Sermons on National Subjects

God’s judgments are from above, out of the sight of the wicked.—Psalm x. 5.

We have just been praying to God to remove from us the cholera, which we call a judgment of God, a chastisement; and God knows we have need enough to do so.  But we can hardly expect God to withdraw His chastisement unless we correct the sins for which He chastised us, and therefore unless we find out what particular sins have brought the evil on us.  For it is mere cant and hypocrisy, my friends, to tell God, in a general way, that we believe He is punishing us for our sins, and then to avoid carefully confessing any particular sin, and to get angry with anyone who tells us boldly which sin God is punishing us for.  But so goes the world.  Everyone is ready to say, “Oh! yes, we are all great sinners, miserable sinners!” and then if you charge them with any particular sin, they bridle up and deny that sin fiercely enough, and all sins one by one, confessing themselves great sinners, and yet saying that they don’t know what sins they have committed.  No man really believes himself a sinner, no man really confesses his sins, but the man who can honestly put his finger on this sin or that sin which he has committed, and is not afraid to confess to God, “This sin and that sin have I done—this bad habit and that bad habit have I cherished within me.”  Therefore, I say, it is no use for us Englishmen to dream that we can flatter and persuade the great God of Heaven and earth into taking away the cholera from us, unless we find out and confess openly what we have done to bring on the cholera, and unless we repent and bring forth fruits worthy of repentance, by amending our habits on that point, and doing everything for the future which shall not bring on the cholera, but keep it off.

Do not let us believe this time, my friends, in the pitiable, insincere way in which all England believed when the cholera was here sixteen years ago.  When they saw human beings dying by thousands, they all got frightened, and proclaimed a Fast and confessed their sins and promised repentance in a general way.  But did they repent of and confess those sins which had caused the cholera?  Did they repent of and confess the covetousness, the tyranny, the carelessness, which in most great towns, and in too many villages also, forces the poor to lodge in undrained stifling hovels, unfit for hogs, amid vapours and smells which send forth on every breath the seeds of rickets and consumption, typhus and scarlet fever, and worse and last of all, the cholera?  Did they repent of their sin in that?  Not they.  Did they repent of the carelessness and laziness and covetousness which sends meat and fish up to all our large towns in a half-putrid state; which fills every corner of London and the great cities with slaughter-houses, over-crowded graveyards, undrained sewers?  Not they.  To confess their sins in a general way cost them a few words; to confess and repent of the real particular sins in themselves, was a very different matter; to amend them would have touched vested interests, would have cost money, the Englishman’s god; it would have required self-sacrifice of pocket, as well as of time.  It would have required manful fighting against the prejudices, the ignorance, the self-conceit, the laziness, the covetousness of the wicked world.  So they could not afford to repent and amend of all that.  And when those great and good men, the Sanitary Commissioners, proved to all England fifteen years ago, that cholera always appeared where fever had appeared, and that both fever and cholera always cling exclusively to those places where there was bad food, bad air, crowded bedrooms, bad drainage and filth—that such were the laws of God and Nature, and always had been; they took no notice of it, because it was the poor rather than the rich who suffered from those causes.  So the filth of our great cities was left to ferment in poisonous cesspools, foul ditches and marshes and muds, such as those now killing people by hundreds in the neighbourhood of Plymouth; for one house or sewer that was improved, a hundred more were left just as they were in the first cholera; as soon as the panic of superstitious fear was past, carelessness and indolence returned.  Men went back, the covetous man to his covetousness, and the idler to his idleness.  And behold! sixteen years are past, and the cholera is as bad as ever among us.

But you will say, perhaps, it is presumptuous to say that Englishmen have brought the cholera on themselves, that it is God’s judgment, and that we cannot explain His inscrutable Providence.  Ah! my friends, that is a poor excuse and a common one, for leaving a great many sins as they are!  When people do not wish to do God’s will, it is a very pleasant thing to talk about God’s will as something so very deep and unfathomable, that poor human beings cannot be expected to find it out.  It is an old excuse, and a great favourite with Satan, I have no doubt.  Why cannot people find out God’s will?—Because they do not like to find it out, lest it should shame them and condemn them, and cost them pleasure or money—because their eyes are blinded with covetousness and selfishness, so that they cannot see God’s will, even when they do look for it, and then they go and cant about God’s judgments; while those judgments, as the text says, are far above out of their mammon-blinded and prejudice-blinded sight.  What do they mean by that word?  Come now, my friends! let us face the question like men.  What do you mean really when you call the cholera, or fever, or affliction at all, God’s judgment?  Do you merely mean that God is punishing you, you don’t know for what, and you can’t find out for what? but that all which He expects of you is to bear it patiently, and then go and do afterwards just what you did before?  Dare anyone say that who believes that God is a God of justice, much less a God of love?  What would you think of a father who punished his children, and then left them to find out as they could what they were punished for?  And yet that is the way people talk of pestilence and of great afflictions, public and private.  They are not ashamed to accuse God of a cruelty and an injustice which they would be ashamed to confess themselves!  How can men, even religious men often, be so blasphemous?  Mainly, I think, because they do not really believe in God at all, they only believe about Him—they believe that they ought to believe in Him.  They have no living personal faith in God or Christ; they do not know God; they do not know God’s character, and what to believe of Him, and what to expect of Him; or what they ought to say of Him; because they do not know, they have not studied, they have not loved the character of Christ, who is the express image and likeness of God.  Therefore God’s judgments are far away out of their sight; therefore they make themselves a God in their own image and after their own likeness, lazy, capricious, revengeful; therefore they are not afraid or ashamed to say that God sends pestilence into a country without showing that country why it is sent.  But another great reason, I believe, why God’s judgments in this and other matters are far above out of our sight, is the careless, insincere way of using words which we English have got into, even on the most holy and awful matters.  I suppose there never was a nation in the world so diseased through and through with the spirit of cant, as we English are now: except perhaps the old Jews, at the time of our Lord’s coming.  You hear men talking as if they thought God did not understand English, because they cling superstitiously to the letter of the Bible in proportion as they lose its spirit.  You hear men taking words into their mouths which might make angels weep and devils tremble, with a coolness and oily, smooth carelessness which shows you that they do not feel the force of what they are saying.  You hear them using the words of Scripture, which are in themselves stricter and deeper than all the books of philosophy in the world, in such a loose unscriptural way, that they make them mean anything or nothing.  They use the words like parrots, by rote, just because their forefathers used them before them.  They will tell you that cholera is a judgment for our sins, “in a sense,” but if you ask them for what sins, or in what sense, they fly off from that home question, and begin mumbling commonplaces about the inscrutable decrees of Providence, and so on.  It is most sad, all this; and most fearful also.

