Providence

Columbus, on his way back to Italy disheartened and discouraged, leading his boy by the hand, stopped one day at a convent not far from Granada and asked for a drink of water. The monk who gave him a drink and heard his story was the man who intervened on his behalf with Queen Isabella, and out of that request for a glass of water came the discovery of America.

John Calvin on his way to Italy, the regular road being closed because of the war between France and Italy, had to pass through Geneva; and there he met Farrel, who with fiery eloquence de­manded that he stay at Geneva and lead the work of God there.

Abraham. Lincoln, rummaging in a barrel of rubbish that someone had left in his store at Salem, came upon a copy of Blackstone's Commentaries; and of that chance discovery were awakened the ambitions and desires which were to play so great a part in American history.

George Whitefield, greatest of all preachers, employed as a drawer in the Bell Inn, was unable to get along with his brother's wife; and that led him to give up his employment and go to Bris­tol, and then, step by step, to Oxford, and then to his apostolic career in the min­istry. Whitefield used to say that the difference he had with his brother's wife was God's way of forcing him out of the public business and calling hire "from drawing wine for drunkards to draw water out of the wells of Salvation for the refreshment of his spiritual Israel."

Only a cradle of bulrushes, daubed with slime and pitch--yet never did maternal hands put more of a mother's soul and a mother's heart into the making of a cradle for its little occupant. By night she carried the babe and his cradle down to the river Nile. Never was a child more tenderly laid in his cradle than was Moses that night by the hand of his faithful mother. When the rising sun made it dangerous for her to linger longer, she gave her babe a last kiss, took a last look at him, and then went back to the city, leaving Miriam, the sister, to watch and see what might happen.

How much of the world's hope was vested in that frail cradle rocking there in the waters of the Nile, with the infant looking up at the lotus flowers which bent over it t Only that ark of bulrushes between the child and the river, only the lotus flowers along the banks to screen him from the murderous hand of Pharaoh! And yet the child was safe, because he represented the great purpose and plan of God.