Many have been known to die of starvation, and the tales of wretchedness and woe with which the public ear is often filled attest the fact.

Squalid forms and threadbare garments are seen, alas! too often in this civilised world, and the grave of the pauper is often opened to receive some unhappy mortal, whose life had been one scene of suffering and want.
Philanthropy shudders and Christianity believes it to be a punishment, administered by the hand of God; that the haggard cause of the starved creature, who has thus miserably died, once contained the spirit of a mortal undergoing the penalty of Him, who judges mankind on high, and expiating through his heart-rending bodily agony, crimes committed in by-gone days.
This is not so in all cases.

What mercy could we attribute to God, did he willingly entail misery upon the innocent, or punish them for the crimes of the guilty?
Why call it a dispensation of Divine justice, that would condemn to weeks, months and years of wretchedness, the mortals he brought in the world himself?
Who hath seen the hovel of the pauper; beheld its wretched inmates, heard their tale of woe, heard them tell of days passing without their having a crumb of bread to satisfy the cravings of hunger, or seen them in that last stage of destitution, when hunger brings on despair, until the mind wanders from its seat, and madness takes its place; heard the raving of the maniac, his frenzied call for bread, and his abject desolation, until death came kindly to relieve his sufferings, and felt not that the hand of God had never worked so much ill for his people?
Is it profanity to say that the eye of God had wandered from them?
We believe it; for the Book that teaches us of the Almighty, depicts him as a God of mercy and compassion.

The eye of the Omnipotent is not upon the wretched.

"He seeth all things," but there are times when His eyes are turned from those who endure the storm of a cold and heartless world, and He knows not of their suffering, until the Angel of Death brings their spirit before the Judgment seat.
God had not deserted the soldier's wife, but His eyes were turned away, and He saw not her condition.