The complexity of God’s providential arrangements may be illustrated by Tyndall’s explanation of the fact that heartsease does not grow in the neighborhood of English villages: 1. In English villages dogs run loose. 2. Where dogs run loose, cats must stay at home. 3. Where cats stay at home, field mice abound. 4. Where field mice abound, the nests of bumble-bees are destroyed. 5. Where bumble-bees’ nests are destroyed, there is no fertilization of pollen. Therefore, where dogs go loose, no heartsease grows.
B. Arguments _a posteriori_ from the facts of nature and of history. (_a_) The outward lot of individuals and nations is not wholly in their own hands, but is in many acknowledged respects subject to the disposal of a higher power. (_b_) The observed moral order of the world, although imperfect, cannot be accounted for without recognition of a divine providence. Vice is discouraged and virtue rewarded, in ways which are beyond the power of mere nature. There must be a governing mind and will, and this mind and will must be the mind and will of God.
The birthplace of individuals and of nations, the natural powers with which they are endowed, the opportunities and immunities they enjoy, are beyond their own control. A man’s destiny for time and for eternity may be practically decided for him by his birth in a Christian home, rather than in a tenement-house at the Five Points, or in a kraal of the Hottentots. Progress largely depends upon “variety of environment” (H. Spencer). But this variety of environment is in great part independent of our own efforts.
“There’s a Divinity that shapes our ends, Rough hew them how we will.” Shakespeare here expounds human consciousness. “Man proposes and God disposes” has become a proverb. Experience teaches that success and failure are not wholly due to us. Men often labor and lose; they consult and nothing ensues; they “embattle and are broken.” Providence is not always on the side of the heaviest battalions. Not arms but ideas have decided the fate of the world—as Xerxes found at Thermopylæ, and Napoleon at Waterloo. Great movements are generally begun without consciousness of their greatness. _Cf._ _Is. 42:16_—“_I will bring the blind by a way that they know not_”; _1 Cor. 5:37, 38_—“_thou sowest ... a bare grain ... but God giveth it a body even as it pleased him._”