Therefore, I asked you, my friends, what is the meaning of that word judgment?  In common talk, people use it rightly enough, but when they begin to talk of God’s judgments, they speak as if it merely meant punishments.  Now judgment and punishment are two things.  When a judge gives judgment, he either acquits or condemns the accused person; he gives the case for the plaintiff, or for the defendant: the punishment of the guilty person, if he be guilty, is a separate thing, pronounced and inflicted afterwards.  His judgment, I say, is his opinion about the person’s guilt, and even so God’s judgments are the expression of His opinion about our guilt.  But there is this difference between man and God in this matter—a human judge gives his opinion in words, God gives His in events: therefore there is no harm for a human judge when he has told a person why he must punish, to punish him in some way that has nothing to do with his crime—for instance, to send a man to prison because he steals, though it would be far better if criminals could be punished in kind, and if the man who stole could be forced either to make restitution, or work out the price of what he stole in hard labour.  For this is God’s plan—God always pays sinners back in kind, that He may not merely punish them, but correct them; so that by the kind of their punishment, they may know the kind of their sin.  God punishes us, as I have often told you, not by His caprice, but by His laws.  He does not break His laws to harm us; the laws themselves harm us, when we break them and get in their way.  It is always so, you will find, with great national afflictions.  I believe, when we know more of God and His laws, we shall find it true even in our smallest private sorrows.  God is unchangeable; He does not lose His temper, as heathens and superstitious men fancy, to punish us.  He does not change His order to punish us.  We break His order, and the order goes on in spite of us and crushes us: and so we get God’s judgment, God’s opinion of our breaking His laws.  You will find it so almost always in history.  If a nation is laid waste by war, it is generally their own fault.  They have sinned against the law which God has appointed for nations.  They have lost courage and prudence, and trust in God, and fellow-feeling and unity, and they have become cowardly and selfish and split up into parties, and so they are easily conquered by their own fault, as the Bible tells us the Jews were by the Chaldeans; and their ruin is God’s judgment, God’s opinion plainly expressed of what He thinks of them for having become cowardly and selfish, and factious and disinterested.  So it is with famine again.  Famines come by a nation’s own fault—they are God’s plainly spoken opinion of what He thinks of breaking His laws of industry and thrift, by improvidence and bad farming.  So when a nation becomes poor and bankrupt, it is its own fault; that nation has broken the laws of political economy which God has appointed for nations, and its ruin is God’s judgment, God’s plain-spoken opinion again of the sins of extravagance, idleness, and reckless speculation.

So with pestilence and cholera.  They come only because we break God’s laws; as the wise poet well says:

Voices from the depths of Nature borne
Which vengeance on the guilty head proclaim.

—“Of nature;” of the order and constitution which God has made for this world we live in, and which if we break them, though God in his mercy so orders the world that punishment comes but seldom even to our worst offences, yet surely do bring punishment sooner or later if broken, in the common course of nature.  Yes, my friends, as surely and naturally as drunkenness punishes itself by a shaking hand and a bloated body, so does filth avenge itself by pestilence.  Fever and cholera, as you would expect them to be, are the expression of God’s judgment, God’s opinion, God’s handwriting on the wall against us for our sins of filth and laziness, foul air, foul food, foul drains, foul bedrooms.  Where they are, there is cholera.  Where they are not, there is none, and will be none, because they who do not break God’s laws, God’s laws will not break them.  Oh! do not think me harsh, my friends; God knows it is no pleasant thing to have to speak bitter and upbraiding words; but when one travels about this noble land of England, and sees what a blessed place it might be, if we would only do God’s will, and what a miserable place it is just because we will not do God’s will, it is enough to make one’s soul boil over with sorrow and indignation; and then when one considers that other men’s faults are one’s own fault too, that one has been adding to the heap of sins by one’s own laziness, cowardice, ignorance, it is enough to break one’s heart—to make one cry with St. Paul, “Oh wretched man that I am, who shall deliver me from the body of this death?”  Ay, my friends, the state of things in England now is enough to drive an earnest man to despair, if one did not know that all our distresses, and this cholera, like the rest, are indeed God’s judgments; the judgments and expressed opinions, not of a capricious tyrant, but of a righteous and loving Father, who chastens us just because He loves us, and afflicts us only to teach us His will, which alone is life and happiness.  Therefore we may believe that this very cholera is meant to be a blessing; that if we will take the lesson it brings, it will be a blessing to England.  God grant that all ranks may take the lesson—that the rich may amend their idleness and neglect, and the poor amend their dirt and stupid ignorance; then our children will have cause to thank God for the cholera, if it teaches us that cleanliness is indeed next to holiness, if it teaches us, rich and poor, to make the workman’s home what it ought to be.  And believe me, my friends, that day will surely come; and these distresses, sad as they are for the time, are only helping to hasten it—the day when the words of the Hebrew prophets shall be fulfilled, where they speak of a state of comfort and prosperity, and civilisation, such as men had never reached in their time—how the wilderness shall blossom like the rose, and there shall be heaps of corn high on the mountain-tops, and the cities shall be green as grass on the earth, instead of being the smoky, stifling hot-beds of disease which they are now—and how from the city of God streams shall flow for the healing of the nations: strange words, those, and dim; too deep to be explained by any one meaning, or many meanings, such as our small minds can give them; but full of blessed cheering hope.  For of whatever they speak, they speak at least of this—of a time when all sorrow and sighing shall be done away, when science and civilisation shall go hand in hand with godliness—when God shall indeed dwell in the hearts of men, and His kingdom shall be fulfilled among them, when “His ways shall be known upon earth at last, and His saving health among all nations”—of a time when all shall know Him, from the least unto the greatest, and be indeed His children, doing no sin, because they will have given up themselves, their selfishness and cruelty and covetousness, and stupidity and laziness, to be changed and renewed into God’s likeness.  Then all these distresses and pestilences, which, as I have shown you, come from breaking the will of God, will have passed away like ugly dreams, and all the earth shall be blessed, because all the earth shall at last be fulfilling the words of the Lord’s Prayer, and God’s will shall be done on earth, even as it is done in heaven.  Oh! my friends, have hope.  Do you think Christ would have bid us pray for what would never happen?  Would He have bid us all to pray that God’s will might be done unless He had known surely that God’s will would one day be done by men on earth below even as it is done in heaven?

