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Providential Rescue—See [Kongo Pioneer Missionary Work].
Providing Against Disaster—See [Control of Circumstances].
Providing for Great Men—See [Great Men Should be Provided for].
PROVIDENCE
Men who know all the risks attending an unguided machine going eighty miles an hour will calmly tell you that a planetary system moving thousands of times as fast needs no guidance of God.
When these racing motor cars reach a speed of eighty miles an hour, they must drive themselves, for no human brain is capable of dealing with all the emergencies that may arise should that rate be maintained for any period worth speaking of. The human animal is not designed to travel eighty miles an hour. Neither the human brain nor the human eye can keep pace with it. The brain declines to respond to the tax upon it; so the big racing-car dashes on minus the brain by which it is supposed to be controlled, and the unexpected obstruction is smashed up, or the car is, before the mental activities come into play.—Forbes Winslow, The Automobile Magazine.
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Grant planned, but a power unseen disposed. It was his firm purpose not to remain in the army. He could not warm up to the profession of arms. He saw nothing in it for one of his temperament and bent of mind. So he resolved to prepare himself for the chair of mathematics in some college, preferably a professorship in the military academy. He wrote a letter to Professor Church, at West Point, asking to become his assistant when the next detail should be made. The answer was satisfactory, and the lieutenant was hopeful. He began to review his West Point course, but this was as far as he ever got toward the goal of his ambition. As the stars in their courses fought against Sisera, so the course of events defeated all his cherished plans to escape an army life. The trouble with Mexico began before Professor Church saw an opportunity to give the lieutenant an assistant professorship, and his hope of ever being ordered to the academy vanished forever.—Nicholas Smith, “Grant, the Man of Mystery.”