230 INDOOR STUDIES 



as He helps the other, not by special providences, 

 but by general providences, like the rain or snow, 

 or light or gravitation. His laws prevail, and 

 whoso obeys them (his will) best triumphs; God 

 gives him the victory. I notice that when the 

 children of Israel are defeated, or suffer any disas- 

 ter, God is always against them; but when they 

 triumph it is God who gives the victory, and it is 

 all true in a strict scientific sense. 



A clergyman on the wrecked train thanked God 

 most fervently that the train did not go into the 

 river. It was clearly the hand of Providence that 

 saved them, he said. One would have thought that 

 if God had interested himself at all in the incident 

 He would have interested himself to have prevented 

 it. If not, we must either suppose He was unable 

 to prevent it, or else unwilling, and either horn of 

 the dilemma is a bad horn. At New Hamburg 

 a few years ago, when a passenger train ran into 

 an oil train, and hundreds of people perished. He 

 seems to have taken no hand at all in the matter. 

 Why should He save this crowd and not that? Or 

 the Ashtabula horror, — where was God then ? Hid- 

 ing from the disaster He might have averted 1 Ah 

 me! as soon as we make God out to be a person 

 who interferes in the events of this world, into 

 what straits are we forced ! We are forced to con- 

 clude either that He is not omnipotent, or else that 

 He is a monster of cruelty, — that He is capricious 

 and changeable, or an ogre that delights in human 

 suffering and blood. I know the well-known text 



