“Second cause” is an expression used in theology to distinguish between God as the ultimate cause of everything that comes to pass and the myriad smaller causes we see at work in the world.
**********
I was attending a prayer-meeting held in the interests of the life of faith, when a strange lady rose to speak, and I looked at her, wondering who she could be, little thinking she was to bring a message to my soul which would teach me a grand practical lesson.
She said she had great difficulty in living the life of faith, on account of the second causes that seemed to her to control nearly everything that concerned her. Her perplexity became so great that at last she began to ask God to teach her the truth about it, whether He really was in everything or not.
After praying this for a few days, she had what she described as a vision. She thought she was in a perfectly dark place, and that there advanced toward her, from a distance, a body of light which gradually surrounded and enveloped her and everthing around her. As it approached, a voice seemed to say, “This is the Presence of God! This is the Presence of God!”
While surrounded with this Presence, all the great and awful things in life seemed to pass before her, — fighting armies, wicked men, raging beasts, storms and pestilences, sin and suffering of every kind. She shrank back at first in terror, but she soon saw that the Presence of God so surrounded and enveloped herself and each one of these things that not a lion could reach out its paw, not a bullet fly throught the air, except as the Presence of God moved out of the way to permit it. And she saw that if there were ever so thin a film, as it were, of this glorious Presence between herself and the most terrible violence, not a hair of her head could be ruffled, nor anything touch her, except as the Presence divided to let the evil through.
Then all the small and annoying things of life passed before her; and equally she saw that there also she was so enveloped in this Presence of God that not a cross look, nor a harsh word, nor petty trial of any kind could affect her, unless God’s encircling presence moved out of the way to let it.
Her difficulty vanished. Her question was answered forever. God was in everything, and to her henceforth there were no second causes.
**********
From Hannah Whitall Smith, The Christian’s Secret of a Happy Life
c 1970, Fleming H. Revell Co.