Daily tobacco leaf-chronicle. (Clarksville, Tenn.) 1890-1895, 1891-07-06

princes OF heaven They all have an eter-
nal lineage. They are all the children of
king Hath the rain a father" Well,
then, say If God takes notice of every
minute raindrop he will take notice of the
most Insignificant affair of my life. 1t is
the astronomical view of things that
bOthers me.
We look upsinto the night heavens, and
we say, "Worldsl worldsp' and how insig-
nificant we feeli We stand at the foot of
Mount Washington or Mont Blanc, and
we feel that we are only insects, and then
we say to ourselves, Though the world is
so large, the sun is one million four hun
dred thousand times larger" "Ohp' we
say, sit is no use, if God wheels that great
machinery through immensely he will not
take the trouble to look down at me-" In
fdel conclusion. Saturn, Mercury and
Jupiter are no more rounded and weighed
and swung by the hand of God than are
the globules ON lilac bush the morning
after shower.
God is no more in magnitudes than he is
in minutip. If he has scales to weigh the
mountains, he has balances delicate enough
to weigh the infnitesimal. You can no
more see him through the telescope than
you can see him through the microscopes no
more when you look up than when you
look down. Are not the hairs of your
head all numbered? And If Himalaya has
God, Hath not the rain a father"
take this doctrine of a particular Provi-
dence, and thrust it into the very midst
of your everyday life. If God fathers
raindrop, is there anything so insignii-
cant in your affairs that God will not
father thatS
When Druyse, the gunsmith invented
the needle gun, which decided the battle
of Sadowa, was it mere accident? When
O farmers boy showed Butcher a short cut
by which he could bring his army up soon
enough to decide Waterloo for England,
was it mere accident? When Lord Byron
took piece of money and tossed it up to
decide whether or not he should be aft
anced to Miss Millbank was it mere ac-
cident which side of the money was up aud
which was DOWN. When the Christian
army was besieged at BeZiers, and a
| drunken drummer came in at midnight
and rang the alarm bell, not knowing what
he was doing, but waking up the host in
time to fight their enemies that moment
arriving, was it an accident?
When in one of the Irish wars a starr
ing mother, flying with her starving child,
sank down and tainted on the rocks in the
night and her hand fell on a warm bottle
of milk, did that just happen so? God is
either in the affairs of men or our religion
is worth nothing at all, and you had better
take it away from us, and instead of this
Bible, which teaches the doctrine, give us
a secular book, and let us, as the famous
Mr.. Fox, the member of parliament, in his
last hour, cry out. "Read me the eighth
book of Virgil"
Obi my friends, let us rouse up to an APP
probation of the fact that all the affairs of
our life are under kings command, and
under a fathers watch. AleXanders war
horse, Bucephalus, would allow anybody
to mount him when he was embarrassed,
but us soon as they put on that war horse,
Bucephalus, the saddle and the trappings
of the conqueror he would allow no one
but Alexander to touch him. And if a
soulless horse could have so much pride in
his owner, shall not we immortals exult in
the fact that we are owned by king?
Hath the rain father"
GODS WAYS ARE PAST FINDING OUT.
Again my subject teaches me that Gods
dealings with us are ineXplicable. That
was the original force of my text. The
rain was a great mystery to the ancients.
They could not understand how the Water
should get into the cloud, and getting
there how it should be suspended, or fall
ing, why it should come down in drops.
Modern science comes along and says there
are two portions of air of different tenn
perature, and they are charged with mois
ture, and the one portion of air decreases
in temperature 50 the water may no longer
be held in vapor, and it falls. And they
tell us that some of the clouds that look
IN hn lI nu lorf nc "a hnu nd 70
be almost quiet in the heavens, are great
mountains of mist four thousand feet from
base to top, and that they rush miles a
minute.
| But after all the brilliant experiments of
DIR. James Hutton, and Saussure, and other
scientists, there is IN infinite mystery
about the rain. There is an ocean of the
unfathomabe IN every raindrop, and God
says today rs he said in the time of Job,
"If you cannot understand one drop of
rain, do not be surprised if my dealings
with you are inexplicable" Why does that
aged man, decrept, beggared, vicious sick
of the world and the world sick of him,
| live on, while here is man in mid life,
consecrated to God, hard working, useful
| in every respect, who dies' Why does chat
old gossip, gadding along the street about
everybody's business but her own, have
such good health, while the Christian
mother with a flock of little ones about
her whom she is preparing for usefulness
and for heavcn--the mother who you think
could not be spared an hour from that
| household-why does she lie down and
die with a cancerP
Why does that man, selfish TO the core,
| 90 on adding fortune to fortune, consum-
ing everything on himself, continue to
prosper, while that man, vino has been
| giving ten per cent of all his income
to God and the church, goes into bank
ruptcyP Before we make stark fools of
ourselves, let us stop pressing this ever
! lasting "why" Let lis worship where we
cannot understand. Let a man take that
one question, "Why2" and follow it far
enough, and push it, and he will land in
wretchedness and perdition We want in
our theology fewer interrogation marks
and more exclamation points. Heaven is
the place for explanation Earth is the
place for trust. If you cannot understand
so minute n thing us n raindrop, how can
you expect to understand Gods dealings2
Hath the rain a father"
! Again, my text makes me think that the
rain of tears is of divine origin. Great
clouds of trouble sometimes hover over us.
They are black, and they are gorged, and
! they are thunderons They are more por-
| tentous than Salvador or Claude ever
! painted-CloudS of poverty, or persecution,