while they have great faults, have also great virtues. Some people are
barren of virtues. No weeds verily, but no flowers. I must not be too
much enraged at a nettle along the fence if it be in a field
containing forty acres of ripe Michigan wheat. At the present time,
naturalists tell us, there is on the sun a spot twenty thousand miles
long, but from the brightness and warmth I conclude it is a good deal
of a sun yet.

Again, when I read in my text that the Lord shaves with the hired
razor of Assyria the land of Judea, I bethink myself of the precision
of God's providence. A razor swung the tenth part of an inch out of
the right line means either failure or laceration, but God's dealings
never slip, and they do not miss by the thousandth part of an inch the
right direction. People talk as though things in this world were at
loose ends. Cholera sweeps across Marseilles and Madrid and Palermo,
and we watch anxiously. Will the epidemic sweep Europe and America?
People say, "That will entirely depend on whether inoculation is a
successful experiment; that will depend entirely on quarantine
regulations; that will depend on the early or late appearance of
frost; that epidemic is pitched into the world, and it goes blundering
across the continents, and it is all guess-work and an appalling
perhaps."

My friends, I think, perhaps, that God had something to do with it,
and that His mercy may have in some way protected us--that He may have
done as much for us as the quarantine and the health officers. It was
right and a necessity that all caution should be used, but there has
come enough macaroni from Italy, and enough grapes from the south of
France, and enough rags from tatterdemalions, and hidden in these
articles of transportation enough choleraic germs to have left by this