He preached as he had never been known to preach before, and never preached again--with originality, power, eloquence; speaking from his deepest heart, as if the words thence pouring out had been supernaturally put into it; which, with a superstition that approached to sublimest faith, he afterward solemnly believe they had been.
The text was that verse about "all things working together for good to them that love God;" but, whatever the original discourse had been, it wandered off into a subject which all who knew the minister recognized as one perpetually close to his heart--submission to the will of God, whatever that will might be, and however incomprehensible it seemed to mortal eyes.
"Not, my friends," said he, after speaking for a long time on this head -- speaking rather than sermonizing, which, like many cultivated but not very original minds, he was too prone to do--"not that I would encourage or excuse that weak yielding to calamity which looks like submission, but is, in fact, only cowardice; submitting to all things as to a sort of fatality, without struggling against them, or trying to distinguish how much of them is the will of God, and how much our own weak will; daunted by the first shadow of misfortune, especially misfortunes in our worldly affairs, wherein so much often happens for which we have ourselves only to blame.

Submission to man is one thing, submission to God another.

The latter is divine, the former is often merely contemptible.

But even to the Almighty Father we should yield not a blind, crushed resignation, but an open-eyed obedience, like that we would fain win from our own children, desiring to make of them children, not slaves.
"My children--for I speak to the very youngest of you here, and do try to understand me if you can, or as much as you can--it is right -- it is God's will--that you should resist, to the very last, any trial which is not inevitable.

There are in this world countless sorrows, which, so far appears, we actually bring on ourselves and others by our own folly, wickedness, or weakness--which is often as fatal as wickedness; and then we blame providence for it, and sink into total despair.