about the
responsibility of God, for He asks us to build our trust, not only in
His promises, but upon our experience of the faithfulness with which He
has kept His promises. What, then, is our testimony? Has God been
faithful to us; and if so, are we justified in assuming that the same
faithfulness is the experience of others?

"Know therefore that the Lord thy God, He is God, the faithful God."
Take this affirmation on its lowest grounds--as touching material
things. It is not said that man does not live by bread, when it is
said that he lives not by bread alone. We may insist upon it, that
material concerns are not worthy to be compared with the things of the
spirit; but this does not affect the truth, that while we are on this
planet we must have material things. Jesus has told us that, "Our
Heavenly Father knoweth what things we have need of before we ask Him."
It does not follow that the things we desire are the things we need.
Christ does not pledge the divine faithfulness to our desires; it is
pledged to our needs.

And how is it redeemed, even in the case of the latter? Think for a
moment of the poverty there is amid all our plenty. Think of the evils
and misery that are the consequence as well as the cause of poverty.
There are thousands of men, and women, and children dying every year in
India from want and sheer starvation. We are told that, in each case,
a penny a day would mean comparative plenty. They are God's creatures,
willing, and indeed eager, to work themselves to skin and bone for a
penny a day, and they cannot earn it. Think again of the untold human
beings nearer home, locked in a warfare from which there is no
discharge but death; the grim struggle for a bare existence, with its
chances at every turn of sickness, accident, no work, and then the
abyss. When we have reckoned off the probable proportion of those who
have done much to make the conditions in which they find themselves, we
have a large percentage of people who are no more responsible for the
poverty and suffering they have to endure than they are responsible for
the fact that they are in the world which uses them so harshly.

For my part I can offer no explanation of these things, that can give a
sensitive heart and an honest mind more than a very moderate degree of
satisfaction. There are communities, and even races of people, whose
existence in this world appears to have no immediate relation to their
own personal hap