I put up prayers to Heaven which I cannot conceive how humanity could have refused to respond to,--prayers such as if put up to me I must have responded to. I saw those near and dear to me perishing around me; and I learned the secret I care no longer to conceal, that man's dependence is upon his courage and his industry, and dependence upon Heaven there seems to be none."[293] Such was his private experience; and facts of public notoriety are appealed to in confirmation: "It has long seemed to me the most serious libel on the character of the Deity to assume for one moment that he interferes in human exigencies. A mountain of desolating facts rises up to shame into silence the hazardous supposition? Was not the whole land a short time ago convulsed with horror at the fate of the _Amazon_? There was not a wretch in the whole country whose slumbering humanity would not have been aroused in the presence of that dismal calamity." ... "How is it that liberty is in chains all over Europe, if God be still interposing in human affairs? If the older doctrine were true, if our brother's blood still cried to God from the ground, the patriot would be released from the dungeon, and the tyrant would descend from the throne he has polluted."--"Science has shown us that we are under the dominion of general laws, and that there is no special providence, and that prayers are useless, and that propitiation is vain; that whether there be a Deity independent of Nature, or whether Nature be God, it is still _the God of the iron foot_, that passes on without heeding, without feeling, and without resting; that Nature acts with a fearful uniformity, stern as fate, absolute as tyranny, merciless as death; too vast to praise, too inexplicable to worship, too inexorable to propitiate, it has no ear for prayer, no heart for sympathy, no arm to save."[294] In these and similar appeals to the facts of individual or common experience, the scriptural doctrine of Providence and Prayer is supposed to be very different from what it really is, and stated without any of the qualifications which are expressly declared by the sacred writers. --It is nowhere declared in Scripture that _every_ prayer must receive an immediate answer, whatever may be the object for which it is presented, or the spirit in which it is offered. On the contrary it is expressly written, "If I regard iniquity in my heart, the Lord will not hear me." "But let him ask in faith, nothing wavering; for he that wavereth is like a wave of the sea driven with the wind and tossed: For let not that man think that he shall receive anything of the Lord." "Ye ask, and receive not, because ye ask amiss, that ye may consume it on your lusts."[295]