If we look through Scripture, we find that the words ‘visit’ and ‘visitation’ are used about ninety times:  that in about fifty of them the meaning of the words is chastisement of some kind or other:  in about forty it is mercy and blessing:  and that in the New Testament the words never mean anything but mercy and blessing, though we have begun of late years to use them only in the sense of punishment and a curse.

Now, how is this, my friends?  How is it that we, who are not under the terrors of the Law, but under the Gospel of grace, have quite lost the Gospel meaning of this word ‘visitation,’ and take a darker view of it than did even the old Jews under the Law?  Have we, whom God hath visited, indeed, in the person of His only-begotten Son Jesus Christ, any right or reason to think worse of a visitation of God than had the Jews of old?  God forbid.  And yet we do so, I fear; and show daily that we do so by our use of the word:  for out of the abundance of the heart man’s mouth speaketh.  By his words he is justified, and by his words he is condemned; and there is no surer sign of what a man’s real belief is, than the sense in which lie naturally, as it were by instinct, uses certain words.

And what is the cause?

Shall I say it?  If I do, I blame not you more than I blame myself, more than I blame this generation.  But it seems to me that there is a little—­or not a little—­atheism among us now-a-days; that we are growing to be ‘without God in the world.’  We are ready enough to believe that God has to do with the next world:  but we are not ready to believe that He has to do with this world.  We, in this generation, do not believe that in God we live, and move, and have our being.  Nay, some object to capital punishment, because (so they say) ‘it hurries men into the presence of their Maker;’ as if a human being could be in any better or safer place than the presence of his Maker; and as if his being there depended on us, or on any man, and not on God Almighty alone, who is surely not so much less powerful than an earthly monarch, that He cannot keep out of His presence or in it whomsoever He chooses.  When we talk of being ’ushered into the presence of God,’ we mean dying; as if we were not all in the presence of God at this moment, and all day long.  When we say, ‘Prepare to meet thy God,’ we mean ‘Prepare to die;’ as if we did not meet our God every time we had the choice between doing a right thing and doing a wrong one—­between yielding to our own lusts and tempers, and yielding to the Holy Spirit of God.  For if the Holy Spirit of God be, as the Christian faith tells us, God indeed, do we not meet God every time a right, and true, and gracious thought arises in our hearts?  But we have all forgotten this, and much more connected with this; and our notion of this world is not that of Holy Scripture—­of that grand 104th Psalm, for instance, which sets forth the Spirit of God as the Lord and Giver of life to