Part 4 — Chapter IV. The Works Of God; Or The Execution Of The Decrees. (continued 3)

2. From Reason.

We may argue the preserving agency of God from the following considerations:

(a) Matter and mind are not self-existent. Since they have not the cause of their being in themselves, their continuance as well as their origin must be due to a superior power.

Dorner, Glaubenslehre: “Were the world self-existent, it would be God, not world, and no religion would be possible.... The world has receptivity for new creations; but these, once introduced, are subject, like the rest, to the law of preservation”—i. e., are dependent for their continued existence upon God.

(b) Force implies a will of which it is the direct or indirect expression. We know of force only through the exercise of our own wills. Since will is the only cause of which we have direct knowledge, second causes in nature may be regarded as only secondary, regular, and automatic workings of the great first Cause.

For modern theories identifying force with divine will, see Herschel, Popular Lectures on Scientific Subjects, 460; Murphy, Scientific Bases, 13-15, 29-36, 42-52; Duke of Argyll, Reign of Law, 121-127; Wallace, Natural Selection, 363-371; Bowen, Metaphysics and Ethics, 146-162; Martineau, Essays, 1:63, 265, and Study, 1:244—“Second causes in nature bear the same relation to the First Cause as the automatic movement of the muscles in walking bears to the first decision of the will that initiated the walk.” It is often objected that we cannot thus identify force with will, because in many cases the effort of our will is fruitless for the reason that nervous and muscular force is lacking. But this proves only that force cannot be identified with human will, not that it cannot be identified with the divine will. To the divine will no force is lacking; in God will and force are one.

We therefore adopt the view of Maine de Biran, that causation pertains only to spirit. Porter, Human Intellect, 582-588, objects to this view as follows: “This implies, first, that the conception of a material cause is self-contradictory. But the mind recognizes in itself spiritual energies that are not voluntary; because we derive our notion of cause from will, it does not follow that the causal relation always involves will; it [pg 413]would follow that the universe, so far as it is not intelligent, is impossible. It implies, secondly, that there is but one agent in the universe, and that the phenomena of matter and mind are but manifestations of one single force—the Creator's.” We reply to this reasoning by asserting that no dead thing can act, and that what we call involuntary spiritual energies are really unconscious or unremembered activities of the will.

From our present point of view we would also criticize Hodge, Systematic Theology, 1:596—“Because we get our idea of force from mind, it does not follow that mind is the only force. That mind is a cause is no proof that electricity may not be a cause. If matter is force and nothing but force, then matter is nothing, and the external world is simply God. In spite of such argument, men will believe that the external world is a reality—that matter is, and that it is the cause of the effects we attribute to its agency.” New Englander, Sept. 1883:552—“Man in early time used second causes, i. e., machines, very little to accomplish his purposes. His usual mode of action was by the direct use of his hands, or his voice, and he naturally ascribed to the gods the same method as his own. His own use of second causes has led man to higher conceptions of the divine action.” Dorner: “If the world had no independence, it would not reflect God, nor would creation mean anything.” But this independence is not absolute. Even man lives, moves and has his being in God (Acts 17:28), and whatever has come into being, whether material or spiritual, has life only in Christ (John 1:3, 4, marginal reading).

Preservation is God's continuous willing. Bowne, Introd. to Psych. Theory, 305, speaks of “a kind of wholesale willing.” Augustine: “Dei voluntas est rerum natura.”Principal Fairbairn: “Nature is spirit.” Tennyson, The Ancient Sage: “Force is from the heights.” Lord Gifford, quoted in Max Müller, Anthropological Religion, 392—“The human soul is neither self-derived nor self-subsisting. It would vanish if it had not a substance, and its substance is God.” Upton, Hibbert Lectures, 284, 285—“Matter is simply spirit in its lowest form of manifestation. The absolute Cause must be that deeper Self which we find at the heart of our own self-consciousness. By self-differentiation God creates both matter and mind.”

(c) God's sovereignty requires a belief in his special preserving agency; since this sovereignty would not be absolute, if anything occurred or existed independent of his will.

James Martineau, Seat of Authority, 29, 30—“All cosmic force is will.... This identification of nature with God's will would be pantheistic only if we turned the proposition round and identified God with no more than the life of the universe. But we do not deny transcendency. Natural forces are God's will, but God's will is more than they. He is not the equivalent of the All, but its directing Mind. God is not the rage of the wild beast, nor the sin of man. There are things and beings objective to him.... He puts his power into that which is other than himself, and he parts with other use of itby preëngagement to an end. Yet he is the continuous source and supply of power to the system.”

Natural forces are generic volitions of God. But human wills, with their power of alternative, are the product of God's self-limitation, even more than nature is, for human wills do not always obey the divine will,—they may even oppose it. Nothing finite is only finite. In it is the Infinite, not only as immanent, but also as transcendent, and in the case of sin, as opposing the sinner and as punishing him. This continuous willing of God has its analogy in our own subconscious willing. J. M. Whiton, in Am. Jour. Theol., Apl. 1901:320—“Our own will, when we walk, does not put forth a separate volition for every step, but depends on the automatic action of the lower nerve-centres, which it both sets in motion and keeps to their work. So the divine Will does not work in innumerable separate acts of volition.” A. R. Wallace: “The whole universe is not merely dependent on, but actually is, the will of higher intelligences or of one supreme intelligence.... Man's free will is only a larger artery for the controlling current of the universal Will, whose time-long evolutionary flow constitutes the self-revelation of the Infinite One.” This latter statement of Wallace merges the finite will far too completely in the will of God. It is true of nature and of all holy beings, but it is untrue of the wicked. These are indeed upheld by God in their being, but opposed by God in their conduct. Preservation leaves room for human freedom, responsibility, sin, and guilt.

