The God of Providence

“And I will trust that He who heeds
The life that hides in mead and wold,
“Who hangs yon alder’s crimson beads,

And stains those mosses green and gold.
Will still, as He hath done, incline
His gracious care to me and mine.”

—Whittier.

“That there is a God who gave the earth to man to dwell in, Paul proves from the order of times and places: which indicates the consummate wisdom of the Governor — superior to all human counsels.” — Bengel.

‘• Then sawest thou that this fair universe — were it the meanest province thereof, is in very deed, the star-domed City of God; that through every star, through every grass-blade, and most, through every Living Soul, the glory of a present God still beams.” — (7ar72/?e.

“The mass of the world are erect against the admission of Special Providences. ... If a man be a Sceptic, cadit questio; but if he believe in a Superintending Ruler, will he hesitate to say in the language of our Liturgy, ‘O God, we have heard with our ears, and our fathers have declared unto us, the noble works that Thou didst in their days, and in the old time before them’?” — Life of the Earl of Shaftesbury, vol. ii., p. 273.

“Behind the dim unknown, Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above His own.”

‘-Lowell,

The great Apostle, having discoursed to his hearers from the Vokime of Nature, proceeds to open the Book of Providence.

He has a succession of references to this new theme, — this equally gracious and beautiful Revelation of the God he worshipped.” He giveth

TO ALL, life and BREATH AND ALL THINGS “(ver. 25). “He HATH DETERMINED THE TIMES BEFORE APPOINTED, AND THE BOUNDS OF THEIR HABITATION”

(ver. 26). ‘’ He is not far from any one of us. For in Him we live and move and have our being” (vers. 27, 28). He commends and fortifies these statements with the quotation from their own poet Aratus — “For we are also His offspring” (ver. 28).

In the preceding pages, we incidentally made allusion to the Apostle’s Nature-appeal addressed to the Lystrians (Acts xiv. 15). It is worthy of note that, on the same occasion, he makes mention of the companion Volume of Providence:

that the mighty Creator is the mighty Sustainer: — “He left not Himself without witness, in that He did good: and gave ns rain from heaven and fruitful seasons, filling our hearts with food and gladness” (ver. 17). Paul had now come from the fevered discussions of the Agora. Groups of Epicureans and Stoics had followed him to the Areopagus. The former famous sect, as we have seen, denied even the existence of a personal God — clinging to their wild * atomic ’ theory of the original creation. If they thus disowned an Almighty Framer, it necessarily followed that they would repudiate the idea of a Superintending Governor. Even those among his hearers who recognised the existence of presiding divinities, tutelary deities, and demigods, conceived of them only as exalted human beings possessing all the passions of human nature: themselves the subjects of a stern necessity; and so absorbed in their own selfish interests — their lives of dreamy indolence — as to be regardless of the weal or woe — the joys or the sorrows of the race immeasurably beneath them. One of the designations of Zeus indeed, was — “Watcher over human affairs.” But amid the heights and clouds of Olympus and its imperial felicities, he and his manifested the supreme indifference and unconcern just spoken of toward all in the realms of earth. Whatever, then, the rivalry might be in other respects between the Stoics and Epicureans, they were at one in rejecting this Christian doctrine of Providence. The world, on their Pantheistic theory, was alike self-made and self-sustained: consigned to ‘Moira,’ — hapless, irresistible Fate.

It must not, however, be supposed that St. Paul, on this new theme, had an altogether unsympathetic audience. The Altars of the city — the offerings and libations, indicated that among others of their teachers, and at all events among the “common people” there existed a belief, crude and imperfect as it was, in a divine Presence and intervention. Their domestic joys and sorrows were hallowed and consecrated at the Temple of Hestia: — Hestia, the goddess and protectress of Home and all its sanctities. “Before her altar were transacted all the solemn events of the family. Here the young were married: here the dead were laid: here was brought the new-born infant to be carried round that sacred shrine as a sign of reception and welcome. Here, too, the slave ran for protection to this visible sign of the home divinity — when he had done wrong, and feared punishment; and here the stranger, doubtful of his welcome, placed himself as under the aegis of the goddess. First and last of all, libations were poured out to Hestia.... This sweet, chaste virgin-mother gathered up the prayers of all her children, as the sun gathers up the dew from the white fleeces strewn on the earth: and no one could feel desolate or abandoned while the fire burnt on her altar.”

