Refreshing Rain 121 



other is beneficence. The idea is absurd, anyway. 

 How could God, the fountain of all that is good 

 and lovely and splendid, increase his own personal 

 glory? He cannot tolerate rebellion, nor suffer 

 contumely to be heaped upon his name and his 

 providences, because hatred of God constitutes the 

 essence of sin, and sin is destructive of all that is 

 good and beautiful and desirable. 



I wonder what a learned theologian would call 

 this line of thinking? Some one, possibly many, 

 have been over it before, and it, or something re- 

 sembling it, has been named after one of them. A 

 man cannot follow any line of religious thought 

 now without finding, if he inquire, that he is only 

 following after a procession who have beaten the 

 path dusty and trodden out all the fresh grass and 

 flowers that may ever have grown on it. 



But I was speaking of our beautiful and refresh- 

 ing rains. I can remember when they were as 

 timely and abundant in southern Ohio and Ken- 

 tucky, and all that region. The forest streams 

 were as full and cool, and the growing seasons 

 always fresh and verdant. Now they are either 

 flooded or parched — flooded at times, destructively 

 in the early spring, when much rain is not needed, 

 and parched the rest of the growing season. Well, 

 men deserve it, and they have not begun to have 

 the worst of it. Within a period of fifty years they 

 have destroyed all the trees, and they may take the 

 consequences; for rain and trees are inseparable 



