest, do quickly”—do in a particular way what is actually being done (Westcott, Bib. Com.,in loco);Acts 4:27, 28—“against thy holy Servant Jesus, whom thou didst anoint, both Herod and Pontius Pilate, with the Gentiles and the peoples of Israel, were gathered together, to do whatsoever thy hand and thy counsel fore-ordained to come to pass.”
To this head of directive providence should probably be referred the passages with regard to Pharaoh inEx. 4:21—“I will harden his heart, and he will not let the people go”;7:13—“and Pharaoh's heart was hardened”;8:15—“he hardened his heart”—i. e., Pharaoh hardened his own heart. Here the controlling agency of God did not interfere with the liberty of Pharaoh or oblige him to sin; but in judgment for his previous cruelty and impiety God withdrew the external restraints which had hitherto kept his sin within bounds, and placed him in circumstances which would have influenced to right action a well-disposed mind, but which God foresaw would lead a disposition like Pharaoh's to the peculiar course of wickedness which he actually pursued.
God hardened Pharaoh's heart, then, first, by permitting him to harden his own heart, God being the author of his sin only in the sense that he is the author of a free being who is himself the direct author of his sin; secondly, by giving to him the means of enlightenment, Pharaoh's very opportunities being perverted by him into occasions of more virulent wickedness, and good resisted being thus made to result in greater evil; thirdly, by judicially forsaking Pharaoh, when it became manifest that he would not do God's will, and thus making it morally certain, though not necessary, that he would do evil; and fourthly, by so directing Pharaoh's surroundings that his sin would manifest itself in one way rather than in another. Sin is like the lava of the volcano, which will certainly come out, but which God directs in its course down the mountain-side so that it will do least harm. The gravitation downward is due to man's evil will; the direction to this side or to that is due to God's providence. SeeRom. 9:17, 18—“For this very purpose did I raise thee up, that I might show in thee my power, and that my name might be published abroad in all the earth. So then he hath mercy on whom he will, and whom he will he hardeneth.”Thus the very passions which[pg 425]excite men to rebel against God are made completely subservient to his purposes: see Annotated Paragraph Bible, onPs. 76:10.
God hardens Pharaoh's heart only after all the earlier plagues have been sent. Pharaoh had hardened his own heart before. God hardens no man's heart who has not first hardened it himself. Crane, Religion of To-morrow, 140—“Jehovah is never said to harden the heart of a good man, or of one who is set to do righteousness. It is always those who are bent on evil whom God hardens. Pharaoh hardens his own heart before the Lord is said to harden it. Nature is God, and it is the nature of human beings to harden when they resist softening influences.”The Watchman, Dec. 5, 1901:11—“God decreed to Pharaoh what Pharaoh had chosen for himself. Persistence in certain inclinations and volitions awakens within the body and soul forces which are not under the control of the will, and which drive the man on in the way he has chosen. After a time nature hardens the hearts of men to do evil.”
(d) Determinative,—God determines the bounds reached by the evil passions of his creatures, and the measure of their effects. Since moral evil is a germ capable of indefinite expansion, God's determining the measure of its growth does not alter its character or involve God's complicity with the perverse wills which cherish it.
Job 1:12—“And Jehovah said unto Satan, Behold, all that he hath is in thy power; only upon himself put not forth thy hand”;2:6—“Behold, he is in thy hand; only spare his life”;Ps. 124:2—“If it had not been Jehovah who was on our side, when men rose up against us; Then had they swallowed us up alive”;1 Cor. 10:13—“will not suffer you to be tempted above that ye are able; but will with the temptation make also the way of escape, that ye may be able to endure it”;2 Thess. 2:7—“For the mystery of lawlessness doth already work; only there is one that restraineth now, until he be taken out of the way”;Rev. 20:2, 3—“And he laid hold on the dragon, the old serpent, which is the Devil and Satan, and bound him for a thousand years.”
