ARTICLE IV.

THE DOCTRINE OF GOD'S PROVIDENCE, IN ITSELF, AND IN ITS RELATIONS AND USES.

BY DR. BENJAMIN W. Dwight, new YORK CITY

SOCIETY is ever slowly oscillating in matters of public opinion and of public feeling from one extreme to another. In reference to principles of state polity, it vibrates to and fro, continually, from authority to liberty. In religious doctrine, the orthodox evangelical portion of it rests quite habitually in a fixed, strongly declared, outward estimate of the fact of God's sovereignty, standing by itself alone; while yet a few earnest minds make always an equally imperative demand for a full recognition, at the same time, of the unimpaired, inherent freedom of the human will in harmonious connection with it. It is natural to glorify power. Brahma, or Force personified, under whatever softer name, has ever been the god of the heathen, ancient and modern; and to quite too many minds in Christendom, also, does power seem to be the highest of the divine attributes.

Although the movements of the human heart, in the gross, are so little directed towards God, that it would be an overwrought statement to describe it as oscillating at different periods from scepticism to credulity, or better, if it might be so said, to faith itself, yet there have been at different times marked tendencies to great theological reaction from the plain gospel standard of doctrine and feeling among the educated classes. Such a strong reactionary tendency is very manifest now throughout the civilized world. On no one theme does it need to be met and baffled more fully than on the great doctrine of God's providence. Says Westcott well: "The belief in providence is the necessary supplement to the belief in inspiration."

The highest culmination of right religious thought and

feeling of any individual mind appears in its full, habitual, all-controlling realization of God's direct personal providence. A present God is the one great want of our natures; and the constantly quickening and inspiring consciousness of that Presence, in all its untold riches of power, wisdom, love and grace, is the greatest attainment of sanctified humanity, here or in heaven. "Let him that glorieth," saith God," glory in this, that he understandeth and knoweth me." In no respect is the piety of modern Christians more weak than in the habitual possession of a serene, uplifting sense of an ever-felt, though unseen, God, waiting to bestow himself, with his gifts, and infinitely beyond them, upon all his creatures. How much, in this relation, did the religious development of David and of the prophets and apostles, so long ago, transcend the type of spiritual strength and joy prevailing now, under the brighter light of the "New Covenant."

The imagination exerts its highest power, and so has its grandest function and value, not, as is so generally conceived, in idealizing to itself or to the thoughts of others more perfect combinations of the elements of individual or related forms than are found represented in nature, or in giving to any of the great generalizations or abstractions of the human mind the force of corresponding concrete realities in any heart expanding with welcome effort to receive them; but in the capability and the disposition to bring home to the inmost consciousness of the soul, with ever new vitalizing energy upon all its springs of action, the invisible and immortal objects of revealed faith. God is the true and only proper object of the imagination, as of reason, faith, and love. Differences of natural or acquired power of conception and realization will determine wonderful degrees of variation in the scope, strength, and style of true religious sentiment and of fervid religious feeling in different minds, which are yet all baptized from above, although with different measures of grace, into Christ. The highest ministries of the imagination are ministries to faith, to elevation of moral feeling, and VOL. XXI. No. 83.

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to the conscious ardor of a purified heart to rise ever upwards, in inward life and feeling, more and more towards God. Next to its power of drawing eternal things into full, overshadowing vision by the soul, and making the great invisibilities of eternity clear and palpable to the inward sight of faith, before which angels stand, eye to eye, gazing with undiminished wonder and joy forever, is its power of revealing God to the awakened and adoring heart of the believer, as present in the actual world around and within him,-present, indeed, as a Creator and Administrator of his universal affairs, but much more also, as a Father and a Friend,cuting great, ever-varied and ever-unfolding plans of love for his children in this world, and that as all preparatory to a grander display of his infinite affection towards them, beyond and above. Thus is the human mind beautifully constructed for the practice of virtue, in all its apparatus of sensibilities and of functional activities-as, in its luminousness of reason, its grasp of faith, its ardor of hope, its power of will, its airy freedom of imagination—and, when fully bent and strained to right action, all its accordant ministries of mutually dependent and harmonious graces. The true and only authorized use of the imagination, as of the reason, is religious; and they are both designed to be employed, when in their constant legitimate exercise, in generating and sustaining ever fresh and ever beautiful exercises of faith in the heart and life. So manifestly is the human mind correlated with God in all its many quick susceptibilities of influence from him, as also in its many qualifications for outward effort and co-operation with him. Man, each man, was made directly for his God, for his gratification, company, smile, and aid forever. All our powers were skilfully contrived by him to open into right action towards him, by our own conscious consent and purpose at first, and afterwards with a sweet spontaneity of their own, acquired by the long habit of right action; and with all the force of not only deep inward preparedness for his overflowing fulness of approach to us, but of ever growing consciousness, also, of its blessed necessity.

