PROVIDENTIAL INTERPOSITIONS.
Much ridicule has been heaped in our age on the superstition of those who believe that the Providence of God is special as well as general, and may interpose in behalf of his children in the minuter duties and details of life. It has been said, even by Christian philosophers, that God cannot be expected to suspend or set aside the great laws of his government for human convenience, and that such a belief is worthy only of ignorant and vulgar minds. We are glad to find so eminent a writer as Dr. Mansel, in his Limits of Religious Thought, confuting these philosophers by reasoning as subtle as their own: The course of divine Providence, he says, in the government of the world, is represented in Scripture under the twofold aspect of General Law and Special Interposition. Not only is God the author of the universe, and of those regular laws by which the periodical recurrence of its natural phenomena are determined; but He is also exhibited as standing in a special relation to mankind; as the direct cause of events by which their temporal or spiritual welfare is affected; as accessible to the prayers of His servants; as to be praised for his special mercies towards each of us in particular. But this scriptural representation has been discovered by Philosophy to be irrational. God is unchangeable; and therefore he cannot be moved by man's entreaty. He is infinitely wise and good; and therefore he ought not to deviate from the perfection of his eternal counsels. "The religious man," says a writer of the present day, "who believes that all events, mental as well as physical, are pre-ordered and arranged according to the decrees of infinite wisdom, and the philosopher, who knows that, by the wise and eternal laws of the universe, cause and effect are indissolubly chained together, and that one follows the other in inevitable succession,—equally feel that this ordination—this chain—cannot be changeable at the cry of man. If the purposes of God were not wise, they would not be formed;—if wise, they cannot be changed; for then they would become unwise. The devout philosopher, trained to the investigation of universal system—the serene astronomer, fresh from the study of the changeless laws which govern innumerable worlds,—shrinks from the monstrous irrationality of asking the Great Architect and governor of all to work a miracle in his behalf,—to interfere, for the sake of his convenience or his plans, with the sublime order conceived by the Ancient of Days in the far eternity of the past; for what is a special providence but an interference with established laws? and what is such interference but a miracle." Now, here, as in the objections previously noticed, the rationalist mistakes a general difficulty of all human thought for a special difficulty of Christian belief. The really insoluble problem is, how to conceive God as acting at all; not how to conceive him as acting in this way, rather than in that. The creation of the world at any period of time; the establishment, at any moment, of immutable laws for the future government of that world; this is the real mystery which reason is unable to fathom; this is the representation which seems to contradict our conceptions of the Divine Perfection. To that pretentious perversion of the44finite which philosophy dignifies with the name of the Infinite, it is a contradiction to suppose that any changes can take place at any moment;—that anything can begin to exist, which was not from all eternity. To conceive the infinite Creator, at any moment of time, calling into existence a finite world, is, in the human point of view, to suppose an imperfection, either before the act or after it. It is to suppose the development of a power hitherto unexercised, or the limiting to a determinate act that which was before general and indeterminate. May we not then repeat our author's objection in another form? how can a being of infinite wisdom and goodness, without an act of self-deterioration, change the laws which have governed his own solitary existence in the far eternity when the world was not? Or rather, may we not ask what these very phrases of "changeless laws" and "far eternity" really mean? Do they not represent God's existence as manifested under the conditions which necessarily involve the conception of the imperfect and the finite? They have not emancipated the Deity from the law of time; they have merely substituted, for the revealed representation of the God who, from time to time vouchsafes His aid to the need of his creatures, the rationalizing representation of the God who, throughout all time, steadfastly refuses to do so.