All natural forces and all personal beings therefore give testimony to the will of God which originated them and which continually sustains them. The physical universe, indeed, is in no sense independent of God, for its forces are only the constant willing [pg 414]of God, and its laws are only the habits of God. Only in the free will of intelligent beings has God disjoined from himself any portion of force and made it capable of contradicting his holy will. But even in free agents God does not cease to uphold. The being that sins can maintain its existence only through the preserving agency of God. The doctrine of preservation therefore holds a middle ground between two extremes. It holds that finite personal beings have a real existence and a relative independence. On the other hand it holds that these persons retain their being and their powers only as they are upheld by God.

God is the soul, but not the sum, of things. Christianity holds to God's transcendence as well as to God's immanence. Immanence alone is God imprisoned, as transcendence alone is God banished. Gore, Incarnation, 136 sq.—“Christian theology is the harmony of pantheism and deism.” It maintains transcendence, and so has all the good of pantheism without its limitations. It maintains immanence, and so has all the good of deism without its inability to show how God could be blessed without creation. Diman, Theistic Argument, 367—“The dynamical theory of nature as a plastic organism, pervaded by a system of forces uniting at last in one supreme Force, is altogether more in harmony with the spirit and teaching of the Gospel than the mechanical conceptions which prevailed a century ago, which insisted on viewing nature as an intricate machine, fashioned by a great Artificer who stood wholly apart from it.” On the persistency of force, super cuncta, subter cuncta, see Bib. Sac., Jan. 1881:1-24; Cocker, Theistic Conception of the World, 172-243, esp. 236. The doctrine of preservation therefore holds to a God both in nature and beyond nature. According as the one or the other of these elements is exclusively regarded, we have the error of Deism, or the error of Continuous Creation—theories which we now proceed to consider.

III. Theories which virtually deny the doctrine of Preservation.

1. Deism.

This view represents the universe as a self-sustained mechanism, from which God withdrew as soon as he had created it, and which he left to a process of self-development. It was held in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by the English Herbert, Collins, Tindal, and Bolingbroke.

Lord Herbert of Cherbury was one of the first who formed deism into a system. His book De Veritate was published in 1624. He argues against the probability of God's revealing his will to only a portion of the earth. This he calls “particular religion.”Yet he sought, and according to his own account he received, a revelation from heaven to encourage the publication of his work in disproof of revelation. He “asked for a sign,” and was answered by a “loud though gentle noise from the heavens.” He had the vanity to think his book of such importance to the cause of truth as to extort a declaration of the divine will, when the interests of half mankind could not secure any revelation at all; what God would not do for a nation, he would do for an individual. See Leslie and Leland, Method with the Deists. Deism is the exaggeration of the truth of God's transcendence. See Christlieb, Modern Doubt and Christian Belief, 190-209. Melanchthon illustrates by the shipbuilder: “Ut faber discedit a navi exstructa et relinquit eam nautis.” God is the maker, not the keeper, of the watch. In Sartor Resartus, Carlyle makes Teufelsdröckh speak of “An absentee God, sitting idle ever since the first Sabbath at the outside of the universe, and seeing it go.” Blunt, Dict. Doct. and Hist. Theology, art.: Deism.

“Deism emphasized the inviolability of natural law, and held to a mechanical view of the world” (Ten Broeke). Its God is a sort of Hindu Brahma, “as idle as a painted ship upon a painted ocean”—mere being, without content or movement. Bruce, Apologetics, 115-131—“God made the world so good at the first that the best he can do is to let it alone. Prayer is inadmissible. Deism implies a Pelagian view of human nature. Death redeems us by separating us from the body. There is natural immortality, but no resurrection. Lord Herbert of Cherbury, the brother of the poet George Herbert of Bemerton, represents the rise of Deism; Lord Bolingbroke its decline. Blount assailed the divine Person of the founder of the faith; Collins its foundation in prophecy; Woolston its miraculous attestation; Toland its canonical literature. Tindal took more general ground, and sought to show that a special revelation was unnecessary, impossible, unverifiable, the religion of nature being sufficient and superior to all religions of positive institution.”

[pg 415]

We object to this view that:

(a) It rests upon a false analogy.—Man is able to construct a self-moving watch only because he employs preëxisting forces, such as gravity, elasticity, cohesion. But in a theory which likens the universe to a machine, these forces are the very things to be accounted for.

Deism regards the universe as a “perpetual motion.” Modern views of the dissipation of energy have served to discredit it. Will is the only explanation of the forces in nature. But according to deism, God builds a house, shuts himself out, locks the door, and then ties his own hands in order to make sure of never using the key. John Caird, Fund. Ideas of Christianity, 114-138—“A made mind, a spiritual nature created by an external omnipotence, is an impossible and self-contradictory notion.... The human contriver or artist deals with materials prepared to his hand. Deism reduces God to a finite anthropomorphic personality, as pantheism annuls the finite world or absorbs it in the Infinite.” Hence Spinoza, the pantheist, was the great antagonist of 16th century deism. See Woods, Works, 2:40.

(b) It is a system of anthropomorphism, while it professes to exclude anthropomorphism.—Because the upholding of all things would involve a multiplicity of minute cares if man were the agent, it conceives of the upholding of the universe as involving such burdens in the case of God. Thus it saves the dignity of God by virtually denying his omnipresence, omniscience, and omnipotence.

The infinity of God turns into sources of delight all that would seem care to man. To God's inexhaustible fulness of life there are no burdens involved in the upholding of the universe he has created. Since God, moreover, is a perpetual observer, we may alter the poet's verse and say: “There's not a flower that's born to blush unseen And waste its sweetness on the desert air.” God does not expose his children as soon as they are born. They are not only his offspring; they also live, move and have their being in him, and are partakers of his divine nature. Gordon, Christ of To-day, 200—“The worst person in all history is something to God, if he be nothing to the world.”See Chalmers, Astronomical Discourses, in Works, 7:68. Kurtz, The Bible and Astronomy, in Introd. to History of Old Covenant, lxxxii-xcviii.

(c) It cannot be maintained without denying all providential interference, in the history of creation and the subsequent history of the world.—But the introduction of life, the creation of man, incarnation, regeneration, the communion of intelligent creatures with a present God, and interpositions of God in secular history, are matters of fact.

