“Grace makes the promise, and Providence the payment,” The Mystery of Providence is a rich, deeply pastoral book. One of its great strengths is that Flavel does not treat providence as a cold doctrine. He takes it into ordinary life: birth, family, work, conversion, suffering, temptation, sanctification, and even death. That makes the book feel spiritually searching rather than merely academic. The best part of the book is its ability to train the reader to look back over lif