excuse
yourselves for want of sober inquiry into God's dealings with you,
by saying, that it is very hard to know, and often impossible to
discover, what object or purpose He has in view when sending to us
this gift or that grief. In some cases it may be so; but it is much
to know and to remember what God's purpose is _not_, and what He can
never wish to have accomplished, either by what He gives to us or
takes from us. Never can it be the purpose of God, in any case, to
advance the work of Satan in our souls, or to retard within us the
coming of His own glorious kingdom of righteousness, peace, and joy in
the Holy Ghost. Never can He send us a gift to make us proud, vain,
indolent, covetous, earthly-minded, sensual, devilish, or in any
degree to alienate us from Himself as our chief good. For whatever
purpose He fashioned our body with such exquisite care, providing
so rich a supply for all its senses, it was not, assuredly, that we
should make that body the instrument of degrading and ruining the
immortal soul, and of sinking our whole being down to a level with the
beasts that perish! He never gave beauty of form to make us vain
or sensuous; nor poured wine into our cup that we should become
drunkards; nor spread food on our table merely to pamper our
self-indulgence and feed our passions. He never gave us dominion
over the earth that we should be Satan's slaves. He never awoke from
silence the glorious harmonies of music for our ear, nor revealed to
our eye the beauties of nature and of art, nor fired our soul with the
magnificent creations of poetry, that we might be so enraptured by
these as to forget and despise Himself. He never gifted us with a
high intellect, refined taste, or brilliant wit, to nourish ambition,
worship genius, and to become profane, irreverent, and devil-like, by
turning those godlike powers against their Maker and Sustainer. We
cannot think, that if money has been poured at our feet, He thereby
intended to infect us with the curse of selfishness, or to tempt us to
become cruel or covetous men, who would let the beggar stand at our
gate, and ourselves remain so poor as to have no inheritance in the
kingdom of God; or to make us such "fools" as to survey our broad
acres and teeming barns with self-love and worldliness, exclaiming,
"Soul, take thine ease; thou hast much goods laid up for many years;
eat, drink, and be merry;" or to tempt us to refuse the cross, and to
depart sorrowful from Chri