Deism therefore continually tends to atheism. Upton, Hibbert Lectures, 287—“The defect of deism is that, on the human side, it treats all men as isolated individuals, forgetful of the immanent divine nature which interrelates them and in a measure unifies them; and that, on the divine side, it separates men from God and makes the relation between them a purely external one.” Ruskin: “The divine mind is as visible in its full energy of operation on every lowly bank and mouldering stone as in the lifting of the pillars of heaven and settling the foundations of the earth; and to the rightly perceiving mind there is the same majesty, the same power, the same unity, and the same perfection manifested in the casting of the clay as in the scattering of the cloud, in the mouldering of dust as in the kindling of the day-star.” See Pearson, Infidelity, 87; Hanne, Idee der absoluten Persönlichkeit, 76.

2. Continuous Creation.

This view regards the universe as from moment to moment the result of a new creation. It was held by the New England theologians Edwards, Hopkins, and Emmons, and more recently in Germany by Rothe.

[pg 416]

Edwards, Works, 2:486-490, quotes and defends Dr. Taylor's utterance: “God is the original of all being, and the only cause of all natural effects.” Edwards himself says: “God's upholding created substance, or causing its existence in each successive moment, is altogether equivalent to an immediate production out of nothing at each moment.”He argues that the past existence of a thing cannot be the cause of its present existence, because a thing cannot act at a time and place where it is not. “This is equivalent to saying that God cannot produce an effect which shall last for one moment beyond the direct exercise of his creative power. What man can do, God, it seems, cannot” (A. S. Carman). Hopkins, Works, 1:164-167—Preservation “is really continued creation.”Emmons, Works, 4:363-389, esp. 381—“Since all men are dependent agents, all their motions, exercises, or actions must originate in a divine efficiency.” 2:683—“There is but one true and satisfactory answer to the question which has been agitated for centuries: ‘Whence came evil?’ and that is: It came from the first great Cause of all things.... It is as consistent with the moral rectitude of the Deity to produce sinful as holy exercises in the minds of men. He puts forth a positive influence to make moral agents act, in every instance of their conduct, as he pleases.” God therefore creates all the volitions of the soul, as he effects by his almighty power all the changes of the material world. Rothe also held this view. To his mind external expression is necessary to God. His maxim was: “Kein Gott ohne Welt”—“There can be no God without an accompanying world.” See Rothe, Dogmatik, 1:126-160, esp. 150, and Theol. Ethik, 1:186-190; also in Bib. Sac., Jan. 1875:144. See also Lotze, Philos. of Religion, 81-94.

The element of truth in Continuous Creation is its assumption that all force is will. Its error is in maintaining that all force is divine will, and divine will in direct exercise. But the human will is a force as well as the divine will, and the forces of nature are secondary and automatic, not primary and immediate, workings of God. These remarks may enable us to estimate the grain of truth in the following utterances which need important qualification and limitation. Bowne, Philosophy of Theism, 202, likens the universe to the musical note, which exists only on condition of being incessantly reproduced. Herbert Spencer says that “ideas are like the successive chords and cadences brought out from a piano, which successively die away as others are produced.” Maudsley, Physiology of Mind, quotes this passage, but asks quite pertinently: “What about the performer, in the case of the piano and in the case of the brain, respectively? Where in the brain is the equivalent of the harmonic conceptions in the performer's mind?” Professor Fitzgerald: “All nature is living thought—the language of One in whom we live and move and have our being.” Dr. Oliver Lodge, to the British Association in 1891: “The barrier between matter and mind may melt away, as so many others have done.”

To this we object, upon the following grounds:

(a) It contradicts the testimony of consciousness that regular and executive activity is not the mere repetition of an initial decision, but is an exercise of the will entirely different in kind.

Ladd, in his Philosophy of Mind, 144, indicates the error in Continuous Creation as follows: “The whole world of things is momently quenched and then replaced by a similar world of actually new realities.” The words of the poet would then be literally true: “Every fresh and new creation, A divine improvisation, From the heart of God proceeds.” Ovid, Metaph., 1:16—“Instabilis tellus, innabilis unda.” Seth, Hegelianism and Personality, 60, says that, to Fichte, “the world was thus perpetually created anew in each finite spirit,—revelation to intelligence being the only admissible meaning of that much abused term, creation.” A. L. Moore, Science and the Faith, 184, 185—“A theory of occasional intervention implies, as its correlate, a theory of ordinary absence.... For Christians the facts of nature are the acts of God. Religion relates these facts to God as their author; science relates them to one another as parts of a visible order. Religion does not tell of this interrelation; science cannot tell of their relation to God.”

Continuous creation is an erroneous theory because it applies to human wills a principle which is true only of irrational nature and which is only partially true of that. I know that I am not God acting. My will is proof that not all force is divine will. Even on the monistic view, moreover, we may speak of second causes in nature, since God's regular and habitual action is a second and subsequent thing, while his act of initiation [pg 417]and organization is the first. Neither the universe nor any part of it is to be identified with God, any more than my thoughts and acts are to be identified with me. Martineau, in Nineteenth Century, April, 1895:559—“What is nature, but the promise of God's pledged and habitual causality? And what is spirit, but the province of his free causality responding to needs and affections of his free children?... God is not a retired architect who may now and then be called in for repairs. Nature is not self-active, and God's agency is not intrusive.” William Watson, Poems, 88—“If nature be a phantasm, as thou say'st, A splendid fiction and prodigious dream, To reach the real and true I'll make no haste, More than content with worlds that only seem.”

(b) It exaggerates God's power only by sacrificing his truth, love, and holiness;—for if finite personalities are not what they seem—namely, objective existences—God's veracity is impugned; if the human soul has no real freedom and life, God's love has made no self-communication to creatures; if God's will is the only force in the universe, God's holiness can no longer be asserted, for the divine will must in that case be regarded as the author of human sin.

