all creation:  but our notion is this—­that this world is a machine, which would go on very well by itself, if God would but leave it alone; that if the course of nature, as we atheistically call it, is not interfered with, then suns shine, crops grow, trade flourishes, and all is well, because God does not visit the earth.  Ah! blind that we are; blind to the power and glory of God which is around us, giving life and breath to all things,—­God, without whom not a sparrow falls to the ground,—­ God, who visiteth the earth, and maketh it very plenteous,—­God, who giveth to all liberally, and upbraideth not,—­God, whose ever-creating and ever-sustaining Spirit is the source, not only of all goodness, virtue, knowledge, but of all life, health, order, fertility.  We see not God’s witness in His sending rain and fruitful seasons, filling our hearts with food and gladness.  And then comes the punishment.  Because we will not keep up a wholesome and trustful belief in God in prosperity, we are awakened out of our dream of unbelief, to an unwholesome and mistrustful belief in Him in adversity.  Because we will not believe in a God of love and order, we grow to believe in a God of anger and disorder.  Because we will not fear a God who sends fruitful seasons, we are grown to dread a God who sends famine and pestilence.  Because we will not believe in the Father in heaven, we grow to believe in a destroyer who visits from heaven.  But we believe in Him only as the destroyer.  We have forgotten that He is the Giver, the Creator, the Redeemer.  We look on His visitations as something dark and ugly, instead of rejoicing in the thought of God’s presence, as we should, if we had remembered that He was about our path and about our bed, and spying out all our ways, whether for joy or for sorrow.  We shrink at the thought of His presence.  We look on His visitations as things not to be understood; not to be searched out in childlike humility—­and yet in childlike confidence—­that we may understand why they are sent, and what useful lesson our Father means us to learn from them:  but we look on them as things to be merely prayed against, if by any means God will, as soon as possible, cease to visit us, and leave us to ourselves, for we can earn our own bread comfortably enough, if it were not for His interference and visitations.  We are too like the Gadarenes of old, to whom it mattered little that the Lord had restored the madman to health and reason, if He caused their swine to perish in the lake.  They were uneasy and terrified at such visitations of God incarnate.  He seemed to them a terrible and dangerous Being, and they besought Him to depart out of their coasts.