3. It cannot be that God is absent from the most untoward environment. There are children born into the world for whom you would say little preparation had been made by any one. Nobody seems to want them here. It is scanty care they receive from any one. They are left to grow as they may ; and live, one hardly knows how ; and are reared with squalor before their eyes, and coarseness in their ears, and evil everywhere. Is God be- forehand with them with the blessings of goodness ? Surely He is ; for, after all, the world is His, nor can man's uttermost labour in evil altogether obliterate or quench His everywhere present and active loving-kindness. One thing is certain; that He has the strangest ways of blending His mercy even with the most untoward environment.
^ I have seen little children exposed to early influences which you would have thought must inevitably have proved fatal to any seeds of goodness they brought with them into the world ; and these things — drunkenness, vileness, murderous brutality, and all the unspeakable horrors that make up the daily round in a drunkard's home — were only blessed to them. There is no limit to the power of Him .who overrules all things, and whose face the angels of little children do always behold, out of evil to bring good. " In him the fatherless find mercy." Let us admit that He deals with many — or allows them to be dealt with by circum- stances— very strangely, very sorely. Nevertheless, these circum- stances too are under His Hand. Who shall say that they are ever sufficient to blind any soul born into God's world outright to its inheritance or quite to put it beyond His reach ? ^
1 A. Martin, Winning the Soul, 204. " Ibid. 202.
JOB-PS. XXX. — 24
370 THE MINISTRY OF SURPRISE
^ In his ballad " The Three Graves " Coleridge puts this story into the mouth of an old sexton. A young farmer, paying his addresses to the daughter of a widow, finds that the widow herself desires to marry him. When he asks in due time that the day of the marriage may be fixed, the mother maliciously depreciates the character of her daughter, and confesses her own passion. Finding herself thrust aside, she kneels down and solemnly prays for a curse upon her daughter and the lover she had accepted. A cloud hangs over the wedding, and bride and bridegroom find themselves strangely chilled and depressed. On Ash-Wednesday the widow goes to church, and takes her place by the side of her daughter's friend, who has helped forward the marriage, and curses her together with the others. Under the haunting in- fluence of that curse the three people fade away, and, within a few short months, fill graves side by side in the country churchyard. The essence of the ballad story is expressed in the lines :
Beneath the foulest mother's curse No child could ever thrive.
That conception fits a pagan condition of society in which, for both temporal and spiritual things, the power of the parent is absolute. But it makes into an almighty fiat the cry of the blood of Abel, and is untrue to the spirit of the gospel. None can curse child or neighbour into hopeless distress in either this or the coming life. He who opens and shuts the gates of blessedness has not surrendered the keys into unworthy hands.i
III.
A Prepaked Inheritance.
1. What have we that we have not received ? Behind us lie the labours and sufferings and sacrifices of the noblest, and we have entered into their labours. We have a rich inheritance, which can be described only as the blessings of goodness. The tree of our life has its roots deep in the soil and the subsoil of history. We are not only the heirs of all the ages, but the heirs of God's grace through all the ages. God's providence is only another name for God's grace, and His providence did not begin 1 T. G. Selby, The Divine Craftsman, 90.
PSALM XXI. 3 371
to us merely at the hour of birth. Every prophet, and every man of faith, has felt in some degree at some time of intense insight that he has been under a foreordaining, a loving purpose before birth, before history, from the very foundation of the world. God's grace began with him long before he was born, and prepared his place for him, and went before him with the blessings of goodness. Time would fail for any of us to tell all that we owe to the past, all the debt in which we stand to preceding generations, not only for temporal mercies, but even for the very intellectual and spiritual atmosphere into which we have been born, and in which we have been reared. We have a spiritual climate, as well as a geographical ; and in it we have had our place prepared for us. The blessings of God's goodness have gone before us, and can in many lines be clearly seen by every enlightened mind and conscience and heart. The liberty we enjoy politically and religiously has been bought and paid for by others. The knowledge which we hold so cheap was dearly acquired by the race. Every advance in social organiza- tion which is to us now as our birthright was attained at great cost.