Upon this view personal identity is inexplicable. Edwards bases identity upon the arbitrary decree of God. God can therefore, by so decreeing, make Adam's posterity one with their first father and responsible for his sin. Edwards's theory of continuous creation, indeed, was devised as an explanation of the problem of original sin. The divinely appointed union of acts and exercises with Adam was held sufficient, without union of substance, or natural generation from him, to explain our being born corrupt and guilty. This view would have been impossible, if Edwards had not been an idealist, making far too much of acts and exercises and far too little of substance.

It is difficult to explain the origin of Jonathan Edwards's idealism. It has sometimes been attributed to the reading of Berkeley. Dr. Samuel Johnson, afterwards President of King's College in New York City, a personal friend of Bishop Berkeley and an ardent follower of his teaching, was a tutor in Yale College while Edwards was a student. But Edwards was in Weathersfield while Johnson remained in New Haven, and was among those disaffected towards Johnson as a tutor. Yet Edwards, Original Sin, 479, seems to allude to the Berkeleyan philosophy when he says: “The course of nature is demonstrated by recent improvements in philosophy to be indeed ... nothing but the established order and operation of the Author of nature” (see Allen, Jonathan Edwards, 16, 308, 309). President McCracken, in Philos. Rev., Jan. 1892:26-42, holds that Arthur Collier's Clavis Universalis is the source of Edwards's idealism. It is more probable that his idealism was the result of his own independent thinking, occasioned perhaps by mere hints from Locke, Newton, Cudworth, and Norris, with whose writings he certainly was acquainted. See E. C. Smyth, in Am. Jour. Theol., Oct. 1897:956; Prof. Gardiner, in Philos. Rev., Nov. 1900:573-596.

How thorough-going this idealism of Edwards was may be learned from Noah Porter's Discourse on Bishop George Berkeley, 71, and quotations from Edwards, in Journ. Spec. Philos., Oct. 1883:401-420—“Nothing else has a proper being but spirits, and bodies are but the shadow of being.... Seeing the brain exists only mentally, I therefore acknowledge that I speak improperly when I say that the soul is in the brain only, as to its operations. For, to speak yet more strictly and abstractedly, 'tis nothing but the connection of the soul with these and those modes of its own ideas, or those mental acts of the Deity, seeing the brain exists only in idea.... That which truly is the substance of all bodies is the infinitely exact and precise and perfectly stable idea in God's mind, together with his stable will that the same shall be gradually communicated to us and to other minds according to certain fixed and established methods and laws; or, in somewhat different language, the infinitely exact and precise divine idea, together with an answerable, perfectly exact, precise, and stable will, with respect to correspondent communications to created minds and effects on those minds.” It is easy to see how, from this view of Edwards, the “Exercise-system” of Hopkins and Emmons naturally developed itself. On Edwards's Idealism, see Frazer's Berkeley (Blackwood's Philos. Classics), 139, 140. On personal identity, see Bp. Butler, Works (Bohn's ed.), 327-334.

(c) As deism tends to atheism, so the doctrine of continuous creation tends to pantheism.—Arguing that, because we get our notion of force [pg 418] from the action of our own wills, therefore all force must be will, and divine will, it is compelled to merge the human will in this all-comprehending will of God. Mind and matter alike become phenomena of one force, which has the attributes of both; and, with the distinct existence and personality of the human soul, we lose the distinct existence and personality of God, as well as the freedom and accountability of man.

Lotze tries to escape from material causes and yet hold to second causes, by intimating that these second causes may be spirits. But though we can see how there can be a sort of spirit in the brute and in the vegetable, it is hard to see how what we call insensate matter can have spirit in it. It must be a very peculiar sort of spirit—a deaf and dumb spirit, if any—and such a one does not help our thinking. On this theory the body of a dog would need to be much more highly endowed than its soul. James Seth, in Philos. Rev., Jan. 1894:73—“This principle of unity is a veritable lion's den,—all the footprints are in one direction. Either it is a bare unity—the One annuls the many; or it is simply the All,—the ununified totality of existence.” Dorner well remarks that “Preservation is empowering of the creature and maintenance of its activity, not new bringing it into being.” On the whole subject, see Julius Müller, Doctrine of Sin, 1:220-225; Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 2:258-272; Baird, Elohim Revealed, 50; Hodge, Syst. Theol., 1:577-581, 595; Dabney, Theology, 338, 339.

IV. Remarks upon the Divine Concurrence.

(a) The divine efficiency interpenetrates that of man without destroying or absorbing it. The influx of God's sustaining energy is such that men retain their natural faculties and powers. God does not work all, but all in all.

Preservation, then, is midway between the two errors of denying the first cause (deism or atheism) and denying the second causes (continuous creation or pantheism). 1 Cor. 12:6—“there are diversities of workings, but the same God, who worketh all things in all”; cf. Eph. 1:23—the church, “which is his body, the fulness of him that filleth all in all.” God's action is no actio in distans, or action where he is not. It is rather action in and through free agents, in the case of intelligent and moral beings, while it is his own continuous willing in the case of nature. Men are second causes in a sense in which nature is not. God works through these human second causes, but he does not supersede them. We cannot see the line between the two—the action of the first cause and the action of second causes; yet both are real, and each is distinct from the other, though the method of God's concurrence is inscrutable. As the pen and the hand together produce the writing, so God's working causes natural powers to work with him. The natural growth indicated by the words “wherein is the seed thereof” (Gen. 1:11) has its counterpart in the spiritual growth described in the words “his seed abideth in him” (1 John 3:9). Paul considers himself a reproductive agency in the hands of God: he begets children in the gospel (1 Cor. 4:15); yet the New Testament speaks of this begetting as the work of God (1 Pet. 1:3). We are bidden to work out our own salvation with fear and trembling, upon the very ground that it is God who works in us both to will and to work (Phil. 2:12, 13).

(b) Though God preserves mind and body in their working, we are ever to remember that God concurs with the evil acts of his creatures only as they are natural acts, and not as they are evil.

