James Galloway Cowan

“ Here are we, for instance, visited with a grievous plague among our herds and flocks. Every one feels some measure of the calamity. All are alive to the necessity of prompt and great efforts to stay the progress of and cure the murrain. ”

“ From what we know of ourselves, brethren, do we not fancy that there is a probable explanation of it all, in the growing contempt for God’s sanctions and restrictions in our law-making (as for instance in the marriage laws) in the wide-spreading persuasion that all that happens on earth can be accounted for without supposing the intervention or even the existence of a God, in the self-sufficiency, self-reliance, self-laudation which characterise us in our living only for time and for ourselves? ”

“ Well is it, indeed, when men thus far believe in a God of Providence; for the human dogmas of our days about fixed laws, necessary and certain revolutions or wars and plagues to keep down the population and so forth, have reasoned and calculated too many into the belief that prayer for the alteration, at least of temporal circumstances, is altogether idle, if not profane. ”

“ Some may say that when we speak of nature we mean God. But do we? Does not the expression suggest to our minds some indescribable, some unknown essence, working in a mechanical, perfunctory, necessary, inevitable, compulsory way, more frequently than present to us any thought of the Lord Jehovah? ”

“ Assuredly God’s visitation is upon us. It may be all favour like Job’s trials, nothing may have provoked His wrath, He may simply be fitting us for and leading us on to greater blessedness. (We shall hardly, however, persuade ourselves that we are so righteous in His sight!) It may be loving correction, meant to make us abandon certain paths that lead downwards out of His favour. Or it may be wrath that can no longer spare the guilty. ”

“ They acknowledge that there is a God. They believe that he has charge of all the elements; they know the general tendency of those elements to be for good; they see them working evil; yet they will not perceive that God has done it. Every cause is made mention of but the great first cause. Every influence is sooner believed in than His. ”

“ Now when God thus makes use of naturally beneficial agents to bring about destructive ends He does so for some particular purpose. Calamities are never brought upon any of God’s creatures from what we call caprice. God never willingly afflicts or grieves; that is, He never does it simply to satisfy His own will, or to exhibit His own power. God’s thoughts and ways are not as our thoughts and ways. Man, if he knows himself to be possessed of a certain power, often exercises it without care or thought that he is thereby injuring others, or for the bare purpose of display. ”

“ We have only to glance at the history of the Israelites and the circumstances in which God afflicted them, to be convinced that such visitations—whether of consuming fire, of overwhelming water, of destroying sword, of famishing dearth, or of noisome pestilence—are called forth by the conduct of those on whom they come. ”

“ Let each of us then set about examining ourselves; and, trying to discern what in us provokes God’s visitation, let us humble ourselves before Him on account of it and repent of it, and resolve to forsake it, and ask for grace to do so; let us pray to Him to make us think and speak and move henceforth in the remembrance that, in Him, we have our being; that He is our God, and we are His people. ”

“ These being the agents and instruments which God uses for or against us, which he requires us to foster if they are good, to remove if they are bad, it would be desperate folly, and most provoking sin, to disregard them. By all means let men follow on as they have begun, in scientific inquiry, sanitary precaution and improvement, and the like; but, besides, let them do what hitherto they do not seem to have done at all sufficiently, namely, recognise and acknowledge the hand of the Lord in these plagues. ”

“ He maketh the winds His messengers, and flames of fire His servants. He employs ordinary agents to effect special ends. Instead of sending forth new agents to perform His will, He diverts the old ones from their usual course and makes them fulfil it. ”

“ Now, looking only into what is called the Book of Nature, simply making our own observations on these laws without the aid of the light of revelation, we cannot fail to discern that they are good in themselves, and that they generally operate for good. ”

“ If now from these our own discoveries we turn to what God has discovered to us in the Book of His word, we shall have all our former observations confirmed, and the reasons for the occasional evil tendency of what are called nature’s operations fully and clearly explained. ”

“ In particular and individual instances of what are called nature’s operations, is not the great moving or permitting power often lost sight of, ay, and virtually denied to be at work? Much of this oversight, this practical infidelity, is due, I doubt not, to our use of the word “nature.” We talk of the law of nature, we admire and wonder at the works of nature, until we all-but deify nature, p. ”

“ My brethren, if I could have felt that men generally assented in heart to the doctrine of that Collect, and were endeavouring to act out its prayers in their life, I should have uttered none of the reproof that has passed my lips. ”

“ But is it not the fact that men are betaking themselves to God in this way only as one of possible remedies and preventives—not tracing the infliction to Him, but merely asking the removal, of Him?: “Somehow we are in trouble ”