The great religious processions and rites, Eucharistic and Propitiatory, of the Hellenes, would have been without meaning or explanation, had they entirely ignored some kind of moral government, alike over individuals and the nation.^ Their poet ^schylus exhorts to a patient submission to * destiny,’ and recognises and enforces conformity to the will of the gods. If not an Athenian, it was a Spartan prayer — ‘May the gods grant what is good for us.’ The *’ Oracles “and “Mysteries” testified remarkably to the national acceptance of tenets which their philosophic sects denied. These in connection with our present chapter claim a passing reference.

It is computed that there were no less than 260 “oracles” throughout Greece. The oldest of these was that of Jupiter at Dodona. No campaign could be undertaken, — no crisis could be met,

1 Fortnightly Review, January 1887.

2 See Professor Dick ou the Acts, p. 269.

without first ascertaining the mind of the gods. Hence the estimate placed on the oracular responses; specially those pronounced at their chief and most famous shrine at Delphi, on Mount Parnassus, with its celebrated fountain of Castalia. This was the oracle of Apollo, who uttered his ambiguous answers through the Pythian goddess seated on her tripod. These responses were subsequently interpreted by the JEvangelides — the priestly apostles of “good tidings.” ‘The inquirers entered the great Temple in festal dress, with olive garlands and stemmata, or fillets of wool, led by the ocrtoi, or sacred guardians of the Temple, who were five of the noblest citizens of Delphi’ (‘’Rambles in Greece,” p. 226). Despite of their obscurity, they often tended to nerve the hesitating warrior in the hour of battle and inspire with indomitable courage. “Delphi was to the Greeks, what Jerusalem was to the Jews, and Mecca is to the Mahommedans, — a national Temple in whose preservation all were interested, because all regarded it with veneration.” Similarly remarkable and reverently observed, were the well-known Eleusinian Mysteries. These were celebrated in Eleusis — a village of Attica. We only refer in passing, to their nine days’ ceremonial,

A Goldsmitli’a History of Greece.

because of its mythological bearings on a recognition of Providence, or what was equivalent to such. On the third and fourth day of the religious festival there was a procession of the initiated * mystse, bearing cakes of barley from the Ehasian plain along with the basket of Ceres containing pomegranates and poppies with other treasures of the earth and products of the soil. On the fifth day — ‘the day of torches,’ there was a similar procession. Appointed priests led the way into the interior of the renowned Temple by the Well of Callichorus — the largest sacred edifice of Greece. The worshippers, in pairs, followed with torches. On the evening of the sixth day the latter — the Neophytes — were admitted into full privileges. *’They were now allowed to behold visions of the creation of the universe; to see the workings of the divine agency by which the machine of the world was regulated and controlled: ... to recognise the immortality of the soul as typified by the concealment of the corn sown in the earth; by its revival in the green blade; and by its full ripeness in the golden harvest.... They were then invited to view the spectacle of that happy state in which they themselves (the initiated) were to exist hereafter.“^ “Much that

1 See Wordsworth’s Athens and Attica, p. 135-6.

is excellent and divine,” says Cicero, (the words are quoted by Mr. Mahaffy) ‘’does Athens seem to me to have produced and added to our life, but nothing better than those Mysteries, by which we are formed and moulded from a rude and savage life to humanity: and indeed in the Mysteries we perceive the real principles of life, and learn not only to live happily, but to die with a fairer hope.” — ‘These,’ adds the author of the same interesting volume, are the words of a man writing in the days of the ruin and prostration of Greece. Can we then wonder at the enthusiastic language of the Homeric Hymn; of Pindar, of Sophocles, of Aristophanes, of Plato, of Isocrates, of Chrysippus. Every manner of writer, religious poet, worldly poet, sceptical philosopher, orator — all are of one mind about this, far the greatest of all the religious festivals of Greece’ (p. 153-4). Yet, may it not be added, does not the inscription on the pedestal of the great statue of Minerva at Eleusis, reveal how faltering were the gropings after the divine truth which Paul now sought to unfold to his hearers: — “I am all that is, was, and

SHALL be; and NO ONE HAS EVER LIFTED MY VEIL”?

