IS GOD CRUEL?

Pacific Press Publishing Company · OAKLAND, CALIFORNIA · Jan 20, 1904

SOMETIMES Providence seems to us almost cruel. It was twenty-five years ago, in the pioneering days in Montana. The means of travel in the section where the incident occurred was by lumbering stage-coaches.

One morning the stage-driver started on his route. His only passengers that day were a mother and her infant child. But one of those sudden drops in temperature, not unusual in that region, made the air bitterly freezing. Every wrap the driver could possibly spare was yielded the mother and her child.

But, tho the babe was kept warm, struggle against it as she might, the fatal drowsiness, which is the vestibule to death by freezing, began to seize and numb the mother. Anxious glances into the stage showed the driver what was wrong in it. While the mother hugged the babe to herself, her head was swaying helplessly.

The driver stopped the stage, opened its door, and took the babe from the mother's arms; wrapped it thickly in blankets and furs; placed it securely under the shelter of a seat. Then he pulled the mother out of the stage. The shock and the necessity of standing on the ground partially awakened her. Then he slammed the door, sprang to his seat, whipped up his horses, and left the woman standing there. This brought her to her senses. At once she began to run after the stage screaming, "My baby! My baby! O, my baby!"

Forced into this rude exercise, her blood began to flow swiftly and warmly. The manacles of the death-sleep were broken from her. As soon as he dared, the driver stopped the stage, assisted the now thoroughly-aroused and warmed woman into it, and, putting the babe back into her arms, and wrapping both as protectingly as possible, drove the saved mother and the saved babe to where complete shelter could defend both.

And that stage-driver was not cruel. Nor, when that mother came to understand it all, did she think him cruel. And so "a frowning Providence may hide a smiling face."—Sel.