Pepper, Outlines of Syst. Theol., 76—The union of God's will and man's will is“such that, while in one view all can be ascribed to God, in another all can be ascribed to the creature. But how God and the creature are united in operation is doubtless known and knowable only to God. A very dim analogy is furnished in the union of the soul and body in men. The hand retains its own physical laws, yet is obedient to the human will. This theory recognizes the veracity of consciousness in its witness to personal freedom, and yet the completeness of God's control of both the bad and the good. Free beings are ruled, but are ruled as free and in their freedom. The freedom is not sacrificed to the control. The two coëxist, each in its integrity. Any doctrine which does not allow this is false to Scripture and destructive of religion.”
2. Rational proof.A. Argumentsa priorifrom the divine attributes. (a) From the immutability of God. This makes it certain that he will execute his eternal plan of the universe and its history. But the execution of this plan involves not only creation and preservation, but also providence. (b) From the benevolence of God. This renders it certain that he will care for the intelligent universe he has created. What it was worth his while to create, it is worth his while to care for. But this care is providence. (c) From the justice of God. As the source of moral law, God must assure the vindication of law by administering justice in the universe and punishing the rebellious. But this administration of justice is providence.For heathen ideas of providence, see Cicero, De Natura Deorum, 11:30, where Balbus speaks of the existence of the gods as that,“quo concesso, confitendum est eorum consilio mundum administrari.”Epictetus, sec. 41—“The principal and most important duty in religion is to possess your mind with just and becoming notions of the gods—to believe that there are such supreme beings, and that they govern and dispose of all the affairs of the world with a just and good providence.”Marcus Antoninus:“If there are no gods, or if they have no regard for human affairs, why should I desire to live in a world without gods and without a providence? But gods undoubtedly there are, and they regard human affairs.”See also Bib. Sac., 16:374. As we shall see, however, many of the heathen writers believed in a general, rather than in a particular, providence.[pg 426]On the argument for providence derived from God's benevolence, see Appleton, Works, 1:146—“Is indolence more consistent with God's majesty than action would be? The happiness of creatures is a good. Does it honor God to say that he is indifferent to that which he knows to be good and valuable? Even if the world had come into existence without his agency, it would become God's moral character to pay some attention to creatures so numerous and so susceptible to pleasure and pain, especially when he might have so great and favorable an influence on their moral condition.”John 5:17—“My Father worketh even until now, and I work”—is as applicable to providence as to preservation.The complexity of God's providential arrangements may be illustrated by Tyndall's explanation of the fact that heartsease does not grow in the neighborhood of English villages: 1. In English villages dogs run loose. 2. Where dogs run loose, cats must stay at home. 3. Where cats stay at home, field mice abound. 4. Where field mice abound, the nests of bumble-bees are destroyed. 5. Where bumble-bees' nests are destroyed, there is no fertilization of pollen. Therefore, where dogs go loose, no heartsease grows.B. Argumentsa posteriorifrom the facts of nature and of history. (a) The outward lot of individuals and nations is not wholly in their own hands, but is in many acknowledged respects subject to the disposal of a higher power. (b) The observed moral order of the world, although imperfect, cannot be accounted for without recognition of a divine providence. Vice is discouraged and virtue rewarded, in ways which are beyond the power of mere nature. There must be a governing mind and will, and this mind and will must be the mind and will of God.The birthplace of individuals and of nations, the natural powers with which they are endowed, the opportunities and immunities they enjoy, are beyond their own control. A man's destiny for time and for eternity may be practically decided for him by his birth in a Christian home, rather than in a tenement-house at the Five Points, or in a kraal of the Hottentots. Progress largely depends upon“variety of environment”(H. Spencer). But this variety of environment is in great part independent of our own efforts.“There's a Divinity that shapes our ends, Rough hew them how we will.”Shakespeare here expounds human consciousness.