the effects of those actions on things around him, must depend on that choice alone, and have no connexion whatever with the events which preceded it. If God's grace, by which that choice is influenced, be a contingent, not a predestinated blessing, we admit at once an immediate interposing cause, which experience proves to have power to determine to the greatest extent, the temporal as well as the eternal happiness of individuals and communities. In the one case the chain of causes and events is cut short never to be re-united; in the other, we have a stone hewn without hands, which must dash to pieces the complicated and gigantic idol of destiny, and scatter its iron, its clay, its brass, its silver, and its gold, "like the chaff of the summer threshing floor which the wind carried away, that no place was found for them."* There can be no qualifications of fatalism; the whole vast bubble bursts if we impugn it in any one particular, while if we contend for any part of it, all moral obligations fall to the ground, and we must make our option in theology between admitting the existence of a power superior to the Almighty, or divesting the All-good of His noblest attributes of justice and mercy. With good reason, then, have the great majority of rational theists, in every age and country, agreed to recognise, in the course of events around them, no other agency than the Providence of the Most High, applied to particulars; a Providence which He exerts, indeed, in its grander features, according * Dan. ii. 35. to an uniform system, but which (in its detail and minuter circumstances) He may and does continually and infinitely vary, according to the necessities, the exertions, the merits, and the prayers of His creatures. For it is not a doctrine of revealed religion only, that God is the moral as well as the physical Governor of the world, and that the course of events is so arranged by Him, as, even in the present life, to promote the interests of virtue, to cross the schemes of impiety, to consult the happiness, and to be influenced by the prayers of the righteous and the penitent. This has been the hope, this the faith, this the fear, this the religion of every nation, how rude soever, by whom, under whatever name, the Almighty has been named, or His altars, with whatever worship, honoured. True it is that they have not supposed in this world a perfect retribution, or anticipated an exact adjustment of earthly good or evil, according to the virtues or the demerits of individuals. This they have believed to be reserved to a future state of being, in which the inequalities of the present life were to be redressed, and the good rewarded richly for their patient endurance of those calamities which had been, for wise ends, imposed on them. But that, even in the present world, impiety and oppression were sometimes exemplarily punished; that, in this valley of tears and darkness, the virtuous were sometimes exemplarily delivered and supported; that prayer might conciliate, and repentance appease, and virtue secure the favour of the Sovereign ruler of events and their causes, are opinions coeval and coextensive with a belief in God's being at all, or only lost amid those miserable savages to whom the difficulties of procuring subsistence have left no time for meditation, and who, in the pressing wants of the passing day, have ceased to regard the invisible world with hope or apprehension. Where the idea of God is admitted at all, it is hard, indeed, to represent to ourselves a God who is indifferent to the distresses or the conduct of His creatures; and the possibility of such a divinity was conceived by Epicurus only, when he had divested him of his character as Creator. A mere bystander may, indeed, be supposed to retire into the unapproachable recesses of an unmoved and happy immortality; he may avert his eyes from the vast and disfigured scene of blood and misery to some happier spot, if such is to be found, of comparative peace and virtue.* But though the bystander might enjoy his own quiet amid the wretchedness of nations, the parent may be naturally expected to feel for his children's wants, and to hear his children's petitions. The same instinct which inclines us to watch over the welfare of our own little ones, that instinct leads us * Τοὺς μὲν ἔα παρὰ νηρῦσι πόνον τ ̓ ἐχέμεν καὶ ὀξὺν to expect relief from our unseen Father when, in bitterness of heart, we call on Him; and there are times of mental calamity in which, even if prayer were useless, or even sinful, it would be next to impossible to abstain from it. Nor do I know a greater presumptive proof of the reasonableness of any practice, or any expectation, than its universal reception among mankind, its entire conformity with our natural wants and feelings, and that it belongs to the number of those primary tenets, those svvoia, which, if not born with us, yet necessarily and speedily arise within us from the constitution of our nature and the disposition of things around us. 1 Nor is this opinion really at variance with the facts alleged against it, or with the degree of regularity found in the recurrence of those dispensations which, by storing the experience, assist the foresight of the calculator. That regularity, such as it is, depends not only on the natural exhaustion of the human body, on the natural phenomena of the earth, the water, and the air, but still more on the continuance of a certain state of civil society, on the civil tranquillity or moral habits of a people, on the facilities afforded, or the barriers opposed, to crime, and on the degree in which that indigence, which often leads to crime, is alleviated or prevented. Accordingly, to two nations or two periods of society differing in these respects from each other, the same calculation will not apply. A very different ratio of casualties belongs to Norway and to France, as well as to France during the rage of revolution, and France during its previous tranquillity. The ensurer must reform his tables if he car ries them from England into Turkey, and in England itself a difference, notoriously springing from moral causes, has arisen within the present age in the average of longevity. But, further, it being granted that the moral and religious habits of a nation exert an influence over the casualties to which the individuals of that nation are exposed, it is plain that there are two ways in which the manner of that influence may be stated; and that it is as allowable in the asserter of a peculiar Providence to say, that God gives health and prosperity to the virtuous, as it is for his opponent to explain the whole phenomena by the physical effects of temperance and industry. Nor will the regularity with which these dispensations succeed each other have power to surprise the believer who reflects that, while the morals and religion of a country are stationary, an equal number of crimes will call down an equal number of chastisements, and that the same prayers may generally receive the same answers from the God who "maketh a fruitful land barren for the wickedness of them that dwell therein," and who hath promised to "hear in Heaven, His dwelling-place, and forgive and do, and give to every man according to his ways. VOL. I. * Psalm cvii. 34. 1 Kings viii. 39. F |