ent, which I
noticed as reported in the papers, was that the last thing which the
fire burned was a church; and it left standing next door, and
untouched, a liquor saloon. It seemed to me a very peculiar kind of
divine judgment, if that is what it really was.

And so, as you look into these cases of supposed divine judgments,
which people are so ready to see in regard to their neighbors, you will
find that it has some serious defect of this sort almost always that
makes you question whether a wise man would be guilty of that method of
conducting his affairs.

This, perhaps, is enough by way of setting forth the popular method of
looking at these problems. I want to ask you now to go with me for a
little while, as I attempt to analyze some of these cases, and get at
the real principle involved as to what it is that is really going on.

Now take this case of the mother whose child is taken away from her, as
she says. Let us see if we can find out what is really being done. It
is possible, of course, that the child has inherited, it may be from a
grandfather or great-grandfather, from somewhere along the line, a
tendency to a particular kind of disease. It may be that, without
anybody's being to blame for it or anybody's knowing it, the child was
exposed to some contagious disease on the street or at school. It may
be that the mother, through a little otherwise pardonable vanity,
wishing to display the beauty of the child rather than to dress it in
the healthiest manner, has been the means of exposing it to cold. It
may be any one of a dozen things has caused the death of this child.
And do you not see that in every case it has nothing whatever to do
with the mother's moral goodness or spiritual cultivation? It is absurd
to think that the mother, in this case, is being punished for something
that she is entirely unconscious of having been guilty of. Do you not
see that there is no logical connection between an inherited disease,
between exposure, between taking cold, between any of these natural
causes and the goodness of the mother? Is it not absurd to talk about
their having anything whatever to do with each other?

I remember hearing a famous revivalist preach some years ago; and in
this particular sermon he represented God as using all means to try to
turn such a man from his path of evil, as he regarded it, into the way
of right and truth and salvation; and he said: First, perhaps, God
takes his property away from