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Untitled Article
will , he confers the power , he offers the result . It is all of him , « . nd through him , and to him . It is all the fruit of his grace ; only , instead of being an exclusive , arbitrary , unaccountable gift of favour to a few , it is an inheritance of boundless wealth and extent , offered to every one that breathes God's air and rejoices in his sunshine .
This attainment is only called man ' s own in the same sense that his food and raiment are called his own . They are the gift of God in every way , —in the constitution and adaptation of the materials and their powers , and of the agent and his powers . When the labourer is accused of pride for calling the crust of
bread he eats his own ; when the savage is reproved for his impiety in calling his wigwam his own work , the same objection may with equal truth be urged against those whose struggle to attain is animated by their faith in an undeviating Providence .
It is well that the rulers of nations do not act upon the belief of an Interruptive Providence . However much we may wish to trace in their measures those Christian principles for which we as yet look almost in vain , we had rather by far that they should govern , as at present , alternately on impulses of expediency and on ill-discerned and ill-digested principles , whose main scope is good , than on dogmas whose practical influence , so applied , would
be dangerous in the extreme . Though our nation has been now and then guilty of the impiety of ascribing an unjust victory to Divine interposition ; though we have formerly expected to recover some forfeited advantages of war by propitiating God with fastings and penitential confessions ; though , even now , we have one political adviser at least who commands the impoverished to increase and multiply their starving population in the expectation that
God will , by some means or other , furnish food where he has permitted life , we have fortunately escaped a course of policy founded on such erroneous principles . Though our legislators have not been careful enough to ascertain what are the moral laws which their civil law is to embody , they have happily acted on the belief that there is an invariable provision of principles on which the practice of nations , as well as individuals , must be
based . However careless they may have been in encouraging , by some of their institutions , the increase of population beyond the means of subsistence , they do not , for the most part , stand up , like Mr . Sadler , to inculcate and defend such a policy on the plea of the appointment of Providence . Though they have erred in the construction and administration of our national law , they do
not advocate its unaltered continuance on the plea that Providence allowed it to be thus formed and administered , and that all must therefore be right . Though our statesmen have , from age to age , been all too ready for war , they have now ceased to represent it as a providential scourge / , which men have only to lie under and bear as patiently as they can . The connexion of cause and effect ,
Untitled Article
65 £ On Nature and Providence io Communities *
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), April 2, 1832, page 252, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct1810/page/36/
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