A doctrine thus so dim and distorted and so partially received, they needed to have brought home to them, in the divine light of Christianity, the near personal cognisance of the Supreme Preserver, the watchful guardianship of Israel’s Shepherd: — the everlasting Love of Israel’s gracious Father. As a Shepherd, — not only exercising a general supervision over the sheep of His varied flock, — but with discriminating eye noting and tending each separate member: feeding it, following it, guarding it, pitying it, — and at last * folding ’ it with His other ransomed flock amid the pastures of the blessed. As a Father, teaching — guiding — sustaining — protecting: — appointing the lot and sphere of life, and overruling all for His own glory and for their good. No spot where He is not; where His handiwork may not be seen, and where the touch of His loving finger may not be felt: from the little flower trembling in the cleft of glacier crevasse, to the revolutions of the planet in the firmament: the supreme — righteous — holy — all- wise Governor; “God over all, blessed for evermore.” Yes “over all,” for St. Paul would first, in this new announcement to his hearers on the Areopagus, seek to correct a misapprehension. Even those who entertained a comparatively intelligent belief regarding a moral government did so in a partial and limited form. Their divinities of Olympus, if anything, were exclusively national. They presided over the destinies of Hellas alone. The outside world was left in unsympathetic isolation. Zeus and his confederates would condescend to be patron deities of no outside barbarians. It was a new thing for the Athenians to have the line of Aratus interpreted to them in its gracious comprehension — “We are all His offspring.” The recognised gods of the nation were, moreover, corporeal: and as such were localised. Not so with the God of St. Paul’s revelation. His presence was not confined to any “Temples made with hands;” or His power limited to any country which may have claimed the right or monopoly to a higher civilisation. “He giveth to all” (indiscriminately) “life and breath and all things.” It shows the breadth and enlargement of the speaker’s own views: — how he had welcomed with his whole soul and heart the expansion of religion under the new and better dispensation. Could we suppose any one tempted more than another, thus to circumscribe and localise, it would assuredly have been a Jew: nurtured in the belief that the One true God — the God of Abraham — the God of his ancestors — dwelt exclusively in the Temple of Zion and overshadowed with His divine protection the Land of Promise alone. But this once “Hebrew of the Hebrews,” had drunk in a wider, nobler spirit at the foot of the Cross. He had imbibed, in heart and soul at least, memorable words from Divine lips — ‘’ The hour cometh, and now is, when the true worshippers shall worship the Father in spirit and in truth “(John iv. 23). The cry of those outside the Old Testament dispensation had been answered by the Divine Head of the New — “Doubtless Thou art our Father: though Abraham be ignorant of us, and Israel acknowledge us not, Thou, O Lord, art our Father, our Redeemer: Thy name is from everlasting” (Isa. lxiii. 16). Father! that is a new revelation which Christianity gives us of the God of Providence, a revelation all its own. While He is the Universal Parent, regarding whom every tribe on earth joins in the quoted strain — “We are His offspring,” the doctrine of Providence is glorified and transfigured in the Cross of Calvary. He whose spiritual children we are, is the living loving paternal head and centre of Kedeemed humanity. The Song of Providence is, through Eternity, to be blended with the Song of Grace — “They sing the Song of Moses the servant of God — (the hero in the greatest providential drama of inspired story) and the Song of the Lamb.”

Alas! we fear it is not for us in this nineteenth, to impeach the Athenians who stood in the first century on the heights of Mars’ Hill, as they listened to what was to most of them the strange doctrine of the Christian Preacher. We dare not dispute that it is the tendency of our age to discard and disown the existence and agency of a Personal God. Science, falsely so called, would fain resolve the world into an aggregate of mechanical powers, an unintelligent mass guided and administered by physical forces; organised, self-evolving laws, which admit of no divine volition: no “Lord of Heaven and Earth” in the sense of a Supreme Disposer, animating, governing, — invested with essential perfections. It is not a little humbling, indeed, to feel that these materialistic fantasies — the accepted articles in many a modern creed, are far beneath the tenets of Socrates. He adopted what was equivalent to a monotheistic belief. He recognised not only a Creator of all things, but a vast mind pervading the universe — a Being of benevolence and beneficence dispensing goodness around. He held that the happiness of mankind consisted in conformity to God’s moral attributes — purity, rectitude, self-control, uprightness, and truth — thus anticipating the true Gospel theory as enunciated on the Areopagus, — not only the belief that God is, but that He is the “rewarder of them that diligently seek Him.” Despite, however, of repudiation in the case of multitudes, it is a doctrine which has been, and still is — dear to the wisest and the best. How the greatest Teachers in every age of Christendom have loved to expatiate upon it! Augustine — the chief of the Latin Fathers, tells us he wrote his well-known treatise (” De Civitate Dei “) for the very purpose of counteracting the denial of a ruling Governor and government, which was then sweeping like a flood through the fast dismembering and disintegrating Roman Empire. His thesis was —” A demonstration that the world was controlled by a divine Providence.” Hear a very different testimony in our own century, from a distinguished man, and a voice potential as a scientist of his day. “What delight,” says the late Lord Brougham, “can be more elevating, more truly worthy of a rational creature’s enjoyment, than to feel, wherever we tread the paths of scientific inquiry, new evidence springing up amid our footsteps; — new traces of divine Intelligence and power meeting our eye. We are never alone: at least, like the old Roman, we are never less alone than in our solitude. We walk with Deity. We commune with the Great First Cause, who sustains every instant, what the word of His power made.”

