that its inhabitants were the peculiar care of
their Creator. But astronomy has changed all that; and what once we
thought so great, we know now to be but a speck amid infinite systems of
worlds. The old question challenges us with a force the Psalmist could
not feel: "When I consider Thy heavens, the work of Thy fingers, the
moon and the stars which Thou hast ordained; what is man that Thou are
mindful of him? and the son of man that Thou visitest him?" The infinity
of God, the nothingness of man: the poor brain reels before the
contrast. Is it thinkable, we ask, that He whose dwelling-place is
eternity should care for us even as we care for our children? So the
question is often urged upon us to-day. But arguments of this kind, it
has been well said, are simply an attempt to terrorize the imagination,
and are not to be yielded to. As a recent writer admirably says: "We
know little or nothing of the rest of the universe, and it may very well
be that in no other planet but this is there intelligent and moral life;
and, if that be so, then this world, despite its material
insignificance, would remain the real summit of creation. But even if
this be not so, still man remains man--a spiritual being, capable of
knowing, loving, and glorifying God. Man is that, be there what myriads
of worlds there may, and is not less than that, though in other worlds
were also beings like him.... No conception of God is less imposing than
that which represents Him as a kind of millionaire in worlds, so
materialized by the immensity of His possessions as to have lost the
sense of the incalculably greater worth of the spiritual interests of
even the smallest part of them."[48]

But this is not the only difficulty; for some it is not the chief
difficulty. We have no theories of God and the universe which bar the
possibility of His intervention in the little lives of men. There is
nothing incredible to us in the doctrine of a particular Providence. But
where, we ask, is the proof of it? We would fain believe, but the facts
of experience seem too strong for us. A hundred thousand Armenians
butchered at the will of an inhuman despot, a whole city buried under a
volcano's fiery hail, countless multitudes suffering the slow torture of
death by famine--can such things be and God really care? Nor is it only
great world tragedies like these which challenge our faith. The question
is pressed upon us, often with sickening keenness, by the commonplace