He is present to bind up the hearts that are breaking with sorrow for the departed, and to make a sudden, untimely, and needless death a monument of warning to those still living, thus making the wrath of man to praise Him. If therefore our children die in infancy, because we have entailed on them feeble bodies by our violation of law, God does not kill them, but they die through violated law, and he in His goodness takes the little ones to His bosom, the seat and source of all law. Let us not then charge our sorrows to the willful enactment of our Heavenly Father. He taketh no pleasure in the death of him that dieth. When he gives life to us, He intends that we shall keep it as long as possible. Having given us life, all the forces of His boundless nature are engaged to maintain it in us until He is ready to harvest us as the farmer does the ripened grain. The God of nature and the God of grace are not in antagonism. “The one God is in all and over all.” A kingdom divided against itself cannot stand. If, therefore, we die this side of three score years and ten—seventy years—we die untimely. It is high time that good men were awake to this fact, and ceased charging over to Divine Providence what legitimately belongs to ourselves. “Jesus Christ came to destroy him that hath the power of death, that is the devil;” and when the philosophy of Jesus is wrought up into human lives by obedience to physical laws, the power of disease and death over our bodies will be very much broken. The victory over death can be so far achieved by men in the body that they need not die until their minds and hearts have received all the development in this world that infinite love ordains. That is, men may so baffle the monster of death by obedience to law as to keep him at bay until their souls have taken on such Christly ripeness that they shall burst and break their bodies, as the ripening chestnuts break their burrs under the frosts of autumn. We have, therefore, no right to ascribe to supernatural agency any phenomena which can be explained on natural principles. Disobedience to law brings penalties. There is nothing that men need to see more in their efforts at reform than the connection between their sufferings and their disobedience. Now, disobedience to the laws of life brings the penalties, sickness and premature death. There is no field where our disobedience manifests itself more frequently and with so little thought of consequences, as in our false and unnatural habits of eating and drinking, which damage the body and demoralize the soul.