You will all agree that God gives the first; that he gives the soil, the timber, the fisheries, the coal, the iron.
Do you believe it? I hope and trust that you do. But I fear that now-a-days many do not; for they boast of the resources of Britain as if we ourselves had made Britain, and not Almighty God; as if we had put the coal and the iron into the rocks, and not Almighty God ages before we were born.
And if they will not say that openly, at least they will say, ‘But the coal, and iron, and all other raw material would have been useless, if it had not been for the genius and energy of the British race.’
Of course not. But who gave them that genius and energy? Who gave them the wit to find the coal and iron?
God; and God gave it to us when we needed it, and not before.
Think of this, I beseech you; for it is true, and wonderful, and a thing of which I may say, ‘Come, and I will reason with you of the righteous acts of the Lord.’
Men say, ‘As long as England is ahead of the world in coal and iron she may defy the world.’ I do not believe it; for if she became a wicked nation all the coal and iron in the universe would not keep her from being ruined.
But even if it were true, which it is not, that the strength of Britain lies in coal and iron, and not in British hearts, what right have we to boast of coal and iron?
Did our forefathers know of them when they came into this land? Did they come after coal and iron?
Not they. They came here to settle as small yeomen; to till miserable little patches of corn, of which we should be now ashamed, and to feed cattle on the moors, and swine in the forests—and that was all they looked to. Then they found that there was iron, principally down south, in Sussex and Surrey; and they worked it, clumsily enough, with charcoal; and for more than twelve hundred years they were here in England, with no notion of the boundless wealth in iron and coal lying together in the same rocks which God had provided for them; or if they did guess at it, they could not use it, because they could not work deep mines, being unable to pump out the water; for God had not opened their eyes and shown them how to do it.