of the tide which underneath was heaving the great ocean on whose surface only the wind spent its force. Is this a true picture of human life as the thoughtful man comes to know it? I think it is. Who is there of us that is not aware that his soul has had two educations? Sometimes the two have been in opposition; sometimes they have overlapped; sometimes they have wholly coincided; but always the two have been two. Our own government of ourselves is most evident, is the one which we are most aware of, so that sometimes for a few moments we forget that there is any other; but very soon our plans for ourselves are so turned and altered and hindered that we cannot ignore the other greater, deeper force. We meant to do that, and look! we have been led on to this. We meant to be this, and lo we are that. We never meant to believe this, and lo, we hold it with all our hearts. What does it mean? It is the everlasting discovery, the discovery which each thoughtful man makes for himself with almost as much surprise as if no other man had ever made it for himself before, that this soul, for which he is responsible, is not his soul only, but is God's soul too. The revelation which came of old to the Virgin Mother about her child- not your child only, but God's child too; yours, genuinely, really yours, but behind yours, and over yours, God's. That is the great revelation about life. When it comes, everything about one's self-culture is altered. Every anticipation and thought of living changes its color. It comes sometimes early, and sometimes late in life. Sometimes it is the flush and glow which fills childhood with dewy hope and beauty. Sometimes it is the peace which gathers about old age and makes it happy. Whenever it comes it makes life new. See what the changes are which it must bring. First it makes anything like a bewildering surprise impossible. When I have once taken it into my account that God has his plans for my soul's culture, that these plans of his outgo and supersede any plans for it which I can make, then any new turn that comes is explicable to me, and, though I may not have anticipated it all, I am not overwhelmed, nor disturbed, nor dismayed by it. I find a new conviction growing in my soul, another view of life, another kind of faith. It is not what I had intended. I had determined that as long as I lived, I would believe something very different from this which I now feel rising and taking possession of me. It seems at first as if my soul had been disloyal to me, and had turned its back faithlessly upon my teaching. I appeal to it, and say: Soul, why hast thou thus dealt with me?" And it answers back to me: "Wist you not, that I must be about my Father's business? Did you not know that I was God's soul as well as your soul? This is something which he has taught me." 66 (Being part of a sermon.) The Finger of God. By Rev. T. DeWITT TALMAGE, of New Jersey. (Born 1832.) R HARAOH was sulking in his marble throne room at Memphis. Plague after plague had come, and sometimes the Egyptian monarch was disposed to do better, but at the lifting of each plague, he was as bad as before. The necromancers of the palace, however, were compelled to recognize the divine movement, and after one of the most exasperating plagues of all the series, they cried out in the words of my text: "This is the finger of God," not the first nor the last time when bad people said a good thing. An old Philadelphia friend visiting me the other day, asked me if I had ever noticed the passage of Scripture from which I to-day speak. I told him no, and I said right away, "That is a good text for a sermon." In strange way sometimes God suggests to his servants useful discourse. It would be a great book that would give the history of sermons. We all recognize the hand of God, and know it is a mighty hand. You have seen a man keep two or three rubber balls flying in the air, catching and pitching them so that none of them fell to the floor, and do this for several minutes, and you have admired his dexterity; but have you thought how the hand of God keeps thousands and thousands of round worlds vastly larger than our world flying for centuries without letting one fall? Wondrous power and skill of God's hand! But about that I am not to discourse. My text leads me to speak of less than a fifth of the divine hand. "This is the finger of God." Only in two other places does the Bible refer to this division of the Omnipotent hand. The rocks on Mount Sinai are basalt and very hard stone. Do you imagine it was a chisel that cut the ten commandments in that basalt? No, in Exodus we read that the tables of stone were written with the finger of God." Christ says that he cast out devils with "the finger of God." The only instance that Christ wrote a word, he wrote not with a pen on parchment, but with his finger on the ground. Yet, though so seldom reference is made in the Bible to a part of God's hand, if you and I keep our eyes open and our heart right, we will be compelled often to cry out, "This is the finger of God." To most of us gesticulation is natural. If a stranger accost you on the street and ask you the way to some place, it is as natural as to breathe for you to level your forefinger this way or that. Not one out of a thousand of you would stand with your hands by your side and make no motion with your finger. Whatever you may say with your lips is emphasized and reinforced and translated by your