---

Zephaniah could not promise the people exemption from the trials that should come upon them from the Chaldeans. But neither was it possible for him, or any other, to say how much, in the way of mitigation of those threatened evils, might be effected by prayer, by effort, by an humble seeking unto the Lord their God. "It may be" — a theology from which these words should be excluded, would, if it met with universal acceptance, go far towards turning the world upside down. It would paralyse all the powers of our religious nature. It would take from under us all grounds for trusting in a moral providence. Let certainty, in relation to the Divine Being, be as fixed a thing as you will, I must have some room left for a peradventure — must be permitted to believe that there are possibilities in the future of indeterminate issue. This indeterminateness may be looked at in two different ways.

I. AS IT BEARS UPON THE PRINCIPLES OF A DIVINE ADMINISTRATION. Is the use of such language as " it may be," compatible with that fixed order of procedure by which, it is commonly assumed, the Almighty governs the world?

1. These words suppose, if they do not directly affirm, the doctrine of a moral providence; as opposed to the doctrine of fatalism; or of irresistible necessity. There is a constant, continuous, moral superintendence over the affairs of men, for moral purposes. God never permits secondary agencies to go out of His own hands. This view is not more a disclosure of revelation, than it is an essential element of our first conceptions of an Infinite Being. On the Christian showing of what God is, we cannot admit His existence without admitting His providence also. Of course nothing more is contended for, than the fact of a special providence overruling the affairs of men. Of the methods of our preservation, or deliverance, in trying circumstances, we often know nothing.

2. Take the words "it may be," as against that unchanging fixity of natural laws, which it is the fashion of a modern philosophy to make the grand autocratic power in the universe of God. The form of the objection is, that since cause and effect, in the natural world, are joined together by a nexus of undeviating certainty, all prayer for the modification of events, occurring in the order of physical law, is "absurd." But this not only limits the agency of the Divine Being in the natural world, but strikes at the root of all our conceptions of God as a moral governor. God and nature, upon this theory, make up the universe, and the only relation which God has to nature is to keep the wondrous machine going. A high and impersonal abstraction governs all things. Free moral agents, in this apparatus of eternal sequences, there are none, either in relation to God or man. What is the foundation fallacy of this reasoning? But prayer asks for no violation of any inevitable law of sequence. It is merely an appeal to Infinite Wisdom to devise some method for our relief. This is the fault we charge upon the so-called scientific objection. It assumes that all the events in this world's history, however intimately affecting man's happiness, depend for their accomplishment on physical laws only, rather than, as they do, upon those laws liable to be modified in their operation by the intervention or volition of moral agents. Just here, where a fixed thing is intercalated with an unfixed thing, room is left for the putting forth of human effort, and the offering up of faithful prayer. The assumption is entirely gratuitous that, in praying against any form of apprehended danger, I expect the laws of the material world to be suspended, or altered, or put out of course, in any miraculous way. My prayer only goes upon the supposition that there are multitudinous agencies in God, which may be employed to turn a threatened evil aside, or to modify its operation before it reaches me.

II. CONSIDER THE SUBJECT IN RELATION TO HUMAN AGENCY. Or what man may and ought to do towards the same object.

1. Seek the Lord by earnest prayer.

2. Take care not to stipulate for any particular form of relief.

(D. Moore, M. A.)

---

---

KJV: Gather yourselves together, yea, gather together, O nation not desired;

WEB: Gather yourselves together, yes, gather together, you nation that has no shame,