Certainly the hand of Providence in the affairs of nations is not to be denied, and certain it is that God visits nations in mercy and in judgment. A sound theology, an enlightened piety sees the providence of God in the growth of the infant colony, in the prosperity of states, and the revolutions and fall of empires. But he works by ministries; and the most terrible exhibitions of his wrath, the most fearful of his judgments are those in which he lets loose the demons, and permits a people to fall under their power. These demons work their own will, but are at the same time the executors of his vengeance—of his justice. The good, even in the greatest national calamities, are never injured, for nothing but sin ever injures; but the wicked are punished. They had chosen the devil for their master, and it is fitting that he whom they had falsely worshipped as God, who is no God, should be made the instrument of their punishment. The national sins of England were great; her kings had betrayed their trust—had led the people into error, and forgotten what they owed to the King of kings and Lord of lords. The Lord had a controversy with them, and he permitted the old Puritans to triumph over them; and whether they did so by simple human strength, or by the willing assistance of evil spirits, inflaming them with a preternatural courage, and driving them on by a preternatural fury, the principle is one and the same. So also of France, in her terrible revolution of 1789, and of Europe in 1848. I read with sorrow the puny attempts of the author of _Woodstock_ to explain away, as mere jugglery or trickery, the strange phenomena which disturbed the sequestrators of the Royal Lodge. He would, on the strength of an anonymous pamphlet, explain them as a trick played off upon the parliamentary commissioners by Dr. Rochecliff, Albert, Tompkins, Joceline, and Phebe. It may have been so; but the machinery he supposes is clearly inadequate to explain all the mysterious phenomena he acknowledges. The trick could hardly have failed, if trick there was, to be detected either by Colonel Everard or the Commissioners. But even, if his explanation of that particular case is to be accepted, or if a thousand instances are to be referred to trickery, it says nothing as to the general fact of demonic vexations and invasions. As Christians, we know that we are constantly beset by evil spirits, and the mysterious occurrences at the Royal Lodge of Woodstock, even if real, are only a step beyond ordinary Satanic temptations, as possession is only a further extension of obsession.