My friends, I think, perhaps, that God had something to do with it, and that His mercy may have in some way protected us—­that He may have done as much for us as the quarantine and the health officers.  It was right and a necessity that all caution should be used, but there has come enough macaroni from Italy, and enough grapes from the south of France, and enough rags from tatterdemalions, and hidden in these articles of transportation enough choleraic germs to have left by this time all Brooklyn mourning at Greenwood, and all Philadelphia at Laurel Hill, and all Boston at Mount Auburn.  I thank all the doctors and quarantines; but, more than all, and first of all, and last of all, and all the time, I thank God.  In all the six thousand years of the world’s existence there has not one thing merely “happened so.”  God is not an anarchist, but a King, a Father.

When little Tod, the son of President Lincoln, died, all the land sympathized with the sorrow in the White House.  He used to rush into the room where the cabinet was in session, and while the most eminent men of the land were discussing the questions of national existence.  But the child had no care about those questions.  Now God the Father, and God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost are in perpetual session in regard to this world and kindred worlds.  Shall you, His child, rush in to criticise or arraign or condemn the divine government?  No; the Cabinet of the Eternal Three can govern and will govern in the wisest and best way, and there never will be a mistake, and like razor skillfully swung, shall cut that which ought to be cut, and avoid that which ought to be avoided.  Precision to the very hair-breadth.  Earthly time-pieces may get out of order and strike wrong, saying that it is one o’clock when it is two, or two when it is three.  God’s clock is always right, and when it is one it strikes one, and when it is twelve it strikes twelve, and the second hand is as accurate as the minute hand.

Further, my text tells us that God sometimes shaves nations:  “In the same day shall the Lord shave with the razor that is hired.”  With one sharp sweep He went across Judea and down went its pride and its power.  In 1861 God shaved our nation.  We had allowed to grow Sabbath desecration, and oppression, and blasphemy, and fraud, and impurity, and all sorts of turpitude.  The South had its sins, and the North its sins, and the East its sins, and the West its sins.  We had been warned again and again, and we did not heed.  At length the sword of war cut from the St. Lawrence to the Gulf, and from Atlantic seaboard to Pacific seaboard.  The pride of the land, not the cowards, but the heroes, on both sides went down.  And that which we took for the sword of war was the Lord’s razor.