“Man proposes and God disposes”has become a proverb. Experience teaches that success and failure are not wholly due to us. Men often labor and lose; they consult and nothing ensues; they“embattle and are broken.”Providence is not always on the side of the heaviest battalions. Not arms but ideas have decided the fate of the world—as Xerxes found at Thermopylæ, and Napoleon at Waterloo. Great movements are generally begun without consciousness of their greatness.Cf.Is. 42:16—“I will bring the blind by a way that they know not”;1 Cor. 5:37, 38—“thou sowest ... a bare grain ... but God giveth it a body even as it pleased him.”The deed returns to the doer, and character shapes destiny. This is true in the long run. Eternity will show the truth of the maxim. But here in time a sufficient number of apparent exceptions are permitted to render possible a moral probation. If evil were always immediately followed by penalty, righteousness would have a compelling power upon the will and the highest virtue would be impossible. Job's friends accuse Job of acting upon this principle. The Hebrew children deny its truth, when they say:“But if not”—even if God does not deliver us—“we will not serve thy gods, nor worship the golden image which thou hast set up”(Dan. 3:18.)Martineau, Seat of Authority, 298—“Through some misdirection or infirmity, most of the larger agencies in history have failed to reach their own ideal, yet have accomplished revolutions greater and more beneficent; the conquests of Alexander, the empire of Rome, the Crusades, the ecclesiastical persecutions, the monastic asceticisms, the missionary zeal of Christendom, have all played a momentous part in the drama of the world, yet a part which is a surprise to each. All this shows the controlling presence of a Reason and a Will transcendent and divine.”Kidd, Social Evolution, 99, declares that the progress of the race has taken place only under conditions which have had no sanction from the reason of the great proportion of the individuals who submit to them. He concludes that a rational religion is a scientific impossibility, and that the function of religion is to provide a super-rational sanction for social progress. We prefer to say that Providence pushes the race forward even against its will.James Russell Lowell, Letters, 2:51, suggests that God's calm control of the forces[pg 427]of the universe, both physical and mental, should give us confidence when evil seems impending:“How many times have I seen the fire-engines of church and state clanging and lumbering along to put out—a false alarm! And when the heavens are cloudy, what a glare can be cast by a burning shanty!”See Sermon on Providence in Political Revolutions, in Farrar's Science and Theology, 228. On the moral order of the world, notwithstanding its imperfections, see Butler, Analogy, Bohn's ed., 98; King, in Baptist Review, 1884:202-222.
A. Argumentsa priorifrom the divine attributes. (a) From the immutability of God. This makes it certain that he will execute his eternal plan of the universe and its history. But the execution of this plan involves not only creation and preservation, but also providence. (b) From the benevolence of God. This renders it certain that he will care for the intelligent universe he has created. What it was worth his while to create, it is worth his while to care for. But this care is providence. (c) From the justice of God. As the source of moral law, God must assure the vindication of law by administering justice in the universe and punishing the rebellious. But this administration of justice is providence.
For heathen ideas of providence, see Cicero, De Natura Deorum, 11:30, where Balbus speaks of the existence of the gods as that,“quo concesso, confitendum est eorum consilio mundum administrari.”Epictetus, sec. 41—“The principal and most important duty in religion is to possess your mind with just and becoming notions of the gods—to believe that there are such supreme beings, and that they govern and dispose of all the affairs of the world with a just and good providence.”Marcus Antoninus:“If there are no gods, or if they have no regard for human affairs, why should I desire to live in a world without gods and without a providence? But gods undoubtedly there are, and they regard human affairs.”See also Bib. Sac., 16:374. As we shall see, however, many of the heathen writers believed in a general, rather than in a particular, providence.[pg 426]On the argument for providence derived from God's benevolence, see Appleton, Works, 1:146—“Is indolence more consistent with God's majesty than action would be? The happiness of creatures is a good. Does it honor God to say that he is indifferent to that which he knows to be good and valuable? Even if the world had come into existence without his agency, it would become God's moral character to pay some attention to creatures so numerous and so susceptible to pleasure and pain, especially when he might have so great and favorable an influence on their moral condition.”John 5:17—“My Father worketh even until now, and I work”—is as applicable to providence as to preservation.The complexity of God's providential arrangements may be illustrated by Tyndall's explanation of the fact that heartsease does not grow in the neighborhood of English villages: 1. In English villages dogs run loose. 2. Where dogs run loose, cats must stay at home. 3. Where cats stay at home, field mice abound. 4. Where field mice abound, the nests of bumble-bees are destroyed. 5. Where bumble-bees' nests are destroyed, there is no fertilization of pollen. Therefore, where dogs go loose, no heartsease grows.
