and worship without personal degradation. For, who could revere, or
even respect, an Omnipotent Being who acted as capriciously as this would imply,—saving, for instance, the
life of this London lady, because the Bishop prayed so earnestly for her, while at the very same moment He was permitting thousands of helpless Jewish women and children, in Russia, to be bludgeoned to death by ruffians ? No "miracle"
was required to save those poor people, only a little change of heart, or even of wayward fancy, on the part of their tormentors.
Some of us have known what it is to see their dearest endure agonies of suffering, and undergo operations involving even worse suffering, undertaken after the most anxious seeking for divine guidance, only to find that they had been ill- advised after all, that the confident predictions of skilled practitioners were falsified, precious lives lost, and hope - changed to despair ; whilst all around they saw comparatively worthless lives "providentially spared." To those, with ex- perience such as I have described, to preach, as the Bishop of London does, and as you applaud him for doing, that in the case of the sufferer in question "she clearly owed her cure directly to the healing-power of Jesus Christ Himself" is to incline them to cast the religion the Bishop represents behind
their backs for ever, with hatred and scorn. Why demean ourselves to worship and cringe to such a Setehos as this,
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