SCRU TABLE PROVIDENCES. 217 



SCRU TABLE PROVIDENCES. 



WHEN", the other day, a juror in one of the "VVestfield suits refused 

 to award damages against the steamboat company, on the 

 ground that the disaster could have happened only by the direct will 

 of God, and was simply an inscrutable Providence, the community 

 heard him with a suppressed titter, which, if it implied tolerance for 

 his convictions, implied equal contempt for his understanding. For it 

 was patent to every mind but his own that a worn-out boiler must 

 explode at the very instant when all conditions favored that catas- 

 trophe, and that the men who knew that that instant was imminent, 

 yet hourly solicited travellers to a possible death, were morally guilty, 

 not only of criminal neglect and deceit, but of murder. 



But many candid men, who saw clearly the accountability of the 

 Westfield owners and managers, shake their heads just now over what 

 seems to them a really mysterious visitation of God the Persian 

 famine. And because all great and inexplicable calamities pain loving 

 hearts, and sadden, if they do not obscure the faith of many souls, it 

 seems worth while to look a moment at this subject of Inscrutable 

 Providences. 



Here is this case of the Persian famine. For unknown years the 

 Persians have been cutting off their trees, and diminishing their rain- 

 fall thereby. Nay, not only has the removal of the forests decreased 

 the supply, but it has wasted whatever rain fell. For the roots of the 

 trees, and of all the innumerable shrubs and bushes and vines and ferns 

 that thrive in their shadow, kept the ground open and held the water 

 in countless natural wells for the use of the soil in droughts. But all 

 the undergrowth dying when its protecting forests were felled, the 

 scanty showers percolated into the streams at once, causing rare floods 

 and frequent droughts. The droughts yielded no harvests, and no 

 harvests were followed by pestilence, famine, and death. Now, for 

 three years no rain has fallen on the blistered fields, and a nation ap- 

 parently is dying. The very first drought was the kindly warning of 

 Heaven against the violation of natural laws. Men were too heedless 

 or too ignorant to accept it ; and the sins of the fathers are to-day 

 visited on the children, not in the vengeance of an awful Power, but 

 in iu; discipline of relentless law. Is not this a Providence so scrutable 

 that he who runs may read ? 



When, in Chicago, a night's fire undid a generation's toil, spreading 

 misery and death broadcast, was that horror in the least degree inex- 

 plicable ? Every man who, within thirty years, had put up a wooden 

 house in a city whose familiar breezes were gales, and Avhose gales 

 were hurricanes, solicited that rain of fire. They who, hasting to be 

 rich, fell into the snare of cheap and dangerous building, digged, every 

 man, a pit for his neighbor's feet as well as for his own. The inscru- 



