nt? Aye, myriads of times. We know
not of them, but over the land there are hundreds of our fellow
mortals whose days are but a repetition of suffering. Famine and
sickness have stalked in the midst of hundreds who are innocent of
crime, and reduced them to the last brink of despair. Is this the work
of God? Forbid it, Heaven! that the charge should be made. There is no
ground on which to assert that the Ruler of the Universe--the God of
Righteousness--the Lord of Mercy, would thrust the innocent into
woe--would blast their earthly prospects--would dash the cup of
happiness from their lips, and leave them to perish through Famine and
Disease--while men steeped in crime, whose consciences, if read, would
show an appalling blackness of guilt--while they, we say, escaped from
earthly punishment and enjoyed all the good of this world! On Earth,
as in Heaven and Hell, man is divided into two bodies, Angels and
Fiends. Both are known to the Almighty, and it is only when His eyes
are turned from the good that Fiends triumph. Only then--it is not His
work--it cannot and can never be.

And now, kind reader, you may think that the writer is either a
lunatic or a madman to advance a doctrine which claims that God--the
Infinite--the Everlasting--the Omnipotent--the Inscrutable, would turn
awhile from the good and survey them not--allow them to suffer. We are
neither the one nor the other. Perchance our doctrine is a mere
vagary; still, as we glance over our country and see the scenes daily
enacted, we cannot believe they are the work of an Almighty Father.
When our maidens are ravished by the hated foe and despoiled of that
Virtue held sacred in Heaven, is it the work of God? When the creeping
babe is immolated by the savages of the North, is it a dispensation of
Providence? When the homesteads of the people are given to the flames
and the cursed army of Abolitionists exult at their demolition, does
the hand of our Heavenly Father direct the work of destruction? When
our temples are profaned by the bacchanalian orgies of the Northern
hordes, does the Infinite invite them to desecrate His altars? They
are not His works--they never were. These acts which the Christian
world shudders at, are the machinations and promptings of Hell, and
the Fiends who dwell therein triumph for awhile where the Eye of God
is not.

But the Eye of God is not always turned away from His suffering
people. The cry of the wretched is borne to His ear by the