XIV.

SECOND SERMON ON THE CHOLERA

Visiting the sins of the fathers upon the children.—Exodus xx. 5.

In my sermon last Sunday I said plainly that cholera, fever, and many more diseases were man’s own fault, and that they were God’s judgments just because they were man’s own fault, because they were God’s plainspoken opinion of the sin of filth and of habits of living unfit for civilised Christian men.

But there is an objection which may arise in some of your minds, and if it has not risen in your minds, still it has in other people’s often enough; and therefore I will state it plainly, and answer it as far as God shall give me wisdom.  For it is well to get to the root of all matters, and of this matter of Pestilence among others; for if we do believe this Pestilence to be God’s judgment, then it is a spiritual matter most proper to be spoken of in a place like this church, where men come as spiritual beings to hear that which is profitable for their souls.  And it is profitable for their souls to consider this matter; for it has to do, as I see more and more daily, with the very deepest truths of the Gospel; and accordingly as we believe the Gospel, and believe really that Jesus Christ is our Saviour and our King, the New Adam, the firstborn among many brethren, who has come down to proclaim to us that we are all brothers in Him—in proportion as we believe that, I say, shall we act upon this very matter of public cleanliness.

The objection which I mean is this: people say it is very hard and unfair to talk of cholera or fever being people’s own fault, when you see persons who are not themselves dirty, and innocent little children, who if they are dirty are only so because they are brought up so, catch the infection and die of it.  You cannot say it is their fault.  Very true.  I did not say it was their fault.  I did not say that each particular person takes the infection by his own fault, though I do say that nine out of ten do.  And as for little children, of course it is not their fault.  But, my friends, it must be someone’s fault.  No one will say that the world is so ill made that these horrible diseases must come in spite of all man’s care.  If it was so, plagues, pestilences, and infectious fevers would be just as common now in England, and just as deadly as they were in old times; whereas there is not one infectious fever now in England for ten that there used to be five hundred years ago.  In ancient times fevers, agues, plague, smallpox, and other diseases, whose very names we cannot now understand, so completely are they passed away, swept England from one end to the other every few years, killing five people where they now kill one.  Those diseases, as I said, have many of them now died out entirely; and those which remain are becoming less and less dangerous every year.  And why?  Simply because people are becoming more cleanly and civilised in their habits of living; because they are tilling and draining the land every year more and more, instead of leaving it to breed disease, as all uncultivated land does.  It is not merely that doctors are becoming wiser: we ourselves are becoming more reasonable in our way of living.  For instance, in large districts both of Scotland and of the English fens, where fever and ague filled the country and swept off hundreds every spring and fall thirty years ago, fever and ague are now almost unknown, simply because the marshes have all been drained in the meantime.  So you see that people can prevent these disorders, and therefore it must be someone’s fault if they come.  Now, whose fault is it?  You dare not lay the blame on God.  And yet you do lay the fault on God if you say that it is no man’s fault that children die of fever.  But I know what the answer to that will be: “We do not accuse God—it is the fault of the fall, Adam’s curse which brought death and disease into the world.”  That is a common answer, and the very one I want to hear.  What? is it just to say, as many do, that all the diseases which ever tormented poor little innocent children all over the world, came from Adam’s sinning six thousand years ago, and yet that it is unfair to say that one little child’s fever came from his parents’ keeping a filthy house a month ago?  That is swallowing a camel and straining at a gnat—that God should be just in punishing all mankind for Adam’s sin, and yet unjust in punishing one little child for its parents’ sin.  If the one is just the other must be just too, I think.  If you believe the one, why not believe the other?  Why?  Because Adam’s curse and “original” sin, as people call it, is a good and pleasant excuse for laying our sins and miseries at Adam’s door; but the same rule is not so pleasant in the case of filth and fever, when it lays other people’s miseries at our door.

I believe that all the misery in the world sprung from Adam’s disobedience and falling from God.  “By one man sin entered the world, and death by sin, and so death passed on all men, even on those who had not sinned after the likeness of Adam’s transgression.”  So says the Bible, and I believe it says so truly.  For this is the law of the earth, God’s law which He proclaimed in the text.  He does visit the sins of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of those who hate Him.  It is so.  You see it around you daily.  No one can deny it.  Just as death and misery entered into the world by one man, so we see death and misery entering into many a family.  A man or woman is a drunkard, or a rogue, or a swearer: how often their children grow up like them!  We have all seen that, God knows, in this very parish.  How much more in great cities, where boys and girls by thousands—oh, shame that it should be so in a Christian land!—grow up thieves from the breast, and harlots from the cradle.  And why?  Why are there, as they say, and I am afraid say too truly, in London alone upwards of 10,000 children under sixteen who live by theft and harlotry?  Because the parents of these children are as bad as themselves—drunkards, thieves, and worse—and they bring up their children to follow their crimes.  If that is not the fathers’ sins being visited on the children, what is?

How often, again, when we see a wild young man, we say, and justly: “Poor fellow! there are great excuses for him, he has been so badly brought up.”  True, but his wildness will ruin him all the same, whether it be his father’s fault or his own that he became wild.  If he drinks he will ruin his health; if he squanders his money he will grow poor.  God’s laws cannot stop for him; he is breaking them, and they will avenge themselves on him.  You see the same thing everywhere.  A man fools away his money, and his innocent children suffer for it.  A man ruins his health by debauchery, or a woman hers by laziness or vanity or self-indulgence, and her children grow up weakly and inherit their parents’ unhealthiness.  How often again, do we see passionate parents have passionate children, stupid parents stupid children, mean and lying parents mean and lying children; above all, ignorant and dirty parents have ignorant and dirty children.  How can they help being so?  They cannot keep themselves clean by instinct; they cannot learn without being taught: and so they suffer for their parents’ faults.  But what is all this except God’s visiting the sins of the fathers upon the children?  Look again at a whole parish; how far the neglect or the wickedness of one man may make a whole estate miserable.  There is one parish in this very union, and the curse of the whole union it is, which will show us that fearfully enough.  See, too, how often when a good and generous young man comes into his estate, he finds it so crippled with debts and mortgages by his forefathers’ extravagance, that he cannot do the good he would to his tenants, he cannot fulfil his duty as landlord where God has placed him, and so he and the whole estate must suffer for the follies of generations past.  If that is not God visiting the sins of the fathers on the children, what is it?

