nt on the paternal
character of God and His providential care. He is right in saying that
"the Providence man needs, the Providence the old theologies gave him,
was a personal Providence, an available help.... I care only to add,
that there is hardly any feature in the Christian system which is so
seductive as this doctrine of a special Providence.... Do you not know
that in all your appeals your success depends upon your telling all
orders of people that there is One in heaven who cares for them, that
every prayer will be answered, that every hair of their head is
numbered, that not a sparrow falls to the ground without their heavenly
Father's knowledge, and are not they worth more than many
sparrows?"[292] He sees the necessity, and seems to feel the
attractiveness, of the doctrine; yet he denies its truth: why? because
it is contradicted, as he conceives, by experience. He adduces his own
personal experience, and then appeals to the experience of his
fellow-men: "I once prayed in all the fervency of this same religion. I
believed once all these things. I put up prayers to Heaven which I
cannot conceive how humanity could have refused to respond to,--prayers
such as if put up to me I must have responded to. I saw those near and
dear to me perishing around me; and I learned the secret I care no
longer to conceal, that man's dependence is upon his courage and his
industry, and dependence upon Heaven there seems to be none."[293] Such
was his private experience; and facts of public notoriety are appealed
to in confirmation: "It has long seemed to me the most serious libel on
the character of the Deity to assume for one moment that he interferes
in human exigencies. A mountain of desolating facts rises up to shame
into silence the hazardous supposition? Was not the whole land a short
time ago convulsed with horror at the fate of the _Amazon_? There was
not a wretch in the whole country whose slumbering humanity would not
have been aroused in the presence of that dismal calamity." ... "How is
it that liberty is in chains all over Europe, if God be still
interposing in human affairs? If the older doctrine were true, if our
brother's blood still cried to God from the ground, the patriot would be
released from the dungeon, and the tyrant would descend from the throne
he has polluted."--"Science has shown us that we are under the dominion
of general laws, and that there is no special providence, and that
prayers are useless, an