did not embrace a sufficiency of food for every mouth in the world; or else that man has not done his duty in securing that food. Now God never deals vaguely with man, his promises are clear and definite, his demands rational and peremptory:—"Do this and live; neglect it, and die." When He said "seed-time and harvest," He said, by that, food shall always be sufficient for man: and never was a famine on earth, in any part, when there was not an abundance in some part, to make up all the deficiency; and if man is not warned by some dreamer, like Pharaoh, of a seven years' famine, to secure a wise Joseph, to provide in advance for a seven years' destitution; yet if he is a wise husbandman, a good steward, a discerner of the signs of the times—when the skies drop down "extra fatness," and the harvests are doubly laden with rich fruit, he hesitates not in believing that tithes and offerings will be called for somewhere, into the storehouse of the Lord, proportionable to the seventh day's manna that was rained from the heavens, to be gathered on the sixth.
Thus Ireland's famine was a marked one, so far as man was concerned; and God is slandered, when it is called an unavoidable dispensation of His wise providence, to which we should all humbly bow, as a chastisement which could not be avoided. As well might we say to the staggering inebriate, that he must be patient under a wise dispensation of Providence—that the Lord does not willingly afflict him, &c, as to say that the starving thousands in Ireland must submit