For heathen ideas of providence, see Cicero, De Natura Deorum, 11:30, where Balbus speaks of the existence of the gods as that,“quo concesso, confitendum est eorum consilio mundum administrari.”Epictetus, sec. 41—“The principal and most important duty in religion is to possess your mind with just and becoming notions of the gods—to believe that there are such supreme beings, and that they govern and dispose of all the affairs of the world with a just and good providence.”Marcus Antoninus:“If there are no gods, or if they have no regard for human affairs, why should I desire to live in a world without gods and without a providence? But gods undoubtedly there are, and they regard human affairs.”See also Bib. Sac., 16:374. As we shall see, however, many of the heathen writers believed in a general, rather than in a particular, providence.
On the argument for providence derived from God's benevolence, see Appleton, Works, 1:146—“Is indolence more consistent with God's majesty than action would be? The happiness of creatures is a good. Does it honor God to say that he is indifferent to that which he knows to be good and valuable? Even if the world had come into existence without his agency, it would become God's moral character to pay some attention to creatures so numerous and so susceptible to pleasure and pain, especially when he might have so great and favorable an influence on their moral condition.”John 5:17—“My Father worketh even until now, and I work”—is as applicable to providence as to preservation.
The complexity of God's providential arrangements may be illustrated by Tyndall's explanation of the fact that heartsease does not grow in the neighborhood of English villages: 1. In English villages dogs run loose. 2. Where dogs run loose, cats must stay at home. 3. Where cats stay at home, field mice abound. 4. Where field mice abound, the nests of bumble-bees are destroyed. 5. Where bumble-bees' nests are destroyed, there is no fertilization of pollen. Therefore, where dogs go loose, no heartsease grows.
B. Argumentsa posteriorifrom the facts of nature and of history. (a) The outward lot of individuals and nations is not wholly in their own hands, but is in many acknowledged respects subject to the disposal of a higher power. (b) The observed moral order of the world, although imperfect, cannot be accounted for without recognition of a divine providence. Vice is discouraged and virtue rewarded, in ways which are beyond the power of mere nature. There must be a governing mind and will, and this mind and will must be the mind and will of God.
The birthplace of individuals and of nations, the natural powers with which they are endowed, the opportunities and immunities they enjoy, are beyond their own control. A man's destiny for time and for eternity may be practically decided for him by his birth in a Christian home, rather than in a tenement-house at the Five Points, or in a kraal of the Hottentots. Progress largely depends upon“variety of environment”(H. Spencer). But this variety of environment is in great part independent of our own efforts.“There's a Divinity that shapes our ends, Rough hew them how we will.”Shakespeare here expounds human consciousness.“Man proposes and God disposes”has become a proverb. Experience teaches that success and failure are not wholly due to us. Men often labor and lose; they consult and nothing ensues; they“embattle and are broken.”Providence is not always on the side of the heaviest battalions. Not arms but ideas have decided the fate of the world—as Xerxes found at Thermopylæ, and Napoleon at Waterloo. Great movements are generally begun without consciousness of their greatness.Cf.Is. 42:16—“I will bring the blind by a way that they know not”;1 Cor. 5:37, 38—“thou sowest ... a bare grain ... but God giveth it a body even as it pleased him.”The deed returns to the doer, and character shapes destiny. This is true in the long run. Eternity will show the truth of the maxim. But here in time a sufficient number of apparent exceptions are permitted to render possible a moral probation. If evil were always immediately followed by penalty, righteousness would have a compelling power upon the will and the highest virtue would be impossible. Job's friends accuse Job of acting upon this principle. The Hebrew children deny its truth, when they say:“But if not”—even if God does not deliver us—“we will not serve thy gods, nor worship the golden image which thou hast set up”(Dan. 3:18.)Martineau, Seat of Authority, 298—“Through some misdirection or infirmity, most of the larger agencies in history have failed to reach their own ideal, yet have accomplished revolutions greater and more beneficent; the conquests of Alexander, the empire of Rome, the Crusades, the ecclesiastical persecutions, the monastic asceticisms, the missionary zeal of Christendom, have all played a momentous part in the drama of the world, yet a part which is a surprise to each. All this shows the controlling presence of a Reason and a Will transcendent and divine.”Kidd, Social Evolution, 99, declares that the progress of the race has taken place only under conditions which have had no sanction from the reason of the great proportion of the individuals who submit to them. He concludes that a rational religion is a scientific impossibility, and that the function of religion is to provide a super-rational sanction for social progress. We prefer to say that Providence pushes the race forward even against its will.James Russell Lowell, Letters, 2:51, suggests that God's calm control of the forces[pg 427]of the universe, both physical and mental, should give us confidence when evil seems impending:“How many times have I seen the fire-engines of church and state clanging and lumbering along to put out—a false alarm! And when the heavens are cloudy, what a glare can be cast by a burning shanty!”See Sermon on Providence in Political Revolutions, in Farrar's Science and Theology, 228. On the moral order of the world, notwithstanding its imperfections, see Butler, Analogy, Bohn's ed., 98; King, in Baptist Review, 1884:202-222.