In holy action God gives the natural powers, and by his word and Spirit influences the soul to use these powers aright. But in evil action God gives only the natural powers; the evil direction of these powers is caused only by man. Jer. 44:4—“Oh, do not this abominable thing that I hate”; Hab. 1:13—“Thou that art of purer eyes than to behold evil, and that canst not look on perverseness, wherefore lookest thou upon them that deal treacherously, and holdest thy peace when the wicked swalloweth up the man that is more righteous than he?” James 1:13, 14—“Let no man say when he is tempted, I am tempted of God; for God cannot be tempted with evil, and he himself tempteth no man: but each man is tempted, when he is drawn away by his own lust, and enticed.” Aaron excused himself for making an Egyptian idol by saying that the fire did it; he asked the people for gold; “so they gave it me; and I cast it into the fire, and there came out this calf” (Ex. 32:24). Aaron leaves out one important point—his [pg 419]own personal agency in it all. In like manner we lay the blame of our sins upon nature and upon God. Pym said of Strafford that God had given him great talents, of which the devil had given the application. But it is more true to say of the wicked man that he himself gives the application of his God-given powers. We are electric cars for which God furnishes the motive-power, but to which we the conductors give the direction. We are organs; the wind or breath of the organ is God's; but the fingering of the keys is ours. Since the maker of the organ is also present at every moment as its preserver, the shameful abuse of his instrument and the dreadful music that is played are a continual grief and suffering to his soul. Since it is Christ who upholds all things by the word of his power, preservation involves the suffering of Christ, and this suffering is his atonement, of which the culmination and demonstration are seen in the cross of Calvary (Heb. 1:3). On the importance of the idea of preservation in Christian doctrine, see Calvin, Institutes, 1:182 (chapter 16).

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 of foreseeing. It is forseeing 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 word Fürsehung, forseeing, looking out for, as well as the word Vorsehung, 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).

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II. Proof of the Doctrine of Providence.

1. Scriptural Proof.

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.”

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 subjectis was her rule, as well as debellare 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 of several islands. 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, 183 sq.; Providence in the Individual Life, 231 sq.

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. Bible in 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 referred 1 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. In 2 Sam. 24:1, God moves David to number Israel, but in 1 Chron. 21:1 the 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 in Ex. 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. See Rom. 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, on Ps. 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. Arguments a priori from 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.

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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. Arguments a posteriori from 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.

III. Theories opposing the Doctrine of Providence.

1. Fatalism.

Fatalism maintains the certainty, but denies the freedom, of human self-determination,—thus substituting fate for providence.

To this view we object that (a) it contradicts consciousness, which testifies that we are free; (b) it exalts the divine power at the expense of God's truth, wisdom, holiness, love; (c) it destroys all evidence of the personality and freedom of God; (d) it practically makes necessity the only God, and leaves the imperatives of our moral nature without present validity or future vindication.

The Mohammedans have frequently been called fatalists, and the practical effect of the teachings of the Koran upon the masses is to make them so. The ordinary Mohammedan will have no physician or medicine, because everything happens as God has before appointed. Smith, however, in his Mohammed and Mohammedanism, denies that fatalism is essential to the system. Islam = “submission,” and the participle Moslem= “submitted,” i. e., to God. Turkish proverb: “A man cannot escape what is written on his forehead.” The Mohammedan thinks of God's dominant attribute as being greatness rather than righteousness, power rather than purity. God is the personification of arbitrary will, not the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. But there is in the system an absence of sacerdotalism, a jealousy for the honor of God, a brotherhood of believers, a reverence for what is considered the word of God, and a bold and habitual devotion of its adherents to their faith.

Stanley, Life and Letters, 1:489, refers to the Mussulman tradition existing in Egypt that the fate of Islam requires that it should at last be superseded by Christianity. F. W. Sanders denies that the Koran is peculiarly sensual. “The Christian and Jewish religions,” he says, “have their paradise also. The Koran makes this the reward, but not the ideal, of conduct; ‘Grace from thy Lord—that is the grand bliss.’ The emphasis of the Koran is upon right living. The Koran does not teach the propagation of religion by force. It declares that there shall be no compulsion in religion. The practice of converting by the sword is to be distinguished from the teaching of Mohammed, just as the Inquisition and the slave-trade in Christendom do not prove that Jesus taught them. The Koran did not institute polygamy. It found unlimited polygamy, divorce, and infanticide. The last it prohibited; the two former it restricted and ameliorated, just as Moses found polygamy, but brought it within bounds. The Koran is not hostile to secular learning. Learning flourished under the Bagdad and Spanish Caliphates. When Moslems oppose learning, they do so without authority from the Koran. The Roman Catholic church has opposed schools, but we do not attribute this to the gospel.”See Zwemer, Moslem Doctrine of God.

Calvinists can assert freedom, since man's will finds its highest freedom only in submission to God. Islam also cultivates submission, but it is the submission not of love but of fear. The essential difference between Mohammedanism and Christianity is found in the revelation which the latter gives of the love of God in Christ—a revelation which secures from free moral agents the submission of love; see page 186. On fatalism, see McCosh, Intuitions, 266; Kant, Metaphysic of Ethics, 52-74, 98-108; Mill, Autobiography, 168-170, and System of Logic, 521-526; Hamilton, Metaphysics, 692; Stewart, Active and Moral Powers of Man, ed. Walker, 268-324.

2. Casualism.

Casualism transfers the freedom of mind to nature, as fatalism transfers the fixity of nature to mind. It thus exchanges providence for chance. [pg 428] Upon this view we remark:

(a) If chance be only another name for human ignorance, a name for the fact that there are trivial occurrences in life which have no meaning or relation to us,—we may acknowledge this, and still hold that providence arranges every so-called chance, for purposes beyond our knowledge. Chance, in this sense, is providential coincidence which we cannot understand, and do not need to trouble ourselves about.

