Well, if God's judgments are razors, we had better be careful how we use them on other people. In careful sheath these domestic weapons are put away, where no one by accident may touch them, and where the hands of children may not reach them. Such instruments must be carefully handled or not handled at all. But how recklessly some people wield the judgments of God! If a man meet with business misfortune, how many there are ready to cry out: "That is a judgment of God upon him because he was unscrupulous, or arrogant, or overreaching, or miserly. I thought he would get cut down! What a clean sweep of everything! His city house and country house gone! His stables emptied of all the fine bays and sorrels and grays that used to prance by his door! All his resources overthrown, and all that he prided himself on tumbled into demolition! Good for him!" Stop, my brother. Don't sling around too freely the judgments of God, for they are razors.
Some of the most wicked business men succeed, and they live and die in prosperity, and some of the most honest and conscientious are driven into bankruptcy. Perhaps his manner was unfortunate, and he was not really as proud as he looked to be. Some of those who carry their head erect and look imperial are humble as a child, while many a man in seedy coat and slouch hat and unblacked shoes is as proud as Lucifer. You can not tell by a man's look. Perhaps he was not unscrupulous in business, for there are two sides to every story, and everybody that accomplishes anything for himself or others gets industriously lied about. Perhaps his business misfortune was not a punishment, but the fatherly discipline to prepare him for heaven, and God may love him far more than He loves you, who can pay dollar for dollar, and are put down in the commercial catalogues as A1. Whom the Lord loveth He gives four hundred thousand dollars and lets die on embroidered pillows? No: whom the Lord loveth He chasteneth. Better keep your hand off the Lord's razors, lest they cut and wound people that do not deserve it. If you want to shave off some of the bristling pride of your own heart do so; but be very careful how you put the sharp edge on others.
How I do dislike the behavior of those persons who, when people are unfortunate, say: "I told you so—getting punished—served him right." If those I-told-you-so's got their desert they would long ago have been pitched over the battlements. The mote in their neighbor's eyes—so small that it takes a microscope to find it—gives them more trouble than the beam which obscures their own optics. With air sometimes supercilious and sometimes Pharisaical, and always blasphemous, they take the razor of the divine judgment and sharpen it on the hone of their own hard hearts, and then go to work on men sprawled out at full length under disaster, cutting mercilessly. They begin by soft expressions of sympathy and pity and half praise, and, lather the victim all over before they put on the sharp edge.
Let us be careful how we shoot at others lest we take down the wrong one, remembering the servant of King William Rufus who shot at a deer, but the arrow glanced against a tree and killed the king. Instead of going out with shafts to pierce, and razors to cut, we had better imitate the friend of Richard Coeur de Lion, who, in the war of the Crusades, was captured and imprisoned, but none of his friends knew where. So his loyal friend went around the land from stronghold to stronghold, and sung at each window a snatch of song that Richard Coeur de Lion had taught him in other days. And one day, coming before a jail where he suspected his king might be incarcerated, he sung two lines of song, and immediately King Richard responded from his cell with the other two lines, and so his whereabouts were discovered, and immediately a successful movement was made for his liberation. So let us go up and down the world with the music of kind words and sympathetic hearts, serenading the unfortunate, and trying to get out of trouble men who had noble natures, but, by unforeseen circumstances, have been incarcerated, thus liberating kings. More hymn-book and less razor.
Especially ought we to be apologetic and merciful toward those who, while they have great faults, have also great virtues. Some people are barren of virtues. No weeds verily, but no flowers. I must not be too much enraged at a nettle along the fence if it be in a field containing forty acres of ripe Michigan wheat. At the present time, naturalists tell us, there is on the sun a spot twenty thousand miles long, but from the brightness and warmth I conclude it is a good deal of a sun yet.
Again, when I read in my text that the Lord shaves with the hired razor of Assyria the land of Judea, I bethink myself of the precision of God's providence. A razor swung the tenth part of an inch out of the right line means either failure or laceration, but God's dealings never slip, and they do not miss by the thousandth part of an inch the right direction. People talk as though things in this world were at loose ends. Cholera sweeps across Marseilles and Madrid and Palermo, and we watch anxiously. Will the epidemic sweep Europe and America? People say, "That will entirely depend on whether inoculation is a successful experiment; that will depend entirely on quarantine regulations; that will depend on the early or late appearance of frost; that epidemic is pitched into the world, and it goes blundering across the continents, and it is all guess-work and an appalling perhaps."
My friends, I think, perhaps, that God had something to do with it, and that His mercy may have in some way protected us—that He may have done as much for us as the quarantine and the health officers. It was right and a necessity that all caution should be used, but there has come enough macaroni from Italy, and enough grapes from the south of France, and enough rags from tatterdemalions, and hidden in these articles of transportation enough choleraic germs to have left by this time all Brooklyn mourning at Greenwood, and all Philadelphia at Laurel Hill, and all Boston at Mount Auburn. I thank all the doctors and quarantines; but, more than all, and first of all, and last of all, and all the time, I thank God. In all the six thousand years of the world's existence there has not one thing merely "happened so." God is not an anarchist, but a King, a Father.
When little Tod, the son of President Lincoln, died, all the land sympathized with the sorrow in the White House. He used to rush into the room where the cabinet was in session, and while the most eminent men of the land were discussing the questions of national existence. But the child had no care about those questions. Now God the Father, and God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost are in perpetual session in regard to this world and kindred worlds. Shall you, His child, rush in to criticise or arraign or condemn the divine government? No; the Cabinet of the Eternal Three can govern and will govern in the wisest and best way, and there never will be a mistake, and like razor skillfully swung, shall cut that which ought to be cut, and avoid that which ought to be avoided. Precision to the very hair-breadth. Earthly time-pieces may get out of order and strike wrong, saying that it is one o'clock when it is two, or two when it is three. God's clock is always right, and when it is one it strikes one, and when it is twelve it strikes twelve, and the second hand is as accurate as the minute hand.
Further, my text tells us that God sometimes shaves nations: "In the same day shall the Lord shave with the razor that is hired." With one sharp sweep He went across Judea and down went its pride and its power. In 1861 God shaved our nation. We had allowed to grow Sabbath desecration, and oppression, and blasphemy, and fraud, and impurity, and all sorts of turpitude. The South had its sins, and the North its sins, and the East its sins, and the West its sins. We had been warned again and again, and we did not heed. At length the sword of war cut from the St. Lawrence to the Gulf, and from Atlantic seaboard to Pacific seaboard. The pride of the land, not the cowards, but the heroes, on both sides went down. And that which we took for the sword of war was the Lord's razor.
In 1862, again, it went across the land. In 1863 again. In 1864 again. Then the sharp instrument was incased and put away. Never in the history of the ages was any land more thoroughly shaved than during those four years of civil combat; and, my brethren, if we do not quit some of our individual sins, national sins, the Lord will again take us in hand. He has other razors within reach besides war: epidemics, droughts, deluges, plagues—grasshopper and locust; or our overtowering success may so far excite the jealousy of other lands that, under some pretext, the great nations of Europe and Asia may combine to put us down. This nation, so easily approached on north and south and from both oceans, might have on hand at once more hostilities than were ever arrayed against any power.