Hosea 2:8-9 For she did not know that I gave her corn, and wine, and oil, and multiplied her silver and gold, which they prepared for Baal. Archbishop Trench says, How prone are we all to ascribe to chance or fortune those gifts and blessings which indeed come directly from God — to build altars to Fortune rather than to Him who is the author of every good thing which we have gotten. And this faith of men, that their blessings, even their highest, come to them by a blind chance, they have incorporated in a word; for "happy" and "happiness" are connected with "hap," which is chance; how unworthy, then, to express any true felicity, whose very essence is that it excludes hap or chance, that the world neither gave nor can take it away. Against a similar misuse of "fortunate," "unfortunate," Wordsworth very nobly protests, when, of one who, having lost everything else, had yet kept the truth, he exclaims — "Call not the royal Swede unfortunate, Who never did to Fortune bend the knee." Parallel Verses KJV: For she did not know that I gave her corn, and wine, and oil, and multiplied her silver and gold, which they prepared for Baal. |
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