PROVIDENCE AND ACCIDENTS.

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 74, Issue 114, 16 May 1931, Page 1 (Supplement)

PROVIDENCE AND ACCIDENTS.

<‘A disaster like that which befel the Scottish express suggests to many minds one of the greatest problems of life. If, as religion asserts, all life is overruled by an all-loving Providence, how can accidents creep into the scheme of things? Does not the fact that there are these terrible happenings deny one of the fundamental truths for which re ligion stands?” writes Dr Sidney Al. Berry in the Yorkshire Observer. “When we often bear people say that it was a special providence that they did not travel in the train which was wrecked or the boat which sank, the retort to that is obvious. If there was a special providence at that particular time, what was providence doing to those who did travel? A special providence in one case would mean a special absence of providence in the other. The truth is that we all have to face a life which has the clement of hazard in it, and we cannot expect that our path should always be on the sunny and sheltered side of the road. A world of freedom must be a world of risks and we cannot have the one without the other. The noblest profession of faith in providence is not that we are protected along every step of the journey, but that in the midst of the adverse and the dangerous, battered often by experience, we are enabled to be ‘ more than conquerors through Him that loved us.’ Not to escape from the hardships, but to face and overcome them, is the noblest ideal of life.”