For heathen ideas of providence, see Cicero, De Natura Deorum, 11:30, where Balbus speaks of the existence of the gods as that, “quo concesso, confitendum est eorum consilio mundum administrari.” Epictetus, sec. 41—“The principal and most important duty in religion is to possess your mind with just and becoming notions of the gods—to believe that there are such supreme beings, and that they govern and dispose of all the affairs of the world with a just and good providence.” Marcus Antoninus: “If there are no gods, or if they have no regard for human affairs, why should I desire to live in a world without gods and without a providence? But gods undoubtedly there are, and they regard human affairs.” See also Bib. Sac., 16:374. As we shall see, however, many of the heathen writers believed in a general, rather than in a particular, providence.
On the argument for providence derived from God's benevolence, see Appleton, Works, 1:146—“Is indolence more consistent with God's majesty than action would be? The happiness of creatures is a good. Does it honor God to say that he is indifferent to that which he knows to be good and valuable? Even if the world had come into existence without his agency, it would become God's moral character to pay some attention to creatures so numerous and so susceptible to pleasure and pain, especially when he might have so great and favorable an influence on their moral condition.” John 5:17—“My Father worketh even until now, and I work”—is as applicable to providence as to preservation.
The complexity of God's providential arrangements may be illustrated by Tyndall's explanation of the fact that heartsease does not grow in the neighborhood of English villages: 1. In English villages dogs run loose. 2. Where dogs run loose, cats must stay at home. 3. Where cats stay at home, field mice abound. 4. Where field mice abound, the nests of bumble-bees are destroyed. 5. Where bumble-bees' nests are destroyed, there is no fertilization of pollen. Therefore, where dogs go loose, no heartsease grows.
B. Arguments a posteriori from the facts of nature and of history. (a) The outward lot of individuals and nations is not wholly in their own hands, but is in many acknowledged respects subject to the disposal of a higher power. (b) The observed moral order of the world, although imperfect, cannot be accounted for without recognition of a divine providence. Vice is discouraged and virtue rewarded, in ways which are beyond the power of mere nature. There must be a governing mind and will, and this mind and will must be the mind and will of God.
The birthplace of individuals and of nations, the natural powers with which they are endowed, the opportunities and immunities they enjoy, are beyond their own control. A man's destiny for time and for eternity may be practically decided for him by his birth in a Christian home, rather than in a tenement-house at the Five Points, or in a kraal of the Hottentots. Progress largely depends upon “variety of environment”(H. Spencer). But this variety of environment is in great part independent of our own efforts.
“There's a Divinity that shapes our ends, Rough hew them how we will.” Shakespeare here expounds human consciousness. “Man proposes and God disposes” has become a proverb. Experience teaches that success and failure are not wholly due to us. Men often labor and lose; they consult and nothing ensues; they “embattle and are broken.” Providence is not always on the side of the heaviest battalions. Not arms but ideas have decided the fate of the world—as Xerxes found at Thermopylæ, and Napoleon at Waterloo. Great movements are generally begun without consciousness of their greatness. Cf. Is. 42:16—“I will bring the blind by a way that they know not”; 1 Cor. 5:37, 38—“thou sowest ... a bare grain ... but God giveth it a body even as it pleased him.”
The deed returns to the doer, and character shapes destiny. This is true in the long run. Eternity will show the truth of the maxim. But here in time a sufficient number of apparent exceptions are permitted to render possible a moral probation. If evil were always immediately followed by penalty, righteousness would have a compelling power upon the will and the highest virtue would be impossible. Job's friends accuse Job of acting upon this principle. The Hebrew children deny its truth, when they say: “But if not”—even if God does not deliver us—“we will not serve thy gods, nor worship the golden image which thou hast set up” (Dan. 3:18.)
Martineau, Seat of Authority, 298—“Through some misdirection or infirmity, most of the larger agencies in history have failed to reach their own ideal, yet have accomplished revolutions greater and more beneficent; the conquests of Alexander, the empire of Rome, the Crusades, the ecclesiastical persecutions, the monastic asceticisms, the missionary zeal of Christendom, have all played a momentous part in the drama of the world, yet a part which is a surprise to each. All this shows the controlling presence of a Reason and a Will transcendent and divine.” Kidd, Social Evolution, 99, declares that the progress of the race has taken place only under conditions which have had no sanction from the reason of the great proportion of the individuals who submit to them. He concludes that a rational religion is a scientific impossibility, and that the function of religion is to provide a super-rational sanction for social progress. We prefer to say that Providence pushes the race forward even against its will.
James Russell Lowell, Letters, 2:51, suggests that God's calm control of the forces [pg 427]of the universe, both physical and mental, should give us confidence when evil seems impending: “How many times have I seen the fire-engines of church and state clanging and lumbering along to put out—a false alarm! And when the heavens are cloudy, what a glare can be cast by a burning shanty!” See Sermon on Providence in Political Revolutions, in Farrar's Science and Theology, 228. On the moral order of the world, notwithstanding its imperfections, see Butler, Analogy, Bohn's ed., 98; King, in Baptist Review, 1884:202-222.