gone up in vain?  Have the prayers of saints, the hymns of psalmists, the agonies of martyrs, the aspirations of poets, the thoughts of sages, the cries of the oppressed, the pleadings of the mother for her child, the maiden praying in her chamber for her lover upon the distant battle-field, the soldier answering her prayer from afar off with, “Sleep quiet, I am in God’s hands”—­those very utterances of humanity which seemed to us most noble, most pure, most beautiful, most divine, been all in vain?—­impertinences; the babblings of fair dreams, poured forth into nowhere, to no thing, and in vain?  Has every suffering, searching soul which ever gazed up into the darkness of the unknown, in hopes of catching even a glimpse of a divine eye, beholding all, and ordering all, and pitying all, gazed up in vain?  For at the ground of the universe is “not a divine eye, but only a blank bottomless eye-socket;” {39} and man has no Father in heaven; and Christ revealed Him not, because He was not there to reveal; and there was no hope, no remedy, no deliverance, for the miserable among the sons of men?

Oh, my friends, those who believe, or fancy that they believe such things, must be able to do so only through some peculiar conformation either of brain or heart.  Only want of imagination to conceive the consequences of such doctrines can enable them, if they have any love and pity for their fellow-men, to preach those doctrines without pity and horror.  They know not, they know not, of what they rob a mankind already but too miserable by its own folly and its own sin; a mankind which, if it have not hope in God and in Christ, is truly—­as Homer said of old—­more miserable than the beasts of the field.  If their unconscious conceit did not make them unintentionally cruel, they would surely be silent for pity’s sake; they would let men go on in the pleasant delusion that there is a living God, and a Word of God who has revealed Him to men; and would hide from their fellow-creatures the dreadful secret which they think they have discovered—­That there is none that heareth prayer, and therefore to Him need no flesh come.

Men take up with such notions, I believe, most generally in days of comfort, ease, safety.  They find the world so well ordered outwardly, that it seems able enough to go on its way without a God.  They have themselves so few sorrows, struggles, doubts, that they never feel that sense of helplessness, of danger, of ignorance, which has made the hearts of men, in every age, yearn for an unseen helper, an unseen deliverer, an unseen teacher.

And so it is—­and shameful it is that so it should be—­that the more God gives to men, the less they thank Him, the less they fancy that they need Him:  but take His bounties, as they take the air they breathe, unconsciously, and as a matter of course.

And therefore adversity is wholesome, danger is wholesome; so wholesome, that in all ages, as far as I can find, the godliest, the most moral, the most manful, and therefore the really happiest and most successful nations or communities of men, have been those who were in perpetual danger, difficulty, struggle; and who have thereby had their faith in God called out; who have learned in the depth, to cry out of the depth to God; to lift up their eyes unto the Lord, and know that their help comes from Him.