1 Lord Brougham’s Discourse on Natural Theology, p. 196.

Though of prior date and of another country, — hear the attestation of a kindred philosopher — the illustrious Benjamin Franklin — “I desire with all humility to acknowledge, that I attribute the happiness of my past life to God’s gracious Providence, which led me to the means I used, and gave the success. My belief of this induces me to hope, though I must not presume, that the same Goodness will still be exercised towards me in continuing that happiness, or enabling me to bear a fatal reverse, which I may experience as others have done: the complexion of my future fortune being known to Him only, in whose power it is to bless us.” ‘’ There appears,” to glean, once more, from the utterances of the great Missionary-Traveller, “in the quiet repose of earth’s scenery, the benignant smile of a Father’s love: we may feel that we are leaning on His breast, while living in a world clothed in beauty. We must feel there is a Governor among the nations, who will bring all His plans with respect to our human family to a glorious consummation. He who stays his mind on an ever-present, ever-energetic God, will not fret himself because of evil doers. ... By different agencies the Great Ruler is bringing all things into focus.... The great minds among men are remarkable for the attention they bestow on minutice. He who dwelleth in the light which no man can approach unto, condescends to provide for the minutest of our wants with an infinitely more constant care than our own utmost self-love can ever attain unto. With the ever-watchful loving eye ever on me, I may surely go among the heathen.”

Happy for those who can personally and individually recognise this divine sovereign rule — a world of moral order: that life is no capricious concurrence or outcome of fortuitous events and circumstances, but a plan of God: that that Lord of all, moreover, is not a God of torpor and inaction — lulled in dreamless inactivity or enthroned in unsympathetic isolation amid the elements He has formed: not a God before whose arbitrary will and semi-human passion His votaries have to crouch in terror: not the Phoenician god — the god of Baal and Astarte: not the Hindoo god with his reserve of awful power and unappeasable thirst of blood: not the Pluto of Homer, described in the Iliad as

“One who never spares, Who knows no mercy and who hears no prayers.”

In a word, not a God whose wrath has to be

1 Livingstone’s Missionary Journal. 1867.

appeased and his favour conciliated, but the Great and Gracious One “who is not far from any one of us,” who has given, in the bright and glorious pages of Nature, a pledge of the character of His Providential rule. “Our Father which art in heaven:” “Like as a Father pitieth his children” — “Your Father knoweth that ye have need of all these things.” If there be at times mystery in His dealings, submissive trust must await the final and ultimate disclosures — the “vindication of the ways of God to man.”

“His plans, like lilies pure and white, unfold. We must not tear the close-shut leaves apart, Time will reveal the calyxes of gold.”

Having that paternal assurance and guarantee, we are environed on every side with a sense of gracious security: whether it be careering along the great modern highway on its thread of iron; or ’ far off upon the sea,’ or in the throng of the busy mart, or in the solitude of Canadian wilds, or amid stretches of Australasian pastures: on the bed of sickness, or in the hour of sudden and appalling disaster — “The Lord reigneth.” The mighty wheels of Ezekiel’s Vision — the symbols alike of a general and particular Providence, are not self-impelled, but God-impelled: revolving.

and evolving nothing but good. In that Providential government, wonderful is the combination of infinitude of action with minute supervision of the small, the weak, the insignificant — “Thy Kingdom is an everlasting Kingdom, Thy dominion endureth throughout all generations: (yet) The Lord upholdeth all that fall, and raiseth up all those that be bowed down” (Ps. cxlv. 13, 14).