Not all chances are of equal importance. The casual meeting of a stranger in the street need not bring God's providence before me, although I know that God arranges it. Yet I can conceive of that meeting as leading to religious conversation and to the stranger's conversion. When we are prepared for them, we shall see many opportunities which are now as unmeaning to us as the gold in the river-beds was to the early Indians in California. I should be an ingrate, if I escaped a lightning-stroke, and did not thank God; yet Dr. Arnold's saying that every school boy should put on his hat for God's glory, and with a high moral purpose, seems morbid. There is a certain room for the play of arbitrariness. We must not afflict ourselves or the church of God by requiring a Pharisaic punctiliousness in minutiæ. Life is too short to debate the question which shoe we shall put on first. “Love God and do what you will,” said Augustine; that is, Love God, and act out that love in a simple and natural way. Be free in your service, yet be always on the watch for indications of God's will.

(b) If chance be taken in the sense of utter absence of all causal connections in the phenomena of matter and mind,—we oppose to this notion the fact that the causal judgment is formed in accordance with a fundamental and necessary law of human thought, and that no science or knowledge is possible without the assumption of its validity.

In Luke 10:31, our Savior says: “By chance a certain priest was going down that way.” Janet: “Chance is not a cause, but a coincidence of causes.” Bowne, Theory of Thought and Knowledge, 197—“By chance is not meant lack of causation, but the coincidence in an event of mutually independent series of causation. Thus the unpurposed meeting of two persons is spoken of as a chance one, when the movement of neither implies that of the other. Here the antithesis of chance is purpose.”

(c) If chance be used in the sense of undesigning cause,—it is evidently insufficient to explain the regular and uniform sequences of nature, or the moral progress of the human race. These things argue a superintending and designing mind—in other words, a providence. Since reason demands not only a cause, but a sufficient cause, for the order of the physical and moral world, casualism must be ruled out.

The observer at the signal station was asked what was the climate of Rochester. “Climate?” he replied; “Rochester has no climate,—only weather!” So Chauncey Wright spoke of the ups and downs of human affairs as simply “cosmical weather.”But our intuition of design compels us to see mind and purpose in individual and national history, as well as in the physical universe. The same argument which proves the existence of God proves also the existence of a providence. See Farrar, Life of Christ, 1:155, note.

3. Theory of a merely general providence.

Many who acknowledge God's control over the movements of planets and the destinies of nations deny any divine arrangement of particular events. Most of the arguments against deism are equally valid against the theory of a merely general providence. This view is indeed only a form of deism, which holds that God has not wholly withdrawn himself from the universe, but that his activity within it is limited to the maintenance of general laws.

[pg 429]

This appears to have been the view of most of the heathen philosophers. Cicero: “Magna dii curant; parva negligunt.” “Even in kingdoms among men,” he says, “kings do not trouble themselves with insignificant affairs.” Fullerton, Conceptions of the Infinite, 9—“Plutarch thought there could not be an infinity of worlds,—Providence could not possibly take charge of so many. ‘Troublesome and boundless infinity’could be grasped by no consciousness.” The ancient Cretans made an image of Jove without ears, for they said: “It is a shame to believe that God would hear the talk of men.” So Jerome, the church Father, thought it absurd that God should know just how many gnats and cockroaches there were in the world. David Harum is wiser when he expresses the belief that there is nothing wholly bad or useless in the world: “A reasonable amount of fleas is good for a dog,—they keep him from broodin' on bein' a dog.” This has been paraphrased: “A reasonable number of beaux are good for a girl,—they keep her from brooding over her being a girl.”

In addition to the arguments above alluded to, we may urge against this theory that:

(a) General control over the course of nature and of history is impossible without control over the smallest particulars which affect the course of nature and of history. Incidents so slight as well-nigh to escape observation at the time of their occurrence are frequently found to determine the whole future of a human life, and through that life the fortunes of a whole empire and of a whole age.

“Nothing great has great beginnings.” “Take care of the pence, and the pounds will take care of themselves.” “Care for the chain is care for the links of the chain.”Instances in point are the sleeplessness of King Ahasuerus (Esther 6:1), and the seeming chance that led to the reading of the record of Mordecai's service and to the salvation of the Jews in Persia; the spider's web spun across the entrance to the cave in which Mohammed had taken refuge, which so deceived his pursuers that they passed on In a bootless chase, leaving to the world the religion and the empire of the Moslems; the preaching of Peter the Hermit, which occasioned the first Crusade; the chance shot of an archer, which pierced the right eye of Harold, the last of the purely English kings, gained the battle of Hastings for William the Conqueror, and secured the throne of England for the Normans; the flight of pigeons to the south-west, which changed the course of Columbus, hitherto directed towards Virginia, to the West Indies, and so prevented the dominion of Spain over North America; the storm that dispersed the Spanish Armada and saved England from the Papacy, and the storm that dispersed the French fleet gathered for the conquest of New England—the latter on a day of fasting and prayer appointed by the Puritans to avert the calamity; the settling of New England by the Puritans, rather than by French Jesuits; the order of Council restraining Cromwell and his friends from sailing to America; Major André's lack of self-possession in presence of his captors, which led him to ask an improper question instead of showing his passport, and which saved the American cause; the unusually early commencement of cold weather, which frustrated the plans of Napoleon and destroyed his army in Russia; the fatal shot at Fort Sumter, which precipitated the war of secession and resulted in the abolition of American slavery. Nature is linked to history; the breeze warps the course of the bullet; the worm perforates the plank of the ship. God must care for the least, or he cannot care for the greatest.

“Large doors swing on small hinges.” The barking of a dog determined F. W. Robertson to be a preacher rather than a soldier. Robert Browning, Mr. Sludge the Medium: “We find great things are made of little things, And little things go lessening till at last Comes God behind them.” E. G. Robinson: “We cannot suppose only a general outline to have been in the mind of God, while the filling-up is left to be done in some other way. The general includes the special.” Dr. Lloyd, one of the Oxford Professors, said to Pusey, “I wish you would learn something about those German critics.” “In the obedient spirit of those times,” writes Pusey, “I set myself at once to learn German, and I went to Göttingen, to study at once the language and the theology. My life turned on that hint of Dr. Lloyd's.”