Look again at a whole nation; the rulers of two countries quarrel, or pretend to quarrel, and go to war—and some here know what war is—just because there is some old grudge of a hundred years standing between two countries, or because rulers of whose names the country people, perhaps, never heard, have chosen to fall out, or because their forefathers by cowardice, or laziness, or division, or some other sin, have made the country too weak to defend itself; and for that poor people’s property is destroyed, and little infants butchered, and innocent women suffer unspeakable shame.  If that is not God visiting the sins of the fathers on the children, what is it?

It is very awful, but so it is.  It is the law of this earth, the law of human kind, that the innocent often suffer for other’s faults, just as you see them doing in cholera, fever, ague, smallpox, and other diseases which man can prevent if he chooses to take the trouble.  There it is.  We cannot alter it.  Those who will may call God unjust for it.  Let them first see, whether He is not only most just, but most merciful in making the world so, and no other way.  I do not merely mean that whatever God does must be right.  That is true, but it is a poor way of getting over the difficulty.  God has taught us what is right and wrong, and He will be judged by His own rules.  As Abraham said to Him when Sodom was to be destroyed: “That be far from Thee, to punish the righteous with the wicked.  Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?”  Abraham knew what was right, and he expected God not to break that law of right.  And we may expect the same of God.  And I may be able, I hope, in my sermon next Sunday, to show you that in this matter God does break the law of right.  Nevertheless, in the meantime, this is His way of dealing with men.  When Sodom was destroyed He brought righteous Lot out of it.  But Sodom was destroyed, and in it many a little infant who had never known sin.  And just so when Lisbon was swallowed up by an earthquake, ninety years ago, the little children perished as well as the grown people—just as in the Irish famine fever last year, many a doctor and Roman Catholic priest, and Protestant clergyman, caught the fever and died while they were piously attending on the sick.  They were acting like righteous men doing their duty at their posts; but God’s laws could not turn aside for them.  Improvidence, and misrule, which had been working and growing for hundreds of years, had at last brought the famine fever, and even the righteous must perish by it.  They had their sins, no doubt, as we all have; but then they were doing God’s work bravely and honestly enough, yet the fever could not spare them any more than it could spare the children of the filthy parents, though they had not kept pigsties under their windows, nor cesspools at their doors.  It could not spare them any more than it can spare the tenants of the negligent or covetous house-owner, because it is his fault and not theirs that his houses are undrained, overcrowded, destitute—as whole streets in many large towns are—of the commonest decencies of life.  It may be the landlord’s fault, but the tenants suffer.  God visits the sins of the fathers upon the children, and landlords ought to be fathers to their tenants, and must become fathers to them some day, and that soon, unless they intend that the Lord should visit on them all their sins, and their forefathers’ also, even unto the third and fourth generation.

For do not fancy that because the innocent suffer with the guilty that therefore the guilty escape.  Seldom do they escape in this world, and in the world to come never.  The landlord who, as too many do, neglects his cottages till they become man-sties, to breed pauperism and disease—the parents whose carelessness and dirt poison their children and neighbours into typhus and cholera—their brother’s blood will cry against them out of the ground.  It will be required at their hands sooner or later, by Him who beholds iniquity and wrong, and who will not be satisfied in the day of His vengeance by Cain’s old answer, “Am I my brother’s keeper?”

We are every one of us our brother’s keeper; and if we do not choose to confess that, God will prove it to us in a way that we cannot mistake.  A wise man tells a story of a poor Irish widow who came to Liverpool and no one would take her in or have mercy on her, till, from starvation and bad lodging, as the doctor said, she caught typhus fever, and not only died herself, but gave the infection to the whole street, and seventeen persons died of it.  “See,” says the wise man, “the poor Irish widow was the Liverpool people’s sister after all.  She was of the same flesh and blood as they.  The fever that killed her killed them, but they would not confess that they were her brothers.  They shut their doors upon her, and so there was no way left for her to prove her relationship, but by killing seventeen of them with fever.”  A grim jest that, but a true one, like Elijah’s jest to the Baal priests on Carmel.  A true one, I say, and one that we have all need to lay to heart.

And I do earnestly trust in you that you will lay it to heart.  We have had our fair warning here.  We have had God’s judgment about our cleanliness; His plain spoken opinion about the sanitary state of this parish.  We deserve the fever, I am afraid; not a house in which it has appeared but has had some glaring neglect of common cleanliness about it; and if we do not take the warning God will surely some day repeat it.  It will repeat itself by the necessary laws of nature; and we shall have the fever among us again, just as the cholera has reappeared in the very towns, and the very streets, where it was seventeen years ago, wherever they have not repented of and amended their filth and negligence.  And I say openly, that those who have escaped this time may not escape next.  God has made examples, and by no means always of the worst cottages.  God’s plan is to take one and leave another by way of warning.  “It is expedient that one man should die for the people, and that the whole nation perish not” is a great and a sound law, and we must profit by it.  So let not those who have escaped the fever fancy that they must needs be without fault.  “Think ye that those sixteen on whom the tower of Siloam fell and slew them, were sinners above all those that dwelt at Jerusalem?  I say unto you, Nay, but except ye repent, ye shall all likewise perish.”

And I say again, as I said last Sunday, that this is a spiritual question, a Gospel sermon; for by your conduct in this matter will your faith in the Gospel be proved.  If you really believe that Jesus Christ came down from heaven and sacrificed Himself for you, you will be ready to sacrifice yourselves in this matter for those for whom He died; to sacrifice, without stint, your thought, your time, your money, and your labour.  If you really believe that He is the sworn enemy of all misery and disease, you will show yourselves too the sworn enemies of everything that causes misery and disease, and work together like men to put all pestilential filth and damp out of this parish.  If you really believe that you are all brothers, equal in the sight of God and Christ, you will do all you can to save your brothers from sickness and the miseries which follow it.  If you really believe that your children are God’s children, that at baptism God declares your little ones to be His, you will be ready to take any care or trouble, however new or strange it may seem, to keep your children safe from all foul smells, foul food, foul water, and foul air, that they may grow up healthy, hearty, and cleanly, fit to serve God as christened, free, and civilised Englishmen should in this great and awful time, the most wonderful time that the earth has ever seen, into which it has pleased God of His great mercy to let us all be born.

XV.

THIRD SERMON ON THE CHOLERA

I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the Fathers upon the children, unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me.—Exodus xx. 6.

