son of increased missionary activity which is taught us by the Indian miseries, let us be careful not to confound this with the notion that no other object entered into the Almighty's purposes than the effecting this moral result, just as we should avoid the confusion of supposing that His sole object in sending a fever is to lead men to attend to sanitary considerations. In each such case of an earthquake, or a fever, or a rebellion, we ought to distinguish the three following things one from another:-1st, the antecedent causes which have brought about the event; 2nd, the moral purpose which the Deity may have had in sending or permitting it; and 3rd, the moral lesson which man may rationally gather from it for his own conduct. Accordingly, when we pass from the moral lesson in each case which we may properly collect, and from speculating about the purposes of the Divine Being, concerning which we really know nothing, except when they are revealed to us by an inspired prophet, to examine into the causes, i. e. the antecedent circumstances from which each of such phenomena has arisen, we shall find them to be brought about by the uniform operation of fixed The atrocities of the Hindoo rebellion are unfortunately no isolated phenomenon, but almost find their parallel in severity, if not in concentration, we regret to have to say it), in other centuries of the world's history. The mutiny of a pampered

causes.

army under the combined influence of religious panic and frantic patriotism, at the suggestion of designing persons, is no isolated phenomenon ; both alike have arisen heretofore from the play of human passion and human appetition, and will continue to arise unto the end of time; and mysterious as is the slaughter of hundreds of our innocent countrymen, we take that mystery to be but another proof of the wondrous administration of the Almighty by general laws. As an instance of an indiscriminate slaughter of guilty and guiltless, we place it parallel in the page of history with the devastation of the Palatinate in the 17th century; or with the massacre of the French which disgraced Sicily in the 13th ; or that still more fearful atrocity, which stands out from among the many bloody deeds of the 16th, as a monument of crime, the massacre of the Huguenots on the feast of St. Bartholomew.

All, especially the last, are instances of a mighty slaughter permitted by a Providence which interfered not to stop those general laws which regulate human passion, nor to intercept those effects which the ingenuity of human sin produces. All alike are but the repetition, in political accidents, of the earthquake, or the explosion, or the pestilence in the physical. You may gather what lessons you please as to your future behaviour in order to prevent their But if you look to the cause of what

recurrence.

is past, you find its explanation in that mighty wonder which we are wishing to impress upon you, - that causes which involve suffering are allowed by Providence to have their play, even though they involve the innocent in the sweep of their operation; that it seems true that in some regions of nature (if we may use the illustration without irreverence), Providence allows the world to move on, like some great machine1, which its author has set in motion as it were (to speak after the manner of men), but with some of whose wheels and movements he is not pleased afterwards to interfere. "Canst thou by searching find out God? Canst thou find out the Almighty to perfection ?"

I have now offered a few illustrations of the absolute invariability of some portion of the Divine administration by law, even when such invariability is fraught with suffering to individuals. But I should be very sorry if I were to leave on your minds the impression that there is any degree of injustice, or any absence of benevolence in the permission of these miseries, or that there is no real Providence in them. We are obliged to conceive of such events under the medium of human language and the illustrations drawn from human experience; and so I spoke just now of the world as one great "machine" which, as it were, acted by delegated

1 Compare Babbage's "Bridgewater Treatise," ch. viii.

power without the immediate operation of God. I meant not this to be understood literally, but only by way of explanation. When we speak of such uniform operations of general laws, we intend not to exclude the idea of God as working and omnipresent; we only express the uniformity of the system according to which He is pleased to work. Our finite minds cannot comprehend the operations of a Being whose government sustains the universe, any more than we can comprehend the attributes of His infinite mind. So, without doubt, if we could comprehend that infinite system, we should see that the catastrophe is not unnoticed by God, the material law not disconnected with the moral, natural accident and moral government not without their links of union.

And as I wish you not to carry away the notion that there is no Providence in catastrophes, so also you should not think of them as marked by injustice. In questions of this kind it is enough for us to rest in the fact that other and more comprehensive instances of Divine benevolence exist, which show that the general purpose of the scheme of nature is a benevolent one.1 Our inability to comprehend that scheme as a whole may well make us sure that if we could so understand it, we should see that these

1 This principle of "the greatest happiness of the greatest number" has, it is well known, been adopted as the ground of

apparent exceptions are not such in reality. Just as if we stood looking on an ingenious machine, the general effect of which evinced consummate wisdom in its maker, we should at once think that any portion of it which seemed useless or injurious would have its use, if the inventor of it were to explain to us the plan of the instrument; so when we look on the great machine of the world or the universe, we may be sure that the apparent exceptions to a benevolent object in its construction would be seen to be reducible to agreement with the Divine mercy, if we could comprehend its scheme and its harmonies. Nay, the very idea of these apparent severities which I have attempted to convey to you, has been intended to remove any misgiving which might be felt in reference to them. For though we cannot hope to explain them fully, yet we have ventured to suggest a partial explanation, viz.:- that such

morals in Bentham's philosophy. Pope, at an earlier period, not only applied it as the rule of human conduct, but as the measure of the Almighty's purposes, e.g. :—

"The universal Cause

Acts not by partial, but by general laws,

And makes what happiness we justly call,

Subsist not in the good of one but all." (Ep. iv. 35.)

The writer of these Sermons does not wholly accede to either of these applications of it; but merely suggests that, in the absence of any better explanation of the mystery, we may lawfully adopt the principle in the kind of manner developed in the text, as a probable means of reconciling God's permission of suffering with the idea of benevolence in His character.