the
world would go on just the same, and just as well, if God thenceforth had
ceased to be. No: that is a dead God; an absentee God--as one said
bitterly once. But the Psalmist believed in the living God, and a
present God, in whom we live and move and have our being; in a God who
does not leave the world alone for a moment, nor in the smallest matter,
but is always interested in it, attending to it, enforcing His own laws,
working--if I may so speak in all reverence--and using the most pitifully
insufficient analogy--working--I say--His own machinery; making all
things work together for good, at least to those who love God; a God
without whom not a sparrow falls to the ground, and in whose sight all
the hairs of our heads are numbered.

In one word, he believed in a living God. If anyone had said to the
Psalmist, as I have heard men say now-a-days--Of course we believe, with
you, in a general Providence of God over the whole universe. But you do
not surely believe in special Providences? That would be superstition.
God governs the world by law, and not by special Providences. Then I
believe that the Psalmist would have answered--Laws? I believe in them
as much as you, and perhaps more than you. But as for special
Providences, I believe in them so much, that I believe that the whole
universe, and all that has ever happened in it from the beginning, has
happened by special Providences; that not an organic being has assumed
its present form, after long ages and generations, save by a continuous
series of special Providences; that not a weed grows in a particular
spot, without a special Providence of God that it should grow there, and
nowhere else; then, and nowhen else. I believe that every step I take,
every person I meet, every thought which comes into my mind--which is not
sinful--comes and happens by the perpetual special Providence of God,
watching for ever with Fatherly care over me, and each separate thing
that He has made.

And if a modern philosopher--or one so called--had said to him,--'This is
unthinkable and inconceivable, and therefore cannot be. I cannot "think
of"--I cannot conceive a mind--or as I call it--"a series of states of
consciousness," as antecedent to the infinity of processes simultaneously
going on in all the plants that cover the globe, from scattered polar
lichens to crowded tropical palms, and in all the millions of animals
which roam among them, and the millions of millions of in