Recognizing God's universal goodness.
"We who recognize the loving-kindness, as well as the power of God, in what may seem the harsher and more forbidding agencies of Nature, ought not to be weary and faint in our minds if over our warm human life the same kind pitying hand should sometimes cause his snow of disappointment to fall like wool, and cast forth his ice of adversity like morsels, knowing that even by these unlikely means shall ultimately be given to us, too, as to Nature, the beauty of Sharon and the excellency of Carmel" (Hugh Macmillan). "The sun does not shine for a few trees and flowers, but for the wide world's joy. The lonely pine on the mountain-top waves its somber boughs, and cries,' Thou art my sun.' And the little meadow violet lifts its cup of blue, and whispers with its perfumed breath, ' Thou art my sum' So God sits, effulgent in heaven, not for a favored few, but for the universe of life; and there is no creature so poor or so low that he may not look up with childlike confidence and say, 'My Father, thou art mine' (Ward Beecher). Our Lord taught concerning the heavenly Father, "He maketh his san to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust."
I. GOD'S UNIVERSAL GOODNESS IS NOT THE APPEARANCE OF THINGS. From man's point of view the world is full of things that he cannot call good. And he often wonders why God made things as they are. How can he call calamities and disasters, bloodshed and war, pain and death, signs of Divine goodness? He can only see the appearance; and with that limited vision it is wholly impossible for man to realize the universal goodness of God. And in moral spheres he is equally puzzled. Crime constantly goes undetected and unpunished. The wicked succeed and the righteous fail. How can God be good to all when so many live lives of misery?
II. GOD'S UNIVERSAL GOODNESS IS THE FACT OF THINGS. But it can only be seen from proper points of view, and with the properly cleared vision. God's world is not a material, it is a moral world, and a material only for the sake of the moral God's universal goodness is clearly seen in the measure in which we can apprehend God's moral end in everything that he does and permits.—R.T.