Many of you were perhaps surprised and puzzled by my saying in my last sermon that God’s visiting the sins of the fathers on the children, and letting the innocent suffer for the guilty, was a blessing and not a curse—a sign of man’s honour and redemption, not of his shame and ruin.  But the more I have thought of those words, the more glad I am that I spoke them boldly, the more true I find them to be.

I say that there is in them the very deepest and surest ground for hope.  “Yes,” some of you may say, “to be sure when we see the innocent suffering for the guilty, it is a plain proof that another world must come some day, in which all that unfairness shall be set right.”  Well, my friends, it does prove that, but I should be very sorry if it did not prove a great deal more than that—this suffering of the innocent for the guilty.  I have no heart to talk to you about the next life, unless I can give you some comfort, some reason for trusting in God in this life.  I never saw much good come of it.  I never found it do my own soul any good, to be told: “This life and this world in which you now live are given up irremediably to misrule and deceit, poverty and pestilence, death and the devil.  You cannot expect to set this world right—you must look to the next world.  Everything will be set right there.”  That sounds fine and resigned; and there seems to be a great deal of trust in God in it; but, as I think, there is little or none; and I say so from the fruits I see it bear.  If people believe that this world is the devil’s world, and only the next world God’s, they are easily tempted to say: “Very well, then, we must serve the devil in this world, and God in the next.  We must, of course, take great care to get our souls saved when we die, that we may go to heaven and live for ever and ever; but as to this world and this life, why, we must follow the ways of the world.  It is not our fault that they have nothing to do with God.  It is not our fault that society and the world are all rotten and accursed; we found them so when we were born, and we must make the best of a bad matter and sail as the world does, and be covetous and mean and anxious—how can we help it?—and stand on our own rights, and take care of number one; and even do what is not quite right now and then—for how can we help it?—or how else shall we get on in this poor lost, fallen, sinful world!”

And so it comes, my friends, that you see people professing—ay, and believing, Gospel doctrines, and struggling and reading, and, as they fancy, praying, morning, noon, and night, to get their own souls saved—who yet, if you are to judge by their conduct, are little better than rogues and heathens; whose only law of life seems to be the fear of what people will say of them; who, like Balaam the son of Bosor, are trying daily to serve the devil without God finding it out, worshipping the evil spirit, as that evil spirit wanted our blessed Lord to do, because they believed his lie, which Christ denied—that the glory of this world belongs to the evil one; and then comforting themselves like Balaam their father, in the hope that they shall die the death of the righteous, and their last end be like his.

Now I say my friends that this is a lie, and comes from the father of lies, who tempts every man, as he tempted our Lord, to believe that the power and glory of this world are his, that man’s flesh and body, if not his soul, belongs to him.  I say, it is no such thing.  The world is God’s world.  Man is God’s creature, made in God’s image, and not in that of a beast or a devil.  The kingdom, the power, and the glory, are God’s now.  You say so every day in the Lord’s Prayer—believe it.  St. James tells you not to curse men, because they are made in the likeness of God now—not will be made in God’s likeness after they die.  Believe that; do not be afraid of it, strange as it may seem to understand.  It is in the Bible, and you profess to believe that what is in the Bible is true.  And I say that this suffering of the innocent for the guilty is a proof of that.  If man was not made so that the innocent could suffer for the guilty, he could not have been redeemed at all, for there would have been no use or meaning in Christ’s dying for us, the just for the unjust.  And more, if the innocent could not suffer for the guilty we should be like the beasts that perish.

Now, why?  Because just in proportion as any creature is low—I mean in the scale of life—just in that proportion it does without its fellow-creatures, it lives by itself and cares for no other of its kind.  A vegetable is a meaner thing than an animal, and one great sign of its being meaner is, that vegetables cannot do each other any good—cannot help each other—cannot even hurt each other, except in a mere mechanical way, by overgrowing each other or robbing each other’s roots; but what would it matter to a tree if all the other trees in the world were to die?  So with wild animals.  What matters it to a bird or a beast, whether other birds and beasts are ill off or well off, wise or stupid?  Each one takes care of itself—each one shifts for itself.  But you will say “Bees help each other and depend upon each other for life and death.”  True, and for that very reason we look upon bees as being more wise and more wonderful than almost any animals, just because they are so much like us human beings in depending on each other.  You will say again, that among dogs, a riotous hound will lead a whole pack wrong—a staunch and well-broken hound will keep a whole pack right; and that dogs do depend upon each other in very wonderful ways.  Most true, but that only proves more completely what I want to get at.  It is the tame dog, which man has taken and broken in, and made to partake more or less of man’s wisdom and cunning, who depends on his fellow-dogs.  The wild dogs in foreign countries, on the other hand, are just as selfish, living every one for himself, as so many foxes might be.  And you find this same rule holding as you rise.  The more a man is like a wild animal, the more of a savage he is, so much more he depends on himself, and not on others—in short, the less civilised he is; for civilised means being a citizen, and learning to live in cities, and to help and depend upon each other.  And our common English word “civil” comes from the same root.  A man is “civil” who feels that he depends upon his neighbours, and his neighbours on him; that they are his fellow-citizens, and that he owes them a duty and a friendship.  And, therefore, a man is truly and sincerely civil, just in proportion as he is civilised; in proportion as he is a good citizen, a good Christian—in one word, a good man.

