Famine in Judah

    For the existence of plenty as of famine, the wisdom of this world looks no higher than to what are called second causes. God, it is considered, is no farther concerned in these matters than as the author of certain general laws. He has set the machine a-going, and it continues to work by its own construction, without any regulation of a superintending hand. Climate, soil, cultivation, need, it is confessed, favourable seasons, but any divine direction of weather is supposed to be unnecessary. Timely rain, or the want of it, is a matter below the attention of the Ruler of the world. The blight and the mildew, the wet and the caterpillar, are enemies with which the farmer is to struggle; but they are never considered as armies of devastation sent into the fields by a righteous Providence. The history of the Old Testament gives us a key to Providence in the production of famine or of plenty. God regulates the supplies of the children of men as exactly as if each individual of the human race had his rations assigned him by the angels of heaven every rising sun. "The word of the Lord that came to Jeremiah concerning the dearth. Judah mourneth, and the gates thereof languish; they are black unto the ground; and the cry of Jerusalem is gone up. And their nobles have sent their little ones to the waters: they came to the pits, and found no water; they returned with their vessels empty : they were ashamed and confounded, and covered their heads. Because the ground is chapt, for there was no rain in the earth, the ploughmen were ashamed, they covered their heads. Yea, the hind also calved in the field, and forsook it, because there was no grass. And the wild asses did stand in the high places, they snuffed up the wind like dragons; their eyes did fail, because there was no grass. O Lord, though our iniquities testify against us, do thou it for thy name's sake: for our backslidings are many; we have sinned against thee."—Jer. xiv. 1-7. As in creation and in Providence, so in redemption, God hides himself in the midst of a blaze of light. In all his works he reveals himself, yet the enmity of the human heart will not allow men to see him. And what is most strange, the savage sees a divine hand in the works of Providence; it is unseen and denied by philosophical wisdom. The illiterate peasant hears God in his voice of thunder and storms, and acknowledges divine wrath in pestilence, sword, and famine. But the philosopher perceives nothing in all these but the course of nature. The wisdom of man makes itself ignorant of what the very beasts seem to feel.