finger. Now, God, in the dear old Book, says to us innumerable things by the way of direction. He plainly tells us the way to go. But in every exigency of our life, if we will only look, we will find a providential gesture and a providential pointing, so that we may confidently say, "This is the finger of God." Two or three times in my life when perplexed on questions of duty after earnest prayer I have cast lots as to what I should do. In olden times the Lord's people cast lots. The land of Canaan was divided by lot; the cities were divided among the priests and Levites by lot; Matthias was chosen to the apostleship by lot. Now, casting lots is about the most solemn thing you can do. It should never be done except with solemnity, like that of the last judgment. It is a direct appeal to the Almighty. If, after earnest prayer, you do not seem to get the divine direction, I think you might, without sin, write upon one slip of paper "Yes" and upon another "No," or some other words appropriate to the case, and then obliterating from your mind the identity of the slips of paper, draw the decision and act upon it. In that case I think you have a right to take that indication as the finger of God. But do not do that except as the last resort, and with a devoutness that leaves absolutely all with God. For much that concerns us we have no responsibility, and we need not make appeal to the Lord for direction. We are not responsible for most of our surroundings; we are not responsible for the country of our birth, nor for whether we are Americans or Norwegians or Scotchmen or Irishmen or Englishmen; we are not responsible for our temperament, be it nervous or phlegmatic, bilious or sanguine; we are not responsible for our features, be they homely or beautiful; we are not responsible for the height or smallness of our stature; we are not responsible for the fact that we are mentally dull or brilliant. For the most of our environments, we have no more responsibility than we have for the mollusks at the botton of the Atlantic ocean. I am very glad that there are many things that we are not responsible for. Do not blame one for being in his manner as cold as an iceberg or nervous as a cat amid a pack of Fourth of July crackers. If you are determined to blame somebody, blame our greatgrandfathers, or our great-grandmothers, who died before the Revolutionary War, and who may have had habits depressing and ruinous. There are wrong things about all of us, which make me think that one hundred and fifty years ago there was some terrible crank in our ancestral line. Realize that and it will be a relief, semi-infinite. Let us take ourselves as we are at this moment, and then ask, "Which way?" Get all the direction you can from careful and constant study of the Bible, and then look up and look out and look around, and see if you can find the finger of God. 66 It is a remarkable thing that sometimes no one can see that finger but yourself. A year before Abraham Lincoln signed the Proclamation of Emancipation, the White House was thronged with committees and associations, ministers and laymen, advising the President to make that Proclamation. But he waited. and waited, amid scoff and anathema, because he did not himself see the finger of God. After awhile, and at just the right time, he saw the divine pointing and signed the Proclamation. The distinguished Confederates, Mason and Slidell, were taken off an English vessel by the United States Government. "Don't give them up," shouted all the Northern States. Let us have war with England rather than surrender them," was the almost unanimous cry of the North. But William H. Seward saw the finger of God leading in just the opposite direction, and the Confederates were given up, and we avoided a war with England, which at that time would have been the demolition of the United States Government. In other words, the finger of God, as it directs you, may be invisible to everybody else. Follow the divine pointing, as you see it, although the world may call you a fool. There has never been a man or woman who amounted to anything that has not sometimes been called a fool. Nearly all the mistakes that you and I have made have come from our following the pointing of some other finger, instead of the finger of God. But, now, suppose all forms of disaster close in upon a man. Suppose his business collapses. Suppose he buys goods and cannot sell them. There are men of vast wealth who are as rich for Heaven as they are for this world, but they are exceptions. If a man grows in grace, it is generally before he gets one hundred thousand dollars, or after he loses them. If a man has plenty of railroad securities and has applied to his banker for more; if the lots he bought have gone up fifty per cent. in value; if he had hard work to get the door of his fireproof safe shut because of the new roll of securities he put in there just before locking up at night; if he be speculating in a falling market, or a rising market, and things take for him a right turn, he does not grow in grace very much that week. Suppose a cold spring or a late autumn or the coming of an epidemic corners a man, and his notes come due and he cannot meet them, and his rent must be paid, and there is nothing with which to pay it, and the wages of the employees are due and there is nothing with which meet that obligation, and goes the bank will not discount, and the business friends to whom he |