GOD IN HISTORY.

YOD in History is my glorious theme. Young men gazing with intermingling hopes and fears into the unsealed future are my noble audience. To indicate the thread by which you may guide yourselves through labyrinthine years to come is my aim. To honour God by unfolding his presence above, below, around, and to do you good by enabling you to see, to realize, and to taste that it is so, will be, I pray and trust, the desirable result.

I assume that whatever evil, sin, imperfection, alloy appear in history, are not of God, but interpolations,-miasmata from below. God did not make sin.

I assume that all good that is developed in history; all beneficent, holy, happy issues that evolve from the intermingling conflicts of persons, principles, passions, are from God. I take it for a fixed and sure truth, that when evil is overruled for good, darkness for light, and man's side-ends for great public and beneficent results; and when, above all, we find the creature planning his own purpose, and God overruling it for His, and the evil intended working out the good that was not intended, we see visibly the footprints of God,--the traces of His omnipotent beneficence, the fact of God in history.

Man is in history; its most wonderful, and often its most perplexing phenomenon. Angels are in history; opening its mysterious seals, sounding its awful trumpets, and pouring forth its dreadful vials. Satan is in history; ever active to sug

gest what is evil, arrest what is good, or overthrow what is holy, pure, permanent, divine.

But God is in history. Were it not so, man would become a fiend; angels would flee as from another Gomorrah; Satan, wearing his burning coronet of sin and the regalia of hell, would lord it over sea and land; and time, commencing with Paradise, would close with Pandemonium.

Many are anxious to get rid of all idea of God in history or in the world. They desire to extinguish every sense of His "No God" is their wish,

presence or of their responsibility.

and "No God" is therefore their conclusion. It is not with the feeling of simple aversion, but with emotions of desperate hostility that they think of God. They are not Atheists, but anti-Theists. They have a latent feeling that God is, and this feeling they persecute and tear up, because it torments them in proportion to its strength.

Yet, just in as far as such persons succeed in emptying their minds of all idea of the presence of God in the history of the world, they increase the density, chaos, and confusion already about them. To an unlettered peasant, the firmament on a clear winter evening glows with splendour like the city of God, but it seems, nevertheless, a wilderness of tumbling and eccentric orbs. But to an astronomer's eye, our planets are revolving each on its axis, and all around the sun; and that sun, with all his planets, is but a group revolving round an inner and more central sun; and all that mighty host but sentinels around the throne of Deity. Such is the difference between seeing all the facts of history as accidental occurrences, and seeing them all projected from God, or overruled by Him, for grand and beneficial issues. Others feel it an unspeakable joy to see the shadow of Deity sweep along the currents of time, and to hear the voice of God, as of old, amid the trees of the garden. They see Him in verses, chapters, and books; in the youngest children and the oldest cherubim; in the dew-drop

dancing on the cabbage-leaf, or on the ocean girdling the earth with its glorious zone; in the smallest molecule of light, and in the majestic mountain or the everlasting hills; in the tripping of an infant's foot, and in the overturning of a monarch's throne; in the flight of Louis Blanc, and in the fall of Louis Philippe.

God is not confined to consecrated acres and hallowed shrines; his power is felt where his presence is deprecated or unsuspected. He is in the counting-house, the shop, the exchange, the market; on the deck, the battle-field; in the parliament, the palace, the judgment-hall. Forcing none, he adjusts, arranges, and directs all; making microscopic points the pivots of gigantic wheels, and a random shot, as recently in Paris, the tocsin of a revolution that has changed the condition, connexion, and prospects of almost every nation in Europe. God is in all history, whether he be seen or not; in its minutest winding, in its gentlest ripple, and in its roaring cataracts; at your festivals and funerals, beside the baby's cradle, and above the monarch's throne.

Robertson writes history very much like an accomplished littérateur; more charmed by the sparks struck from its collisions than arrested by the sense of a present Deity. Hume writes as if he were the hired advocate and special pleader of Satan; seemingly the patron of religion and virtue, really the desperate enemy of both. Gibbon brings the splendours of a magnificent genius and the drapery of a gorgeous style to do the same work which Hume's dry metaphysical diction had failed to do. Alison, whatever may be thought of minor views, is the most faithful, eloquent, and correct Christian writer of history. A historian ought to stand, like the apocalyptic angel, in the sun, and from that central and commanding foothold review the past and record the present. He ought to see the facts of history as the astronomer sees the stars in the firmament; each in its orbit, and all moving round a central

sun. He ought to see God in all, and yet not the author of sin. A fierce conclave of Covenanters once went out to murder a magistrate, against whose life they fanatically thought they had a commission; the magistrate escaped, but one Archbishop Sharpe happened to pass: "Truly," they said, "this is of God, and it is a clear call from God to fall upon him." This was adding blasphemy to murder.

God permitted them thus to

sin, perhaps in order to teach posterity what terrible atrocities may be perpetrated under the garb of religion, but God was no further in that sanguinary episode.

God is in history; forgiving, neutralizing, and overruling the evil that is in the world.

God is in history; creating, upholding, and carrying to victory whatever is good or holy in it.

The rejection of the conviction that God is present-acting in, regulating, restraining, or overruling all facts and times and events has aggravated a thousandfold the miseries of sceptical minds. They are adrift from the anchorage-ground of Deity, their bark on an ungoverned and ungovernable sea— helm broken, compass cast away, and all is chaos. Thus wrote David Hume: "I am affrighted and confounded with that forlorn solitude in which I am placed by my philosophy. When I look abroad, I see on every side dispute, contradiction, distraction. When I turn my cye inward, I find nothing but doubt and ignorance. Where am I, or what? From what causes do I derive my existence, and to what condition shall I return ? I am confounded with these questions, and begin to fancy myself in the most deplorable condition imaginable, environed with the deepest darkness.”—Treatise on Human Nature, vol. i. p. 458.

Voltaire says: "Who can without horror consider the whole world as the empire of destruction? It abounds with wonders ; it abounds also with victims. It is a vast field of carnage and contagion. Every species is without pity pursued and torn to

pieces through the earth, the air, the water. In man there is more wretchedness than in all other animals put together. He loves life, and yet he knows he must die. This knowledge is his fatal prerogative; other animals have it not. He spends the transient moments of his existence in diffusing the miseries which he suffers; cutting the throats of his fellow-creatures for pay; in cheating and being cheated; in robbing and being robbed, and in repenting of all he does. The bulk of mankind are nothing more than a crowd of wretches, equally criminal and unfortunate. I tremble at the review of this dreadful picture. I wish I never had been born."

These men had no central column against which to lean amid the social and moral convulsions of the world. To them the world had no plan, the centuries no mission; and the existence of the creature, and the being of the heavens, air, earth, were to them mere fortuitous accidents. They staggered amid the chaos in which their scepticism had placed them. They felt the misery and bitterness of their intense solitariness, and therefore deprecated their existence as a calamity. They had souls too great for any on earth to satisfy, and they knew of no God above the earth from whose fulness they could fill them. Hence the greatness of the atheist's nature is his curse while atheism is his creed.

To such minds all history is but the ceaseless flux and reflux of disconnected facts; a chaos of intermingling and conflicting occurrences, without polarity, harmony, or design. A historian's duty, according to this theory, is to write a dry chronicle, to sum up the centuries, and to leave the skeletons and mummies of departed ages for the admiration or dissection of future inquirers.

Others, dissatisfied with so cold and bare a recital of disjointed facts, have cast their eye over them from Olympus, and made history musical by song, if they could not make it cohere by an all-pervading and percolating element. In their hands