A very slight accident may turn the future of a man's
whole life, perhaps of a whole nation. Chance and change--there
seems to us, at times, to be little else than chance and change. Is
not the world full of chance? Are not people daily crushed in
railways, burnt to death, shot with their own guns, poisoned by
mistake, without any reason that we can see, why one should be
taken, and another left? Why should not an accident happen to us,
as well as to others? Why should not we have the thing we love best
snatched from us this day? Why not, indeed? What, then, will help
us to overcome the fear of chances and accidents? How shall we keep
from being fearful, fretful, full of melancholy forebodings! Where
shall we find something abiding and eternal, a refuge sure and
steadfast, in which we may trust, amid all the chances and changes
of this mortal life? St. John tells us--In that within you which is
born of God.
2. In the world so much seems to go by fixed law and rule. That is
even more terrible to our minds and hearts--to find that all around
us, in the pettiest matters of life, there are laws and rules ready
made for us, which we cannot break; laws of trade; laws of
prosperity and adversity; laws of health and sickness; laws of
weather and storms; laws by which not merely we, but whole nations,
grow, and decay, and die.
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