been anxiously waiting for you, and had begun to fear that you would not be here. You have come to the kingdom for just this time, and I am happy to discover that in this large and evidently critical audience I have at last found one hearer who has sense enough to appreciate a good thing when he hears it."
The dog seemed to understand that he was addrest; and so he howled, and then the people howled, and I went on howling. The dog went his way without ever knowing that he saved my life that day.—P. S. Henson, Christian Endeavor World.
(2573)
Providential Rescue—See Kongo Pioneer Missionary Work.
Providing Against Disaster—See Control
of Circumstances.
Providing for Great Men—See Great
Men Should be Provided for.
PROVIDENCE
Men who know all the risks attending an unguided machine going eighty miles an hour will calmly tell you that a planetary system moving thousands of times as fast needs no guidance of God.
When these racing motor cars reach a
speed of eighty miles an hour, they must
drive themselves, for no human brain is
capable of dealing with all the emergencies
that may arise should that rate be maintained
for any period worth speaking of.
The human animal is not designed to travel
eighty miles an hour. Neither the human
brain nor the human eye can keep pace with
it. The brain declines to respond to the tax
upon it; so the big racing-car dashes on
minus the brain by which it is supposed to
be controlled, and the unexpected obstruction
is smashed up, or the car is, before the
mental activities come into play.—Forbes
Winslow, The Automobile Magazine.
(2574)
Grant planned, but a power unseen disposed. It was his firm purpose not to remain in the army. He could not warm up to the profession of arms. He saw nothing in it for one of his temperament and bent of mind. So he resolved to prepare himself for the chair of mathematics in some college, preferably a professorship in the military academy. He wrote a letter to Professor Church, at West Point, asking to become his assistant when the next detail should be made. The answer was satisfactory, and the lieutenant was hopeful. He began to review his West Point course, but this was as far as he ever got toward the goal of his ambition. As the stars in their courses fought against Sisera, so the course of events defeated all his cherished plans to escape an army life. The trouble with Mexico began before Professor Church saw an opportunity to give the lieutenant an assistant professorship, and his hope of ever being ordered to the academy vanished forever.—Nicholas Smith, "Grant, the Man of Mystery."
(2575)
See Faith and Support.
PROVIDENCE, DIVINE
Wordsworth expresses the thought of an infinite and beneficent power guiding the affairs of men in the following lines:
One adequate support
For the calamities of mortal life
Exists—one only; an assured belief
That the procession of our fate, howe'er
Sad or disturbed, is ordered by a Being
Of infinite benevolence and power
Whose everlasting purposes embrace
All accidents, converting them to good.
(2576)
Providence, Unswerving—See Steadiness of Providence.
PROVINCIALISM
Provincialism is local pride unduly inflated.
It is the temper that is ready to hail
as a Swan of Avon any local gosling who
has taught himself to make an unnatural use
of his own quills. It is always tempting us
to stand on tiptoe to proclaim our own superiority.
It prevents our seeing ourselves
in proper proportion to the rest of the
world. It leads to the preparation of school
manuals in which the threescore years and
ten of American literature are made equal in
importance to the thousand years of literature
produced in Great Britain. It tends
to render a modest writer, like Longfellow,
ridiculous by comparing him implictly with
the half-dozen world poets. In the final resort,
no doubt, every people must be the
judge of its own authors; but before that
final judgment is rendered every people con-