The birthplace of individuals and of nations, the natural powers with which they are endowed, the opportunities and immunities they enjoy, are beyond their own control. A man's destiny for time and for eternity may be practically decided for him by his birth in a Christian home, rather than in a tenement-house at the Five Points, or in a kraal of the Hottentots. Progress largely depends upon“variety of environment”(H. Spencer). But this variety of environment is in great part independent of our own efforts.
“There's a Divinity that shapes our ends, Rough hew them how we will.”Shakespeare here expounds human consciousness.“Man proposes and God disposes”has become a proverb. Experience teaches that success and failure are not wholly due to us. Men often labor and lose; they consult and nothing ensues; they“embattle and are broken.”Providence is not always on the side of the heaviest battalions. Not arms but ideas have decided the fate of the world—as Xerxes found at Thermopylæ, and Napoleon at Waterloo. Great movements are generally begun without consciousness of their greatness.Cf.Is. 42:16—“I will bring the blind by a way that they know not”;1 Cor. 5:37, 38—“thou sowest ... a bare grain ... but God giveth it a body even as it pleased him.”
The deed returns to the doer, and character shapes destiny. This is true in the long run. Eternity will show the truth of the maxim. But here in time a sufficient number of apparent exceptions are permitted to render possible a moral probation. If evil were always immediately followed by penalty, righteousness would have a compelling power upon the will and the highest virtue would be impossible. Job's friends accuse Job of acting upon this principle. The Hebrew children deny its truth, when they say:“But if not”—even if God does not deliver us—“we will not serve thy gods, nor worship the golden image which thou hast set up”(Dan. 3:18.)
Martineau, Seat of Authority, 298—“Through some misdirection or infirmity, most of the larger agencies in history have failed to reach their own ideal, yet have accomplished revolutions greater and more beneficent; the conquests of Alexander, the empire of Rome, the Crusades, the ecclesiastical persecutions, the monastic asceticisms, the missionary zeal of Christendom, have all played a momentous part in the drama of the world, yet a part which is a surprise to each. All this shows the controlling presence of a Reason and a Will transcendent and divine.”Kidd, Social Evolution, 99, declares that the progress of the race has taken place only under conditions which have had no sanction from the reason of the great proportion of the individuals who submit to them. He concludes that a rational religion is a scientific impossibility, and that the function of religion is to provide a super-rational sanction for social progress. We prefer to say that Providence pushes the race forward even against its will.
James Russell Lowell, Letters, 2:51, suggests that God's calm control of the forces[pg 427]of the universe, both physical and mental, should give us confidence when evil seems impending:“How many times have I seen the fire-engines of church and state clanging and lumbering along to put out—a false alarm! And when the heavens are cloudy, what a glare can be cast by a burning shanty!”See Sermon on Providence in Political Revolutions, in Farrar's Science and Theology, 228. On the moral order of the world, notwithstanding its imperfections, see Butler, Analogy, Bohn's ed., 98; King, in Baptist Review, 1884:202-222.