Ay, that is what I want to come to, my friends—that word man, and what it means.  The law of man’s life, the constitution and order on which, and on no other, God has made man, is this—to depend upon his fellow-men, to be their brothers, in flesh and in spirit; for we are brothers to each other.  God made of one blood all nations to dwell on the face of the earth.  The same food will feed us all alike.  The same cholera will kill us all alike.  And we can give the cholera to each other; we can give each other the infection, not merely by our touch and breath, for diseased beasts can do that, but by housing our families and our tenants badly, feeding them badly, draining the land around them badly.  This is the secret of the innocent suffering for the guilty, in pestilences, and famines, and disorders, which are handed down from father to child, that we are all of the same blood.  This is the reason why Adam’s sin infected our whole race.  Adam died, and through him all his children have received a certain property of sinfulness and of dying, just as one bee transmits to all his children and future generations the property of making honey, or a lion transmits to all its future generations the property of being a beast of prey.  For by sinning and cutting himself off from God Adam gave way to the lower part of him, his flesh, his animal nature, and therefore he died as other animals do.  And we his children, who all of us give way to our flesh, to our animal nature, every hour, alas! we die too.  And in proportion as we give way to our animal natures we are liable to die; and the less we give way to our animal natures, the less we are liable to die.  We have all sinned; we have all become fleshly animal creatures more or less; and therefore we must all die sooner or later.  But in proportion as we become Christians, in proportion as we become civilised, in short, in proportion as we become true men, and conquer and keep in order this flesh of ours, and this earth around us, by the teaching of God’s spirit, as we were meant to do, just so far will length of life increase and population increase.  For while people are savages, that is, while they give themselves up utterly to their own fleshly lusts, and become mere animals like the wild Indians, they cannot increase in number.  They are exposed, by their own lusts and ignorance and laziness, to every sort of disease; they turn themselves into beasts of prey, and are continually fighting and destroying each other, so that they, seldom or never increase in numbers, and by war, drunkenness, smallpox, fevers, and other diseases too horrible to mention, the fruit of their own lusts, whole tribes of them are swept utterly off the face of the earth.  And why?  They are like the beasts, and like the beasts they perish.  Whereas, just in proportion as any nation lives according to the spirit and not according to the flesh; in proportion as it conquers its own fleshly appetites which tempt it to mere laziness, pleasure, and ignorance, and lives according to the spirit in industry, cleanliness, chaste marriage, and knowledge, earthly and heavenly, the length of life and the number of the population begin to increase at once, just as they are doing, thank God! in England now; because Englishmen are learning more and more that this earth is God’s earth, and that He works it by righteous and infallible laws, and has put them on it to till it and subdue it; that civilisation and industry are the cause of Christ and of God; and that without them His kingdom will not come, neither will His will be done on earth.

But now comes a very important question.  The beasts are none the worse for giving way to their flesh and being mere animals.  They increase and multiply and are happy enough; whereas men, if they give way to their flesh and become animals, become fewer and weaker, and stupider, and viler, and more miserable, generation after generation.  Why?  Because the animals are meant to be animals, and men are not.  Men are meant to be men, and conquer their animal nature by the strength which God gives to their spirits.  And as long as they do not do so; as long as they remain savage, sottish, ignorant, they are living in a lie, in a diseased wrong state, just as God did not mean them to live; and therefore they perish; therefore these fevers, and agues, and choleras, war, starvation, tyranny, and all the ills which flesh is heir to, crush them down.  Therefore they are at the mercy of the earth beneath their feet, and the skies above their head; at the mercy of rain and cold; at the mercy of each other’s selfishness, laziness, stupidity, cruelty; in short, at the mercy of the brute material earth, and their own fleshly lusts and the fleshly lusts of others, because they love to walk after the flesh and not after the spirit—because they like the likeness of the old Adam who is of the earth earthy, better than that of the new Adam who is the Lord from heaven—because they like to be animals, when Christ has made them in his own image, and redeemed them with His own blood, and taught them with His own example, and made them men.  He who will be a man, let him believe that he is redeemed by Christ, and must be like Christ in everything he says and does.  If he would carry that out, if he would live perfectly by faith in God, if he would do God’s will utterly and in all things he would soon find that those glorious old words still stood true: “Thou shalt not be afraid of the arrow by night, nor of the pestilence which walketh in the noonday; a thousand shall fall at thy side, and ten thousand at thy right hand, but it shall not come nigh thee.”  For such a man would know how to defend himself against evil; God would teach him not only to defend himself, but to defend those around him.  He would be like his Lord and Master, a fountain of wisdom and healing and safety to all his neighbours.  We might any one of us be that.  It is everyone’s fault more or less that he is not.  Each of us who is educated, civilised, converted to the knowledge and love of God, it is his sin and shame that he is not that.  Above all, it is the clergyman’s sin and shame that he is not.  Ay, believe me, when I blame you, I blame myself ten thousand times more.  I believe there is many a sin and sorrow from which I might have saved you here, if I had dealt with you more as a man should deal who believes that you and I are brothers, made in the same image of God, redeemed by the same blood of Christ.  And I believe that I shall be punished for every neglect of you for which I have been ever guilty.  I believe it, and I thank God for it; for I do not see how a clergyman, or anyone else, can learn his duty, except by God’s judging him, and punishing him, and setting his sins before his face.

Yes, my friends, it is good for us to be afflicted, good for us to suffer anything that will teach us this great truth, that we are our brother’s keepers; that we are all one family, and that where one of the members suffers, all the other members suffer with it; and that if one of the members has cause to rejoice, all the others will have cause to rejoice with it.  A blessed thing to know, is that—though whether we know it or not, we shall find it true.  If we give way to our animal nature, and try to live as the beasts do, each one caring for his own selfish pleasure—still we shall find out that we cannot do it.  We shall find out, as those Liverpool people did with the Irish widow, that our fellow-men are our brothers—that what hurts them will be sure in some strange indirect way to hurt us.  Our brothers here have had the fever, and we have escaped; but we have felt the fruits of it, in our purses—in fear, and anxiety, and distress, and trouble—we have found out that they could not have the fever without our suffering for it, more or less.  You see we are one family, we men and women; and our relationship will assert itself in spite of our forgetfulness and our selfishness.  How much better to claim our brotherhood with each other, and to act upon it—to live as brothers indeed.  That would be to make it a blessing, and not a curse; for as I said before, just because it is in our power to injure each other, therefore it is in our power to help each other.  God has bound us together for good and for evil, for better for worse.  Oh! let it be henceforward in this parish for better, and not for worse.  Oh! every one of you, whether you be rich or poor, farmer or labourer, man or woman, do not be ashamed to own yourselves to be brothers and sisters, members of one family, which as it all fell together in the old Adam, so it has all risen together in the new Adam, Jesus Christ.  There is no respect of persons with God.  We are all equal in His sight.  He knows no difference among men, except the difference which God’s Spirit gives, in proportion as a man listens to the teaching of that Spirit—rank in godliness and true manhood.  Oh! believe that—believe that because you owe an infinite debt to Christ and to God—His Father and your Father—therefore you owe an infinite debt to your neighbours, members of Christ and children of God just as you are—a debt of love, help, care, which you can, pay, just because you are members of one family; for because you are members of one family, for that very reason every good deed you do for a neighbour does not stop with that neighbour, but goes on breeding and spreading, and growing and growing, for aught we know, for ever.  Just as each selfish act we do, each bitter word we speak, each foul example we set, may go on spreading from mouth to mouth, from heart to heart, from parent to child, till we may injure generations yet unborn; so each noble and self-sacrificing deed we do, each wise and loving word we speak, each example we set of industry and courage, of faith in God and care for men, may and will spread on from heart to heart, and mouth to mouth, and teach others to do and be the like; till people miles away, who never heard of our names, may have cause to bless us for ever and ever.  This is one and only one of the glorious fruits of our being one family.  This is one and only one of the reasons which make me say that it was a good thing mankind was so made that the innocent suffer for the guilty.  For just as the innocent are injured by the guilty in this world, even so are the guilty preserved, and converted, and brought back again by the innocent.  Just as the sins of the fathers are visited on the children, so is the righteousness of the fathers a blessing to the children; else, says St. Paul, our children would be unclean, but now they are holy.  For the promises of God are not only to us, but to our children, even to as many as the Lord our God shall call.  And thus each generation, by growing in virtue and wisdom and the knowledge of God, will help forward all the generations which follow it to fuller light and peace and safety; and each parent in trying to live like a Christian man himself, will make it easier for his children to live like Christians after him.  And this rule applies even in the things which we are too apt to fancy unimportant—every house kept really clean, every family brought up in habits of neatness and order, every acre of foul land drained, every new improvement in agriculture and manufactures or medicine, is a clear gain to all mankind, a good example set which is sure sooner or later to find followers, perhaps among generations yet unborn, and in countries of which we never heard the name.

