SERMON XXI.

REV. HENRY B. SMITH, D. D.

"I am the Lord, and there is none else; there is no God beside me. I girded thee, though thou hast not known me."-ISAIAH xlv. 5.

WE are apt to believe that man makes history. We look at the outside of events, and see not the secret springs that move and guide their progress. We judge them as they affect our transient feelings, interests, or plans. We measure them as they appear in time, and forget the past eternity in which they were all determined, and the future eternity in which they will all be interpreted.

But there is one who seeth the end from the beginning. There is a God who hideth himself, and only now and then revealeth himself. He alone fully knows what all things are and mean. He setteth up one, and putteth down another; and none can stay his hand, or say unto him, What doest thou? The lot is cast into the lap, but the whole disposing thereof is of the Lord. In his hand is the soul of every living thing, and the breath of all mankind. At one time he setteth every man's sword against his fellow, even throughout all the host (Judges vii. 22); at another time he leads us to say, Thou Lord

wilt ordain peace for us; for thou also hast wrought all our works in us. So that in self-renunciation we are compelled to acknowledge, that now, O Lord, thou art our Father; we are the clay, and thou our potter; and we all are the work of thy hands. The king's heart is in the hand of the Lord; as the rivers of water he turneth it withersoever he will. In our text he says of Cyrus, as may be said of all great rulers guided by his providence in ways they knew not: "I girded thee, though thou hast not known me; that they may know from the rising of the sun, and from the west, that there is none beside me. I am the Lord, and there is none else."

And there are times in every individual, and in every national history, when these majestic and awe-inspiring truths underlying all events and all religion, are brought so distinctly home to every mind and heart, that they could not be made more impressive if written in lines of light upon the canopy of heaven. There are times when we must flee to the refuge of God's providence, if we would avoid the blindness of chance, or the despair of fatalism; for between these three, lawless chance, pitiless fate, or Divine providence, we must all at last choose in estimating the events of time. In the great crises and junctures of history, in its staggering vicissitudes, when viewing the hecatombs sacrificed upon fields of carnage, when bowed down by the stroke of speechless private woe, or mute with horror before appalling crime committed against the embodied majesty of the State, at the moment when a nation's destiny seems trembling in the balance-how deeply, how solemnly is the conviction forced upon us, that if there be any comfort, any refuge, it is only under the shadow of the Divine wings; it is only in the belief, that He who ruleth in the heavens ruleth also upon the earth, and that the wrath of man

shall praise him. But as for you, said Joseph to his brethren, ye thought evil against me; but God meant it unto good, to bring to pass as it is this day, to save much people alive.

And if ever a people were called upon, by an unparalleled concurrence and combination of circumstances, to recognize the hand of God in history, the hand of him who both forms the light and creates darkness, who maketh peace and createth evil, it is surely this American people under the present conjuncture of events, some of which have so recently filled us with thankful exultation, while others have plunged us in the depths of national grief, mingled with awe, as if the very contradictions of destiny were at the same instant appointed to be our lot. An all-wise and inscrutable Providence has been guiding us in ways we knew not of; girding us for a work which no man could foresee, or which, if foreseen, no man would have dared to attempt; enabling us, with faith and patience and sacrifice, to pass through all the vicissitudes of the greatest civil war in history, unexampled in its intensity, tenacity, resources, and cost both of treasures. and men, until we had just come to see, as from the summit of another Pisgah, the promised land stretched out, inviting us to enter in and make of it a goodly land in the name of the Lord of hosts. And then, just at the moment when all hearts were jubilant with the hope of a quickcoming peace; when the great rebellion was staggering and crumbling down under the quick and sharp strokes by which alone it could be felled to the earth; when the nation was awaiting its jubilee, and the very air was ringing with the glad acclaims of myriad voices of the freemen and the freed; and when many, too, in the fulness of their too exuberant joy, had begun to forgat justice to the wrong-doers, and were speaking of an almost total

amnesty and forgiveness; then the providence of God sta tled us again with a lesson which can never be forgotten, and, by the foulest crime of modern history, brought us once more face to face, in the most awful form imagination can conceive, with that gigantic sin which has brought all these woes upon us. As the great leader of the Israelites came only to the verge of the land of promise, and was not permitted to enter in, so the recognized and chosen leader of our republic was not allowed to share the full fruition of all he labored for with such sleepless watch and paternal care. An execrable assassin has sent him to his grave amid lamentation and wailing. A people stricken by the mighty hand of God, bowing low in the dust, can only say: I am dumb, I open not my mouth, because thou didst it.

And thus is the providence of God teaching us the highest lesson of trust, as well as the constant duty of submission. Some things in this providence are so open and legible, that only an atheist can be blind to them; others are so mysterious, that only God himself can interpret them unto us. How plainly, for example, during these four years of embittered strife and untold calamities, he has taught us the inmost meaning of this war as a punishment for our national sins, and as involving the highest moral aims and issues. Who now doubts that the sin of slavery was in part to be atoned for by our sufferings and blood? that a God of justice has been vindicating the rights of the oppressed? and that in this he has been true and righteous altogether? Who now can doubt that the war has been so desperate and prolonged, in part that its great moral issue might be made up, and that its ethical lessons might be imprinted as with the point of a diamond, as in lines of fire, upon the nation's conscience and heart? As our late President, in his last Inaugural, so

solemnly said: "If we shall suppose American slavery one of those offences which in the providence of God must needs come, but which, having continued through his appointed time, he now wills to remove, and that he gives to both North and South this terrible war, as was due to those by whom the offence came, we shall not discern that there is any departure from those Divine attributes which believers in the living God always ascribe to him." And who can now doubt that the great Emancipation Proclamation of Abraham Lincoln was the turning-point in the strife, the decision on which all was hanging; that it gave to the North its moral supremacy, while it added two hundred thousand ardent patriots to our armies; that it took from the rebellion its last prop, and from foreign powers all possibility of intervention against the republic? And what a wonder-working providence appears in all the knots and stadia of our slow yet ever growing success in the unexampled supply of armed men to meet each new emergency; in the stimulus given to labor, and the increase of our resources from month to month, from year to year; in the decrease of poverty and crime through all the North, and in its never-failing crops; in the moral training of our people, making them willing to endure hardships and to give up what was best and dearest to them for the sake of the good cause; in the openhanded devotion with which the sicknesses and wounds of our suffering and dying soldiers have been ministered to in the hospital and on the field of battle by an army of selfdenying men and women all through the land, spreading the broad mantle of charity over the horrors and carnage of war; in reviving and deepening the love of the Union and its glorious flag, and identifying the cause of the nation with the cause of human freedom; in the fact that our very defeats as well as in our successes have subserved the