Goldwin Smith: “Had a bullet entered the brain of Cromwell or of William III in his first battle, or had Gustavus not fallen at Lützen, the course of history apparently would have been changed. The course even of science would have been changed, if there had not been a Newton and a Darwin.” The annexation of Corsica to France [pg 430]gave to France a Napoleon, and to Europe a conqueror. Martineau, Seat of Authority, 101—“Had the monastery at Erfurt deputed another than young Luther on its errand to paganized Rome, or had Leo X sent a less scandalous agent than Tetzel on his business to Germany, the seeds of the Reformation might have fallen by the wayside where they had no deepness of earth, and the Western revolt of the human mind might have taken another date and another form.” See Appleton, Works, 1:149 sq.; Lecky, England in the Eighteenth Century, chap. I.

(b) The love of God which prompts a general care for the universe must also prompt a particular care for the smallest events which affect the happiness of his creatures. It belongs to love to regard nothing as trifling or beneath its notice which has to do with the interests of the object of its affection. Infinite love may therefore be expected to provide for all, even the minutest things in the creation. Without belief in this particular care, men cannot long believe in God's general care. Faith in a particular providence is indispensable to the very existence of practical religion; for men will not worship or recognize a God who has no direct relation to them.

Man's care for his own body involves care for the least important members of it. A lover's devotion is known by his interest in the minutest concerns of his beloved. So all our affairs are matters of interest to God. Pope's Essay on Man: “All nature is but art unknown to thee; All chance, direction which thou canst not see; All discord, harmony not understood; All partial evil, universal good.” If harvests may be labored for and lost without any agency of God; if rain or sun may act like fate, sweeping away the results of years, and God have no hand in it all; if wind and storm may wreck the ship and drown our dearest friends, and God not care for us or for our loss, then all possibility of general trust in God will disappear also.

God's care is shown in the least things as well as in the greatest. In Gethsemane Christ says: “Let these go their way: that the word might be fulfilled which he spake, Of those whom thou hast given me I lost not one” (John 18:8, 9). It is the same spirit as that of his intercessory prayer: “I guarded them, and not one of them perished, but the son of perdition” (John 17:12). Christ gives himself as a prisoner that his disciples may go free, even as he redeems us from the curse of the law by being made a curse for us (Gal. 3:13). The dewdrop is moulded by the same law that rounds the planets into spheres. Gen. Grant said he had never but once sought a place for himself, and in that place he was a comparative failure; he had been an instrument in God's hand for the accomplishing of God's purposes, apart from any plan or thought or hope of his own.

Of his journey through the dark continent in search of David Livingston, Henry M. Stanley wrote in Scribner's Monthly for June, 1890: “Constrained at the darkest hour humbly to confess that without God's help I was helpless, I vowed a vow in the forest solitudes that I would confess his aid before men. Silence as of death was around me; it was midnight; I was weakened by illness, prostrated with fatigue, and wan with anxiety for my white and black companions, whose fate was a mystery. In this physical and mental distress I besought God to give me back my people. Nine hours later we were exulting with a rapturous joy. In full view of all was the crimson flag with the crescent, and beneath its waving folds was the long-lost rear column.... My own designs were frustrated constantly by unhappy circumstances. I endeavored to steer my course as direct as possible, but there was an unaccountable influence at the helm.... I have been conscious that the issues of every effort were in other hands.... Divinity seems to have hedged us while we journeyed, impelling us whither it would, effecting its own will, but constantly guiding and protecting us.” He refuses to believe that it is all the result of “luck”, and he closes with a doxology which we should expect from Livingston but not from him: “Thanks be to God, forever and ever!”

(c) In times of personal danger, and in remarkable conjunctures of public affairs, men instinctively attribute to God a control of the events which take place around them. The prayers which such startling emergencies force from men's lips are proof that God is present and active in human affairs. This testimony of our mental constitution must be regarded as virtually the testimony of him who framed this constitution.

[pg 431]

No advance of science can rid us of this conviction, since it comes from a deeper source than mere reasoning. The intuition of design is awakened by the connection of events in our daily life, as much as by the useful adaptations which we see in nature. Ps. 107:23-28—“They that go down to the sea in ships ... mount up to the heavens, they go down again to the depths ... And are at their wits' end. Then they cry unto Jehovah in their trouble.” A narrow escape from death shows us a present God and Deliverer. Instance the general feeling throughout the land, expressed by the press as well as by the pulpit, at the breaking out of our rebellion and at the President's subsequent Proclamation of Emancipation.

“Est deus in nobis; agitante calescimus illo.” For contrast between Nansen's ignoring of God in his polar journey and Dr. Jacob Chamberlain's calling upon God in his strait in India, see Missionary Review, May, 1898. Sunday School Times, March 4, 1893—“Benjamin Franklin became a deist at the age of fifteen. Before the Revolutionary War he was merely a shrewd and pushing business man. He had public spirit, and he made one happy discovery in science. But ‘Poor Richard's’ sayings express his mind at that time. The perils and anxieties of the great war gave him a deeper insight. He and others entered upon it ‘with a rope around their necks.’ As he told the Constitutional Convention of 1787, when he proposed that its daily sessions be opened with prayer, the experiences of that war showed him that ‘God verily rules in the affairs of men.’ And when the designs for an American coinage were under discussion, Franklin proposed to stamp on them, not ‘A Penny Saved is a Penny Earned,’ or any other piece of worldly prudence, but ‘The Fear of the Lord is the Beginning of Wisdom.’ ”

(d) Christian experience confirms the declarations of Scripture that particular events are brought about by God with special reference to the good or ill of the individual. Such events occur at times in such direct connection with the Christian's prayers that no doubt remains with regard to the providential arrangement of them. The possibility of such divine agency in natural events cannot be questioned by one who, like the Christian, has had experience of the greater wonders of regeneration and daily intercourse with God, and who believes in the reality of creation, incarnation, and miracles.

