One and another shall cross that shore till all are welcomed home. Then we'll list Heaven's arches ringing

With a rare melodious singing,

And we, too, will join the harpers wreathing praises round the throne.

ARTICLE V.

ACCIDENTS OR PROVIDENCES, WHICH?

It is said that in his flight for Mecca, Mohammed sought concealment and rest in a cave by the way-side. After his entrance a spider spread its net across the mouth of the cave. His pursuers, intent on his death and examining every covert, paused at this one. But, seeing the insect-net, they judged that he could not have entered there, and so passed on. Some say that thus an accident saved the entire and vast Mohammedan power from being destroyed in its infancy. Was this insect trifling an accidental preservation of the Moslem power in its germ? Or shall we say that God thus wrapped up and protected in cobwebs a force that would break up armies and nations?

An event may take place without our foresight. It may come from an unknown cause. It may be a strange effect, to appearance, of a supposed known cause. It may be contrary to our earnest, waiting expectation. It may come so unawares that our every thought of it must be an after-thought. It may come as a sudden and terrible defeat of our most sacred desires, purposes, and labors. It may come full of surprising and mysterious mercies. The way of life to individuals and communities shows many of these events. They affect variously our treasures, hopes, plans, friends, and life.

Men divide these events into Providences and Accidents. The favor that comes through unforeseen and strange concurrence of circumstances is called a providence, while the calamity is called an accident.

Now if the term, accident, as thus used, were a softened and more grateful term for unexpected or sorrowful event, it would be well enough. But there is frequently glided under that wórd, the substance of the idea that the event did not share in the ordinary supervision of God. Nay, more. There is the feeling, often, that had God attended and brought his usual providence to bear, the event would have been otherwise.

Herein lies an error, and it is deep and wide-working. For it leaves men in the discussion of events to admit or dispense with the agency of God in them. In some terrible railroad casualty the life of one man is saved from imminent danger, and men call his escape a particular providence. Another, sitting beside him, is mutilated to a terrible death, and they call this event to him an accident. A third, whose home is in sight of the catastrophe, lives a life unmarked by any peculiar incident, and dies a common death, in a ripe old age, on the bed where he has slept nightly these fifty years; and they say nothing about providence in his case. The drift of which criticism is, that in some events God is very attentive, even to directing, toward others indifferent or inefficient, and of yet others as unobservant as if occurring outside the range of his dominion.

Such a feeling, and it is not uncommon, on the subject of accidents, limits the presence, shortens the arm, and restricts the supervision of God. This modern and popular theory of accidents is the outgrowth of a false theology. It is an old Arminian notion, whose advocates number more than would willingly and openly espouse this ancient heresy. It is a theology that concedes to God a limited monarchy over matter, and an elective monarchy over free agents. It ranks him among men as superintendent of contingencies. It allows him foreordination, but the plans in which it lies and is to be executed, are based on and made to be coincident with what he foresees his creatures will do. So God's decrees are but his indorsement or permission in advance of what he foresees must take place. It allows him foreknowledge of the actions of man; but he obtains this, not by knowing how the causes that he will ordain, connect, and make operative, will produce events; he divines what man, with a self-determining will,

and acting independently of all motives, will do. It allows him an election of men unto salvation, but it is an election following the person who is already predetermined in his own will, or by his own endeavors, to be saved. It is an election, not leading and causing, but pursuing and consenting, an election that does not cast, but only counts and declares the votes. Of course such a theology gives a large place for accidents, and for those unsupported sorrows that come with accidents to him believing in them. An accident, in the common and moral use of this word, means an event that has no divine mind designing and controlling it. It is fortuitous or hap-hazard as outside the circle of the divine power, or as a lawless marauder inside. Is there any such event under the government of God? Do the elements of his character and government allow us to suppose such an event as possible?

God is everywhere, at all times, and at the same time. He sees all that has been, all that is, all that shall be, and all that might be, yet never shall be. The arm of God is the only power that works a change in anything, at any time. There is no motion, no variation, in things animate or inanimate, but, directly or indirectly, it is of God. He keeps every substance and being, be it mineral or vegetable, solid or fluid, brute, human, or angelic, from dissolving, and returning to primitive, chaotic atoms. God is of service for the world besides creating it and starting it with a system of forces. And we must not exile him under the delusion that we shall have anything remaining, abiding, and operative in what we call the constitution and course of Nature, natural forces, or natural laws. These are but the modes, the habits of God in his omnipresent and perpetual working. He is not, in creation, like a clockmaker, constructing his machine, winding it up, and then ever sitting idly by to see it run. "In Him we live and move and have our being," a fact equally at home in the outside field of philosophic truths and in the inside field of inspired truths.