Was I not right then in saying that this earth is not the devil’s earth at all, but a right good earth, of God’s making and ruling, wherein no good deed will perish fruitless, but every man’s works will follow him—a right good earth, governed by a righteous Father, who, as the psalm says “is merciful,” just “because He rewards every man according to his work.”

XVI.

ON THE DAY OF THANKSGIVING

(Nov. 15th, 1849.)

God hath visited his people.—Luke vii. 16.

We are assembled this day to thank God solemnly for the passing away of the cholera from England; and we must surely not forget to thank Him at the same time for the passing away of the fever, which has caused so much expense, sorrow, and death among us.  Now I wish to say a very few words to you on this same matter, to show you not only how to be thankful to God, but what to be thankful for.  You may say: It is easy enough for us to know what to thank God for in this case.  We come to thank Him, as we have just said in the public prayers, for having withdrawn this heavy visitation from us.  If so, my friends, what we shall thank Him for depends on what we mean by talking of a visitation from God.

Now I do not know what people may think in this parish, but I suspect that very many all over England do not know what to thank God for just now; and are altogether thanking him for the wrong thing—for a thing which, very happily for them, He has not done for them, and which, if He had done it for them, would have been worse for them than all the evil which ever happened to them from their youth up until now.  To be plain then, many, I am afraid, are thanking God for having gone away and left them.  While the cholera was here, they said that God was visiting them; and now that the cholera is over, they consider that God’s visit is over too, and are joyful and light of heart thereat.  If God’s visit is over, my friends, and He is gone away from us; if He is not just as near us now as He was in the height of the cholera, the best thing we can do is to turn to Him with fasting, and weeping, and mourning, and roll ourselves in the dust, and instead of thanking our Father for going away, pray to Him, of his infinite mercy, to condescend to come back again and visit us, even though, as superstitious and ignorant men believe, God’s visiting us were sure to bring cholera, or plague, or pestilence, or famine, or some other misery.  For I read, that in His presence is life and not death—at His right hand is fulness of joy, and not tribulation and mourning and woe; but if not, it were better to be with God in everlasting agony, than to be in everlasting happiness without God.

Here is a strange confusion—people talking one moment like St. Paul himself, desiring to be with Christ and God for ever, and then in the same breath talking like the Gadarenes of old, when, after Christ had visited them, and judged their sins by driving their unlawful herd of swine into the sea, they answered by beseeching Him to depart out of their coasts.

Why is this confusion?—Because people do not take the trouble to read their Bibles; because they bring their own loose, careless, cant notions with them when they open their Bibles, and settle beforehand what the Bible is to tell them, and then pick and twist texts till they make them mean just what they like and no more.  There is no folly, or filth, or tyranny, or blasphemy, which men have not defended out of the Bible by twisting it in this way.  The Bible is better written than that, my friends.  He that runs may read, if he has sense to read.  The wayfaring man, though simple, shall make no such mistake therein, if he has God’s Spirit in him—the spirit of faith, which believes that the Bible is God’s message to men—the humble spirit, which is willing to listen to that message, however strange or new it may seem to him—the earnest spirit, which reads the Bible really to know what a man shall do to be saved.  Look at your Bibles thus, my friends, about this matter.  Read all the texts which speak of God’s visiting and God’s visitation, and you will find all the confusion and strangeness vanish away.  For see!  The Bible talks of the Lord visiting people in His wrath—visiting them for their sins—visiting them with sore plagues and punishments, about forty times.  But the Bible speaks very nearly as often of God’s visiting people to bring them blessings and not punishments.  The Bible says God visited Sarah and Hannah to give them what they most desired—children.  God visited the people of Israel in Egypt to deliver them out of slavery.  In the book of Ruth we read how the Lord visited His people in giving them bread.  The Psalmist, in the captivity at Babylon, prays God to visit him with His salvation.  The prophet Jeremiah says that it was a sign of God’s anger against the Jews that He had not visited them; and the prophets promised again and again to their countrymen, how, after their seventy years’ captivity in Babylon, the Lord would visit them, and what for?—To bring them back into their own land with joy, and heap them with every blessing—peace and wealth, freedom and righteousness.  So it is in the New Testament too.  Zacharias praised God: “Blessed be the Lord God of Israel, for He hath visited and redeemed His people; through the tender mercy of our God, whereby the day-spring from on high hath visited us.”  And that was the reason why I chose Luke vii. 16, for my text—only because it is an example of the same thing.  The people, it says, praised God, saying: “A great Prophet is risen up among us, and God hath visited His people.”  And in the 14th of Acts we read how God visited the Gentiles, not to punish them, but to take out of them a people for His name, namely, Cornelius and his household.  And lastly, St. Peter tells Christian people to glorify God in the day of visitation, as I tell you now—whether His visitation comes in the shape of cholera, or fever, or agricultural distress; or whether it comes in the shape of sanitary reform, and plenty of work, and activity in commerce; whether it seems to you good or evil, glorify God for it.  Thank Him for it.  Bless Him for it.  Whether His visitation brings joy or sorrow, it surely brings a blessing with it.  Whether God visits in wrath or in love, still God visits.  God shows that He lives; God shows us that He has not forgotten us; God shows us that He is near us.  Christ shows us that His words are true: “Lo, I am with you alway, even to the end of the world.”

