God's Government.
There are still people to be found foolish enough to believe that events occur at hap-hazard, without divine predestination, and different calamities transpire without the overruling hand, or the direct agency of God. Alas! for us, if chance had aught to do with events of our life. We should be like poor mariners, put out to sea in an unsafe vessel, without a chart and without a helm; we should know nothing of the port to which we might ultimately come; we should only feel that we were now the sport of the winds, the captives of the tempest, and might soon be the victims of the all-devouring deep. Alas! poor orphans were we all, if we were indebted for food and clothing, for present comfort and future prospects, to nothing but chance. No father's care to watch over us, but left to the fickleness and fallibility of mortal things! What were all that we see about us, but a great sand-storm in the midst of a desert, blinding our eyes, preventing us from ever hoping to see the end through the darkness of the beginning? We should be pilgrims in a pathless waste, where there were no roads to direct us—travellers who might be overturned and overwhelmed at any moment, and our bleached bones left the victims of the tempest, unknown, or forgotten of all. Thank God, it is not so with us. We believe that everything which happens to us is ordered by the wise and tender will of Him who is our Father and our Friend; we see order in the midst of confusion; we see purposes accomplished where others discern nothing but void and vacancy. We believe that "He hath His way in the whirlwind and in the storm, and the clouds are the dust of His feet."