The devoted missionary, at the promptings of a voice within, quits a land of safety and peace, and finds himself in the midst of dangers and sufferings of almost every name; _in perils of waters, in perils of robbers, in perils in the city, in perils in the wilderness, in weariness, in watchings often, in hunger and thirst, in fastings often, in cold and nakedness_. The furnace of persecution is heated, and he performs his duties with his life constantly in his hand. But he uses no weapon save faith and prayer. He feels that "he is immortal till his work is done." And, in fact, he outlives all his dangers, and, in venerable old age, surrounded by the fruits of his labor,--a reformed and affectionate people,--he passes quietly into the abodes of the blessed. Here, again, why should we hesitate to refer his protection and deliverance to the special interposition of his heavenly Father, in the manner I have pointed out? On the other hand, the history of dreadfully wicked men is full of terrible examples of calamity and suffering, as the consequence of their sins. True, the evil came upon them apparently by the operation of natural laws; but shall we hence infer that God in no case has so modified these laws, by an agency among the hidden causes of events, as to make the result certain? He certainly could do this; and to say that he never has done it, is to remove one of the most powerful restraints that operate upon the wicked. In several examples recorded in the Bible, both of deliverance for the virtuous and of punishment for the wicked, so many natural agencies are concerned, that we are left in doubt whether the events are to be regarded as miraculous or not. Let the deluge, the destruction of Sodom, and the passage of the Israelites through the Red Sea, serve as examples. In the first, we find the flood imputed to a forty days' rain and the overflowing of the ocean; and its reduction to a wind. In the destruction of the cities of the plain, the phenomena described correspond very well with the effects of volcanic agency; and we find accordingly that the region where those cities stood shows marks of that agency. In the passage of the Red Sea, the removal of the waters, to allow the Israelites to pass, is imputed to a strong east wind all night. Nevertheless, the pillar of a cloud by day and the pillar of fire by night were a manifest and standing miracle in this transaction. Now, may it not be that, in all these cases, so far as natural agencies were concerned, they were made to conspire with the miraculous in the manner which I have described, viz., by such a modification of some of the remote causes by which they were brought into action, as exactly to answer the divine purpose in the catastrophe of the deluge, of Sodom, and in the passage of the Red Sea?