God is thus declared, in the mechanism of our being itself, to be its great necessary counterpart. The finite demands, by the very terms of its nature, the infinite for its completion. With unceasing consciousness of their absolute need of him who is "the Desire of all nations," our natures are ever groping, however weakly or blindly, and with whatever indistinct cognizance of the causes of our constant inward pain without him, yet groping really, and often sadly without effect, because with no true moral energy, for his manifestation of himself to the soul. "God alone is great"; and we are great only and so far as we draw near to him, and as we feel, in consequence, that he draws near to us; for, "draw nigh," he saith, "unto me, and I will draw nigh unto you." Thorough absorption in his work on earth; felt unity of aspiration, plan, and labor with him; the full, purposed, happy marriage of the heart with his-these are the simple but high terms of all true and grand human attainment. Without him no one can be his proper self, since we were not made for any independent existence from him, but only to be united in him, with all other finite beings, into one harmonious, eternal society, vital in every part with love, with ever new, accumulative demonstrations of interest on his part in us, and ever enlarging appreciation and improvement of them on our part to our good, and so to his glory.

Our capabilities for realizing great divine truths, and appropriating them to our own manly strength and moral growth, and diffusing them in their fulness of power and value among others, we cannot divine, until we come into complete and constant contact of heart, in all our modes of daily living and acting, with God: "committing our way unto him," in all things, "doing whatsoever we do, heartily, as unto the Lord," and literally "casting every care and burden upon him." "Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for those that love him; but God hath revealed them unto us by his Spirit." The unconverted man, the declaration of this passage is, has no conception of

the festive fulness of feeling with which God dwells in the heart of him, here on earth, who says to his soul, as he stands at the door and knocks (Rev. iii. 20) for entrance: "lift up your heads ye everlasting gates, that the King of Glory may come in."

True indeed is the maxim, rightly understood, which some of the mockers of evangelism would use in quite another sense: "pectus est quod theologum facit." "He that doeth the will of God," saith Christ, "shall know the doctrine, whether it be of God." As is any one's idea of God, in himself and in all his plans and actions, such are life and death, time and eternity, duty and pleasure, to him; and such is he likewise to all who know him.

The following synopsis presents the leading points of this Article:

I. The fact of God's providence among men.
II. Its characteristic external features.

III. The interior principles of its administration.
IV. Its connection with other things.

V. Its great generic forms of manifestation.

VI. The power of true views of it on the life and character. I. The fact of God's providence.

The sentiment of this great, delightful truth is the very aroma of every page of the Bible. No other doctrine exhales its sweetness so unfailingly, from every part of it, to the gladdened sense of him who is "the friend of God." Deeply did the Hebrew prophets feel its power; and in their clear, responsive, joyous appreciation of its truth lay no small part of their inward anointing from on high for the prophetical office. In their many and specific foretokenings of wrath from Heaven upon the cities of the old world, in such terrific succession, when at the height of their power, the key is furnished us to the otherwise strange overthrow of so many of the great kingdoms of antiquity. It was God, they teach us, that toppled down their towers of pride, and opened their two-leaved gates of brass to his appointed ministers of wrath. The pages of prophecy were thus but pages in