Providence prepares the way for men's conversion, sometimes by their own partial reformation, sometimes by the sudden death of others near them. Instance Luther and Judson. The Christian learns that the same Providence that led him before his conversion is busy after his conversion in directing his steps and in supplying his wants. Daniel Defoe: “I have been fed more by miracle than Elijah when the angels were his purveyors.” In Psalm 32, David celebrates not only God's pardoning mercy but his subsequent providential leading: “I will counsel thee with mine eye upon thee” (verse 8). It may be objected that we often mistake the meaning of events. We answer that, as in nature, so in providence, we are compelled to believe, not that we know the design, but that there is a design. Instance Shelley's drowning, and Jacob Knapp's prayer that his opponent might be stricken dumb. Lyman Beecher's attributing the burning of the Unitarian church to God's judgment upon false doctrine was invalidated a little later by the burning of his own church.

Job 23:10—“He knoweth the way that is mine,” or “the way that is with me,” i. e., my inmost way, life, character; “When he hath tried me, I shall come forth as gold.” 1 Cor. 19:4—“and the rock was Christ”—Christ was the ever present source of their refreshment and life, both physical and spiritual. God's providence is all exercised through Christ. 2 Cor. 2:14—“But thanks be unto God, who always leadeth us in triumph in Christ”; not, as in A. V., “causeth us to triumph.” Paul glories, not in conquering, but in being conquered. Let Christ triumph, not Paul. “Great King of grace, my heart subdue; I would be led in triumph too. A willing captive to my Lord, To own the conquests of his word.” Therefore Paul can call himself “the prisoner of Christ Jesus” (Eph. 3:1). It was Christ who had shut him up two years in Cæsarea, and then two succeeding years in Rome.

IV. Relations of the Doctrine of Providence.

1. To miracles and works of grace.

Particular providence is the agency of God in what seem to us the minor affairs of nature and human life. Special providence is only an instance [pg 432] of God's particular providence which has special relation to us or makes peculiar impression upon us. It is special, not as respects the means which God makes use of, but as respects the effect produced upon us. In special providence we have only a more impressive manifestation of God's universal control.

Miracles and works of grace like regeneration are not to be regarded as belonging to a different order of things from God's special providences. They too, like special providences, may have their natural connections and antecedents, although they more readily suggest their divine authorship. Nature and God are not mutually exclusive,—nature is rather God's method of working. Since nature is only the manifestation of God, special providence, miracle, and regeneration are simply different degrees of extraordinary nature. Certain of the wonders of Scripture, such as the destruction of Sennacherib's army and the dividing of the Red Sea, the plagues of Egypt, the flight of quails, and the draught of fishes, can be counted as exaggerations of natural forces, while at the same time they are operations of the wonder-working God.

The falling of snow from a roof is an example of ordinary (or particular) providence. But if a man is killed by it, it becomes a special providence to him and to others who are thereby taught the insecurity of life. So the providing of coal for fuel in the geologic ages may be regarded by different persons in the light either of a general or of a special providence. In all the operations of nature and all the events of life God's providence is exhibited. That providence becomes special, when it manifestly suggests some care of God for us or some duty of ours to God. Savage, Life beyond Death, 285—“Mary A. Livermore's life was saved during her travels in the West by her hearing and instantly obeying what seemed to her a voice. She did not know where it came from; but she leaped, as the voice ordered, from one side of a car to the other, and instantly the side where she had been sitting was crushed in and utterly demolished.”In a similar way, the life of Dr. Oncken was saved in the railroad disaster at Norwalk.

Trench gives the name of “providential miracles” to those Scripture wonders which may be explained as wrought through the agency of natural laws (see Trench, Miracles, 19). Mozley also (Miracles, 117-120) calls these wonders miracles, because of the predictive word of God which accompanied them. He says that the difference in effect between miracles and special providences is that the latter give some warrant, while the former give full warrant, for believing that they are wrought by God. He calls special providences “invisible miracles.” Bp. of Southampton, Place of Miracles, 12, 13—“The art of Bezaleel in constructing the tabernacle, and the plans of generals like Moses and Joshua, Gideon, Barak, and David, are in the Old Testament ascribed to the direct inspiration of God. A less religious writer would have ascribed them to the instinct of military skill. No miracle is necessarily involved, when, in devising the system of ceremonial law it is said: ‘Jehovah spake unto Moses’ (Num. 5:1). God is everywhere present in the history of Israel, but miracles are strikingly rare.” We prefer to say that the line between the natural and the supernatural, between special providence and miracle, is an arbitrary one, and that the same event may often be regarded either as special providence or as miracle, according as we look at it from the point of view of its relation to other events or from the point of view of its relation to God.

E. G. Robinson: “If Vesuvius should send up ashes and lava, and a strong wind should scatter them, it could be said to rain fire and brimstone, as at Sodom and Gomorrha.” There is abundant evident of volcanic action at the Dead Sea. See article on the Physical Preparation for Israel in Palestine, by G. Frederick Wright, in Bib. Sac., April, 1901:364. The three great miracles—the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrha, the parting of the waters of the Jordan, the falling down of the walls of Jericho—are described as effect of volcanic eruption, elevation of the bed of the river by a landslide, and earthquake-shock overthrowing the walls. Salt slime thrown up may have enveloped Lot's wife and turned her into “a mound of salt” (Gen. 19:26). In like manner, some of Jesus' works of healing, as for instance those wrought upon paralytics and epileptics, may be susceptible of natural explanation, while yet they show [pg 433]that Christ is absolute Lord of nature. For the naturalistic view, see Tyndall on Miracles and Special Providences, in Fragments of Science, 45, 418. Per contra, see Farrar, on Divine Providence and General Laws, in Science and Theology, 54-80; Row, Bampton Lect. on Christian Evidences, 109-115; Godet, Defence of Christian Faith, Chap. 2; Bowne, The Immanence of God, 56-65.