h into their causes; find out, if we can, the laws which they
obey, because those laws are given them by God our Father; try, by
using those laws, to escape them, as we are learning now to escape
tempests; or to prevent them, as we are learning now to prevent
pestilences: and where we cannot do that, face them manfully,
saying, 'It is my Father's will. These terrible events must be
doing God's work. They may be punishing the guilty; they may be
taking the righteous away from the evil to come; they may be
teaching wise men lessons which will enable them years hence to save
lives without number; they may be preparing the face of the earth
for the use of generations yet unborn. Whatever they are doing they
are and must be doing good; for they are doing the will of the
living Father, who willeth that none should perish, and hateth
nothing that he hath made.'

This, my friends, is the lesson which the Bible teaches; and because
it teaches that lesson it is the Book of books, and the inspired
word or message, not of men concerning God, but of God himself,
concerning himself, his kingdom over this world and over all worlds,
and his good will to men.

SERMON XIV. BALAAM

NUMBERS xxiii. 19. God is not a man, that he should lie; neither
the son of man, that he should repent: hath he said, and shall he
not do it? or hath he spoken, and shall he not make it good?

If I was asked for any proof that the story of Balaam, as I find it
in the Bible, is a true story, I should lay my hand on this one
only--and that is, the deep knowledge of human nature which is shown
in it.

The character of Balaam is so perfectly natural, and yet of a kind
so very difficult to unravel and explain, that if the story was
invented by man, as poems or novels are, it must have been invented
very late indeed in the history of the Jews; at a time when they had
grown to be a far more civilised people, far more experienced in the
cunning tricks of the human heart than they were, as far as we can
see from the Bible, before the Babylonish captivity. But it was NOT
invented late; for no Jew in these later times would have thought of
making Balaam a heathen, to be a prophet of God, or a believer in
the true God at all. The later Jews took up the notion that God
spoke to and cared for the Jews only, and that all other nations
were accursed.

There is no reason, therefore, against simply believing the story as
it stands. It seems a very anci