was done. Hundreds of thousands fell around him in every rank, yet on he went unharmed. On the terrible bridge of Lodi the bullets hailed and whistled harmlessly around his head; vain was the cannon ball at Ratisbon; innocent the exploding shell at Bautzen; and the Cossack at Brienne dropped his spear from a dead hand at the very feet of this man of destiny. They could not touch that charmed life till the avenger of God's justice had fulfilled his task; and then this greatest military genius of the world's history lay stranded on a barren island, to be a schoolboy's theme; stranded there by his own boundless selfishness, falsehood, and rapacity; and France is still drinking the sediments of its bitter cup of sin, incapable of a good and stable government till moral and religious health shall have been diffused through the nation.

Yet this signal series of events is but one of a multitude of instances which, as time rolls on, render it more and more obvious to the seeing eye that behind and above all the seeming confusion of human and national affairs God rules and overrules.

IV. God often overrules human wickedness, whether in its milder or fiercer forms, to the establishment and diffusion of true religion. Pride, avarice, ambition, lust, as well as open enmity, have often been thrust into his treadmill and chained to his galleys. It is an interesting and a curious study to observe all along the line of history conflicting forces traveling the same path, and the most opposite purposes and motives centering in the same material act. What Joseph said to

his brethren, "Ye thought evil against me, but God meant it unto good," is the clew to many a transaction before and since the coming of Christ, and even of the Saviour's own earthly fate. The base heart of Judas betrayed him who was yet "delivered by the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God"; and when mad Pharisees would kill the hated reprover of their sins, they offered up the world's great sacrifice on Calvary. It was the hand of persecution which drove forth the first disciples from Jerusalem "every where preaching the word." Saul aided at the death of the first Christian martyr, and it is hardly too much to think, with Augustine, that "the church owes Paul to the prayer of the dying Stephen."

In any

So it has often been from that day to this. great anti-religious movement the thoughtful reader of history may often learn to recognize the preparation for some great movement of God, and not seldom the very work of God wrought out all unconsciously by his hewers of wood and drawers of water. It is largely in this way that such a vast mass of thought and learning has been concentrated upon his written Word, till it is becoming steadily buttressed round by the scholarship of the world. Was it desirable that the truth of its historic records should be established for these distant times? A bold German is stirred up to make an attack all along the line. And then learning rallied to the onset; the tombs and temples of Egypt and the bricks and tablets of Babylonia and Assyria broke the silence of two thousand years, and with their long

mute hieroglyphics and mysterious wedge-shaped characters vindicated the record. And the process is not

ended.

Does it become important that Christians in modern times should be made certain of the substantial integrity of the New Testament text? English skeptics, Collins, Tindal, and others, exultingly raise the cry of vast and fatal variations, destructive of all confidence. Then came the grand rally. The old libraries, from the heart of Europe to the convents of Mount Athos and the Nitrian desert and the Sinaitic peninsula were ransacked for ancient manuscripts, the folios of the Christian Fathers were hunted through for quotations, hundred of years of toil were expended in the mere comparison of texts, until at last all the variations of nigh two thousand documents were found not to affect the substance of one historic fact or to change a single doctrine. So the textual foundation was made sure for all time.

Strauss' destructive "Life of Jesus" was a startling apparition to Christian Europe. But it evoked dozens of constructive lives of Christ. It also demolished a spurious theory, the "accommodation" theory of interpreting the Scriptures, and aroused a host of keen scholars to demolish his own "mythical" theory. His bulky book passed away to dusty shelves even before its author passed away with no God but a blind force and no hope of immortality, leaving behind him no rule of life but abandonment to destiny. He did more, perhaps, than any man of his day to make the thinking

world confront that question, "What think ye of Christ?" and more than any Christian man could do to precipitate the great issue, still upon us, whereby we are driven, as at the point of the bayonet, to take our stand and make our election between an unhesitating supernaturalism and the abyss of blank doubt and despair; and the Church is made to see that it is engaged in a struggle for everything or nothing.

These illustrations are on the broader scale. But the world is full of instances on the narrower scale in which hostile aims and efforts have recoiled, and the reaction has been greater than the action. Thus the deliberate agreement of two friends, West and Littleton, to disprove two special topics of God's Word, extorted from them two powerful vindications of Christ's resurrection and Paul's conversion. The very falsehoods of certain infidel writers opened the eyes of the young skeptic, David Nelson, and led him to give his life to the reclamation of infidels, and with singular success. The endowment of a college on infidel principles called forth a defense of the Christian religion from the greatest American statesman and orator of the past generation; and in the present generation certain scientific assaults upon the Gospels have summoned to their firm defense one who in after years will be recognized as the noblest public man in the history of the British empire.

Men's evil passions have been abundantly used for the diffusion of God's truth. Before the coming of Christ, Alexander's insatiate ambition had spread far

and wide the noble language in which his messengers might address all the nations, and Roman rapacity had constructed a vast empire under which the first missionaries could travel along its great highways from Babylon to Spain. In the time of greatest spiritual declension the prodigality of a luxurious and perhaps infidel pope kindled the Reformation; and the balancing of evil policies and corrupt purposes, together with wicked wars and Mohammedan incursions, saved Luther and the Reformation from premature destruction. Selfish reasons of state have more than once protected the infant religion till the powers of state could not destroy. The unbridled passions of the eighth Henry rent England from the Church of Rome. The British conquests in India, stained with many crimes and once hostile to the gospel, at length gave a breadth and security to the missionary work impossible under the multitude of petty chieftains. The discreditable opium war with China yet threw open to God's Word a vast empire hermetically sealed. The jealousies of European powers centering around Constantinople are perhaps all that for years have saved the Christian Church in Turkey from extinction, till doubtless now it cannot be extinguished. God often gives individual good men strange helpers. William Tyndale's enemies bought up his first edition for destruction, and thus enabled him to issue his second. When Whitefield was preaching with such power in this country, the most enterprising religious publisher was the thrifty Benjamin Franklin, at that time probably a disciple of Shaftesbury and Collins.