On God’s pre-arrangement of the physical conditions of national life, striking suggestions may be found in Shaler, Nature and Man in America. Instance the settlement of Massachusetts Bay between 1629 and 1639, the only decade in which such men as John Winthrop could be found and the only one in which they actually emigrated from England. After 1639 there was too much to do at home, and with Charles II the spirit which animated the Pilgrims no longer existed in England. The colonists builded better than they knew, for though they sought a place to worship God themselves, they had no idea of giving this same religious liberty to others. R. E. Thompson, The Hand of God in American History, holds that the American Republic would long since have broken in pieces by its own weight and bulk, if the invention of steam-boat in 1807, railroad locomotive in 1829, telegraph in 1837, and telephone in 1877, had not bound the remote parts of the country together. A woman invented the reaper by combining the action of a row of scissors in cutting. This was as early as 1835. Only in 1855 the competition on the Emperor’s farm at Compiègne gave supremacy to the reaper. Without it farming would have been impossible during our civil war, when our men were in the field and women and boys had to gather in the crops. B. A government and control extending to the free actions of men—(_a_) to men’s free acts in general; (_b_) to the sinful acts of men also. (a) _Ex. 12:36_—“_Jehovah gave the people favor in the sight of the Egyptians, so that they let them have what they asked. And they despoiled the Egyptians_”; _1 Sam. 24:18_—“_Jehovah had delivered me up into thy hand_” (Saul to David); _Ps. 33:14, 15_—“_He looketh forth Upon all the inhabitants of the earth, He that fashioneth the hearts of them all_” (_i. e._, equally, one as well as another); _Prov. 16:1_—“_The plans of the heart belong to man; But the answer of the tongue is from Jehovah_”; _19:21_—“_There are many devices in a man’s heart; But the counsel of Jehovah, __ that shall stand_”; _20:24_—“_A man’s goings are of Jehovah; How then can man understand his way?_” _21:1_—“_The king’s heart is in the hand of Jehovah as the watercourses: He turneth it whithersoever he will_” (_i. e._, as easily as the rivulets of the eastern fields are turned by the slightest motion of the hand or the foot of the husbandman); _Jer. 10:23_—“_O Jehovah, I know that the way of man is not in himself; it is not in man that walketh to direct his steps_”; _Phil. 2:13_—“_it is God who worketh in you both to will and to work, for his good pleasure_”; _Eph. 2:10_—“_we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God afore prepared that we should walk in them_”; _James 4:13-15_—“_If the Lord will, we shall both live, and do this or that._”