CHAPTER VII.
THE FAMINE YEAR.
They who were in the south of Ireland during the winter of 1846-47 will not readily forget the agony of that period.

For many, many years preceding and up to that time, the increasing swarms of the country had been fed upon the potato, and upon the potato only; and now all at once the potato failed them, and the greater part of eight million human beings were left without food.
The destruction of the potato was the work of God; and it was natural to attribute the sufferings which at once overwhelmed the unfortunate country to God's anger--to his wrath for the misdeeds of which that country had been guilty.

For myself, I do not believe in such exhibitions of God's anger.

When wars come, and pestilence, and famine; when the people of a land are worse than decimated, and the living hardly able to bury the dead, I cannot coincide with those who would deprecate God's wrath by prayers.

I do not believe that our God stalks darkly along the clouds, laying thousands low with the arrows of death, and those thousands the most ignorant, because men who are not ignorant have displeased Him.