Few learned delusions are more popular than that a law is a power. It is but a mode, the uniform manifestation of a power. It is the channel for the stream. The statute of a State is nothing except as it is filled, vitalized, and energized by the

will of the State. At this very point old English deism, French infidelity, and the modern reproduction of the two in German neology, diverge from the path of Christian philosophy. Those earlier sceptics assumed that force inheres in matter, and is an essential element of its nature, and is itself the ultimate cause of all activity in matter. Newton, on the Christian side, referred all action and changes in matter to a spiritual cause. Modern Christian philosophy follows in the same line of truth. Says Professor Guyot, "What is a law but a permanent act of the Divine Will? What is a What is a development but the existence or realization in time and space of this Supreme Will?" And Professor Peirce, of Cambridge, speaking of an inherent and fixed force in matter, which would secure perpetual motion, says: "It may not perhaps be incompatible with the unbounded power of the Creator; but if it had been introduced into nature, it would have proved destructive to human belief in the spiritual origin of force, and the necessity of a first cause superior to matter, and would have subjected the grand plans of Divine Benevolence to the will and caprice of man." †

Here force in nature is referred back directly to a divine source, and so natural laws are resolved into divine modes of action. Professor Dana of New Haven puts this point in the same light, when, speaking of natural laws, he calls them "the laws which God has established in nature, or rather the methods in which he is constantly working in the universe." [Bib. Sac. 13: 82.

All this is good Christian philosophy. And it is good theology too. It shows God as "a God at hand, and not a God afar off." "To represent God," says Calvin, "as a Creator only for a moment, who entirely finished all his work at once, were frigid and jejune; and in this it behoves us especially to differ from the heathen." "If any one falls into the hands of robbers, or meets with wild beasts; if by a sudden storm he is shipwrecked on the ocean; if he is killed by the fall of a house or a tree; if another, wandering through deserts, finds relief for

On the Concordance of the Mosaic Account of the Creation with that given by Modern Science." - Lectures before the Spingler Institute, New York. 1852. Bib. Sacra, 12: 333.

↑ "A System of Analytic Mechanics." Boston: Little, Brown & Company, p. 31.

his penury, or, after having been tossed about by the waves, reaches the port, and escapes, as it were, but a hair's breadth from death, carnal reason will ascribe all these occurrences, both prosperous and adverse, to fortune. But whoever has been taught from the mouth of Christ, that the hairs of his head are all numbered, will seek further for a cause, and conclude that all events are governed by the secret counsel of God. And respecting things inanimate it must be admitted, that though they are all naturally endued with their peculiar prop erties, yet they exert not their power, any further than as they are directed by the present hand of God. They are, therefore, no other than instruments into which God infuses as much ef ficacy as he pleases, bending and turning them to any actions, according to his will." "In the creatures there is no erratic power, or action, or motion; but they are so governed by the counsel of God that nothing can happen but what is subject to his knowledge, and decreed by his will. First, then, let the readers know that what is called providence describes God, not as idly beholding from heaven the transactions which happen in the world, but as holding the helm of the universe, and regulating all events." [Institutes, B. 1, c. 16.

This is not only Calvinism but Christianity. The archangel folds his tireless wing, but as he borrows Almighty power for the act. No microscopic vermin infests man or beast in the land of the Pharaohs, but the magician of the Nile and the modern scholar in natural science shall be forced to say, "This is the finger of God." No comet gleams across the angry heavens, no continent is rocked and submerged, no angel, no sparrow falls, no spider hangs his dewy web, no snow-flake falls on the wandering footsteps of a lost Franklin, but God with infinite thought and perfect care supervises each cause, every circumstance and all the consequences.

Otherwise how does he govern the world? Of necessity there can be no general administration of a perfect government without securing the particulars. Can there be the river without the springs, the deluge without the drops, the web without the threads, the thread without the fibres of the cotton?

If God measure not the wind and guide not the waves on the troubled Adriatic in such way as to drift that floating spar