Page:The kernel and the husk (Abbott, 1886).djvu/163

Letter 14] relief in a letter which declared—in perfect good faith, and without any intention to imply a miracle—that God had "sent down fire from heaven upon their town." An Eastern traveller of modern times tells an amusing story to the same effect how a camel-driver, when questioned as to the cause of his rheumatism, could not be induced for a long time to make any other answer except that "Allah had caused it;" and even when the traveller had elicited the immediate cause, the man would still persist that "Allah had sent the rheumatism, though it had followed upon drinking a great quantity of camels' milk when he was in a violent heat." You should therefore accustom yourself, if you want to understand the Bible, to look at Western narrative from an Oriental point of view. Take for example the interesting account given by the African traveller Mungo Park of the manner in which a trifling incident saved his life in the desert. Alone and desperate, faint and famished, he had thrown himself down to die, when he suddenly caught sight of a small but exquisitely shaped plant of great rarity and interest: "And can God have taken so much thought and care for the creation of this little plant," he cried, "and have no thought or care for me?" In the strength of this suggestion he started up, pressed on his way, and reached safety. Now compare this striking little story with the similar incident of the gourd, recorded in the Book of Jonah, and imagine how a prophet of Israel could have described the message of salvation. He would have told us (as the prophet Jonah tells us) how the Lord God in the same day caused a plant to grow up before the face of the man, and how the Lord God said unto the man "Hath the Lord thy God taken thought for this plant, and shall He take no thought for thee? Arise, go on thy way"—giving, as from God, the actual words of the thought which the Western traveller describes as suggesting itself or occurring to his