Abraham “went out, not knowing whither he went” (Heb. 11:8). Not till he reached Canaan did he know the place of his destination. Like a child he placed his hand in the hand of his unseen Father, to be led whither he himself knew not. We often have guidance without discernment of that guidance. Is. 42:16—“I will bring the blind by a way that they know not; in paths that they know not will I lead them.” So we act more wisely than we ourselves understand, and afterwards look back with astonishment to see what we have been able to accomplish. Emerson: “Himself from God he could not free; He builded better than he knew.” Disappointments? Ah, you make a mistake in the spelling; the D should be an H: His appointments. Melanchthon: “Quem poetæ fortunam, nos Deum appellamus.”Chinese proverb: “The good God never smites with both hands.” “Tact is a sort of psychical automatism” (Ladd). There is a Christian tact which is rarely at fault, because its possessor is “led by the Spirit of God” (Rom. 8:14). Yet we must always make allowance, as Oliver Cromwell used to say, “for the possibility of being mistaken.”
When Luther's friends wrote despairingly of the negotiations at the Diet of Worms, he replied from Coburg that he had been looking up at the night sky, spangled and studded with stars, and had found no pillars to hold them up. And yet they did not fall. God needs no props for his stars and planets. He hangs them on nothing. So, in the working of God's providence, the unseen is prop enough for the seen. Henry Drummond, Life, 127—“To find out God's will: 1. Pray. 2. Think. 3. Talk to wise people, but do not regard their decision as final. 4. Beware of the bias of your own will, but do not be too much afraid of it (God never unnecessarily thwarts a man's nature and likings, and it is a mistake to think that his will is always in the line of the disagreeable). 5. Meantime, do the next thing (for doing God's will in small things is the best preparation for knowing it in great things). 6. When decision and action are necessary, go ahead. 7. Never reconsider the decision when it is finally acted on; and 8. You will probably not find out until afterwards, perhaps long afterwards, that you have been led at all.”
Amiel lamented that everything was left to his own responsibility and declared: “It is this thought that disgusts me with the government of my own life. To win true peace, a man needs to feel himself directed, pardoned and sustained by a supreme Power, to feel himself in the right road, at the point where God would have him be,—in harmony with God and the universe. This faith gives strength and calm. I have not got it. All that is seems to me arbitrary and fortuitous.” How much better is Wordsworth's faith, Excursion, book 4:581—“One adequate support For the calamities of mortal life Exists, one only: an assured belief That the procession of our fate, howe'er Sad or disturbed, is ordered by a Being Of infinite benevolence and power, Whose everlasting purposes embrace All accidents, converting them to good.” Mrs. Browning, De Profundis, stanza xxiii—“I praise thee while my days go on; I love thee while my days go on! Through dark and dearth, through fire and frost, With emptied arms and treasure lost, I thank thee while my days go on!”
4. To the evil acts of free agents.
(a) Here we must distinguish between the natural agency and the moral agency of God, or between acts of permissive providence and acts of efficient causation. We are ever to remember that God neither works evil, nor causes his creatures to work evil. All sin is chargeable to the self-will and perversity of the creature; to declare God the author of it is the greatest of blasphemies.
Bp. Wordsworth: “God foresees evil deeds, but never forces them.” “God does not cause sin, any more than the rider of a limping horse causes the limping.” Nor can it be said that Satan is the author of man's sin. Man's powers are his own. Not Satan, but the man himself, gives the wrong application to these powers. Not the cause, but the occasion, of sin is in the tempter; the cause is in the evil will which yields to his persuasions.
(b) But while man makes up his evil decision independently of God, God does, by his natural agency, order the method in which this inward evil shall express itself, by limiting it in time, place, and measure, or by guiding it to the end which his wisdom and love, and not man's intent, has [pg 442] set. In all this, however, God only allows sin to develop itself after its own nature, so that it may be known, abhorred, and if possible overcome and forsaken.
Philippi, Glaubenslehre, 2:272-284—“Judas's treachery works the reconciliation of the world, and Israel's apostasy the salvation of the Gentiles.... God smooths the path of the sinner, and gives him chance for the outbreak of the evil, like a wise physician who draws to the surface of the body the disease that has been raging within, in order that it may be cured, if possible, by mild means, or, if not, may be removed by the knife.”
Christianity rises in spite of, nay, in consequence of opposition, like a kite against the wind. When Christ has used the sword with which he has girded himself, as he used Cyrus and the Assyrian, he breaks it and throws it away. He turns the world upside down that he may get it right side up. He makes use of every member of society, as the locomotive uses every cog. The sufferings of the martyrs add to the number of the church; the worship of relics stimulates the Crusades; the worship of the saints leads to miracle plays and to the modern drama; the worship of images helps modern art; monasticism, scholasticism, the Papacy, even sceptical and destructive criticism stir up defenders of the faith. Shakespeare, Richard III, 5:1—“Thus doth he force the swords of wicked men To turn their own points on their masters' bosoms”; Hamlet, 1:2—“Foul deeds will rise, though all the earth o'erwhelm them, to men's eyes”; Macbeth, 1:7—“Even handed justice Commends the ingredients of the poisoned chalice To our own lips.”