The word “Kingdom” suggests yet another closing thought. Over and above individual superintendence, we are reminded that this same Providential rule embraces the divine government of nations. It is indeed to this, its wider development and acceptation, that Paul seeks specially to engage the attention and assent of his hearers on the Attic Hill: — “All the nations of men on all the face of the earth “(v. 26). This special feature of the theme was by no means novel, or characteristic of the later economy. God — the God of Peoples and Kingdoms, is as fully set forth in the Old Testament as in the New: indeed, much more so. From the story of Joseph and the Pharaohs, the subsequent march through the Sinaidesert — the raising up of Cyrus and Sennacherib as the agents and ministers of His purposes in later ages, and onwards still, we have nothing but a divine * programme ’ — a divine unfolding of the roll and record of Providence. These delegated human instruments vere all in ignorance of the Higher forces at vrork in their mission. Of Cyrus it was said —” I have surnamed thee, though thou hast not known Me “(Isa. xlv. 4). ‘’ O Assyrian, the rod of Mine anger.... Howbeit he (Sennacherib) meaneth not so, neither doth his heart think so” (Isa. x. 5, 7). But He by whom kings reign “meant so:” He who has the heart of kings in His hands and turneth them even as He turneth the rivers of water, “thought so.” These vassal Rulers obey His behests: and then, (as in their pride and arrogance of spirit, like the boastful blaspheming Assyrian, they lift up their hands against the Most High) when they have accomplished their work, He scatters them as chaff before the whirlwind!

In the same way are we, at this hour, bound to trace and recognise His hand in unravelling political complexities; overruling human passions and human wrongs for the furtherance of His own cause on the earth.

“You hear an endless cry that goes
Lamenting through the sombre air,
Of nations bent with many woes,
Or gauntly wrestling with despair:

“You see a world that wildly whirls

Through coiling clouds of battle-smoke, And drenched with blood the children’s curls, And women’s hearts by thousands broke: —

“I see a Host above it all.

Where Angels wield their conquering sword — And thrones may rise or thrones may fall, But comes the Kingdom of the Lord.”

It is not the vessel without a Pilot — the world without a Ruler: — “He doeth according to His will in the armies of heaven and among the inhabitants of the earth.” “He brings forth the lightning out of His treasuries.” “He gives the sea its decree.” “He walketh on the wings of the wind.” “He maketh the wrath of man to praise Him, and restraineth the remainder of His wrath.” “The Lord is King. ... He sitteth between the cherubims, be the earth never so unquiet” (Prayer Book Version). In the impressive symbolism of the Book of Revelation, He sends forth His mission-angels clad “in pure and white linen and having their breasts girded with golden girdles,” to execute His mandates. With unswerving loyalty they proceed on their errands as ministers of Providence, executing the behests of the sovereign Kuler, till the final voice comes out of the Temple saying — * It is done: ’ and they sur-

1 Alfred Norris.

render their trust by laying their emptied vials at their Lord’s feet. There is a fond legend of the ancient Hellenes, that Athene, full-panoplied, on more than one occasion personally led the Greek armies.^ The fantasy becomes a divine and glorious verity with the great God of Providence. He is the true fiery and cloudy column preceding the march of His Israel of every age, through the wilderness; — “The Lord will go before you, and the God of Israel will be your rereward” (Isa. lii. 12). “He filleth all things.. If my eyes were opened I should see at every moment God’s love, God’s power, God’s wisdom, working alike in sun and moon; in every growing blade and ripening grain, and in the training and schooling of every human being and every nation, to whom He has appointed their times and the bounds of their habitation, if, haply, they may seek after the Lord and find Him” {Kingsley),

It is, then, God — as the Supreme God of all, and the Father- God of His people — the Sovereign Disposer, which forms the second great truth which Paul proclaims to Greek ears on the heights

1 “As -when Jupiter,” says the Father of Greek poetry, “spreads the purple rainbow over heaven, portending battle or cold storm, so Athene, wrapping herself round with a purple cloud, stooped to the Greek soldiers and raised up each of them.” — Quoted by Mr. Buskin. of Areopagus. It is the same strain which the Holy Church throughout all the world ’ has taken up and echoed down the ages —

“All the Earth doth worship Thee,

THE Father Everlasting.

Holt, Holy, Holy, Lord God op Sabaoth.

0 Lord, save Thy people,

AND bless Thine inheritance:

Govern them

AND lift them UP FOR EVER.”