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.--All around us, laws, iron laws, which we
do not make, and which we dare not try to break, lest they go on
their way, and grind us to powder.

Then comes the awful question, Are we at the mercy of these laws?
Is the world a great machine, which goes grinding on its own way
without any mercy to us or to anything; and are we each of us parts
of the machine, and forced of necessity to do all we do? Is it
true, that our fate is fixed for us from the cradle to the grave,
and perhaps beyond the grave? How shall we prevent the world from
overcoming us in this? How shall we escape the temptation to sit
down and fold our hands in sloth and despair, crying, What we are,