That is a hard lesson to learn and practise, though not a very difficult one to understand.  I will try now to make you understand it—God alone can teach you to practise it.  I pray and hope, and I believe too, that He will—that these very hard times are meant to teach people really to believe in God and Jesus Christ, and that they will teach people.  God knows we need, and thanks be to Him that He does know that we need, to be taught to believe in Him.  Nothing shows it to me more plainly than the way we talk about God’s visitations, as if God was usually away from us, and came to us only just now and then—only on extraordinary occasions.  People have gross, heathen, fleshly, materialist notions of God’s visitations, as if He was some great earthly king who now and then made a journey about his dominions from place to place, rewarding some and punishing others.  God is not in any place, my friends.  God is a Spirit.  The heaven and the heaven of heavens could not contain Him if He wanted a place to be in, as, glory be to His name, He does not.  If He is near us or far from us, it is not that He is near or far from our bodies, as the Queen might be nearer to us in London than in Scotland, which is most people’s notion of God’s nearness.  He is near, not our bodies, but our spirits, our souls, our hearts, our thoughts—as it is written, “The kingdom of God is within you.”  Do not fancy that when the cholera was in India, God was nearer India than He was to England, and that as the cholera crawled nearer and nearer, God came nearer and nearer too; and that now the cholera is gone away somewhere or other, God is gone away somewhere or other too, to leave us to our own inventions.  God forbid a thousand times!  As St. Paul says: “He is not far from any one of us.”  “In Him we live and move and have our being,” cholera or none.  Do you think Christ, the King of the earth, is gone away either—that while things go on rightly, and governments, and clergy, and people do right, Christ is there then, filling them all with His Spirit and guiding them all to their duty; but that when evil times come, and rulers are idle, and clergy dumb dogs, and the rich tyrannous, and the poor profligate, and men are crying for work and cannot get it, and every man’s hand is against his fellow, and no one knows what to do or think; and on earth is distress of nations with perplexity, men’s hearts failing them for fear, and for dread of those things which are coming on the earth—do you think that in such times as those, Christ is the least farther off from us than He was at the best of times?—The least farther off from us now than He was from the apostles at the first Whitsuntide?  God forbid!—God forbid a thousand times!  He has promised Himself, He that is faithful and true, He that will never deny Himself, though men deny Him, and say He is not here, because their eyes are blinded with love of the world, and covetousness and bigotry, and dread lest He, their Master, should come and find them beating the men-servants and maid-servants, and eating and drinking with the drunken in the high places of the earth, and saying: “Tush!  God hath forgotten it”—ay, though men have forgotten Him thus, and—worse than thus, yet He hath said it—“Lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world.”  Why, evil times are the very times of which Christ used to speak as the “days of the Lord,” and the “days of the Son of man.”  Times when we hear of wars and rumours of wars, and on earth distress of nations with perplexity—what does He tell men to do in them?  To go whining about, and say that Christ has left His Church?  No!  “Then,” He says, “when all these things come to pass, then rejoice and lift up your heads, for your redemption draweth nigh.”

And yet the Scripture does most certainly speak of the Lord’s coming out of His place to visit—of the Son of Man coming, and not coming to men—of His visiting us at one time and not at another.  How does that agree with what I have just said?  My dear friends, we shall see that it agrees perfectly with what I have said, if we will only just remember that we are not beasts, but men.  It may seem a strange thing to have to remind people of, but it is just what they are always forgetting.  My friends, we are not animals, we are not spiders to do nothing but spin, or birds only to build nests for ourselves, much less swine to do nothing but dig after roots and fruits, and get what we can out of the clods of the ground.  We are the children of the Most High God; we have immortal souls within us; nay, more, we are our souls: our bodies are our husk—our shell—our clothes—our house—changing day by day, and year by year upon us, one day to drop off us till the Resurrection.  But we are our souls, and when God visits, it is our souls He visits, not merely our bodies.  There is the whole secret.  People forget God, and therefore they are glad to fancy that He has forgotten them, and has nothing to do with this world of His which they are misusing for their own selfish ends; and then God in His mercy visits them.  He knocks at the door of their hearts, saying: “See!  I was close to you all the while.”  He forces them to see Him and to confess that He is there whether they choose or not.  God is not away from the world.  He is away from people’s hearts, because He has given people free wills, and with free wills the power of keeping Him out of their hearts or letting Him in.  And when God visits He forces Himself on our attention.  He knocks at the door of our hard hearts so loudly and sharply that He forces all to confess that He is there—all who are not utterly reprobate and spiritually dead.  In blessings as well as in curses, God knocks at our hearts.  By sudden good fortune, as well as by sudden mishap; by a great deliverance from enemies, by an abundant harvest, as well as by famine and pestilence.  Therefore this cholera has been a true visitation of God.  The poor had fancied that they might be as dirty, the rich had fancied that they might be as careless, as they chose; in short, that they might break God’s laws of cleanliness and brotherly care without His troubling Himself about the matter.  And lo! He has visited us; and shown us that He does care about the matter by taking it into His own hands with a vengeance.  He who cannot see God’s hand in the cholera must be as blind—as blind as who?—as blind as he that cannot see God’s hand when there is no cholera; as blind as he who cannot see God’s hand in every meal he eats, and every breath he draws; for that man is stone blind—he can be no blinder.  The cholera came; everyone ought to see that it did not come by blind chance, but by the will of some wise and righteous Person; for in the first place God gave us fair warning.  The cholera came from India at a steady pace.  We knew to a month when it would arrive here.  And it came, too, by no blind necessity, as if it was forced to take people whether it liked or not.  Just as it was in the fever here, so it was in the cholera, “One shall be taken and another left.”  It took one of a street and left another; took one person in a family and left another: it took the rich man who fancied he was safe, as well as the poor man who did not care whether he was safe or not.  The respectable man walking home to his comfortable house, passed by some untrapped drain, and then poisonous gas struck him and he died.  The rich physician who had been curing others, could not save himself from the poison of the crowded graveyard which had been allowed to remain at the back of his house.  By all sorts of strange and unfathomable judgments the cholera showed itself to be working, not by a blind necessity, but at the will of a thinking Person, of a living God, whose ways are not as our own ways, and His paths are in the great deep.  And yet the cholera showed—and this is what I want to make you feel—that it was working at the will of the same God in whom we live and move and have our being, who sends the food we eat, the water in which we wash, the air we breathe, and who has ordained for all these things natural laws, according to which they work, and which He never breaks, nor allows us to break them.  For every case of cholera could be traced to some breaking of these laws—foul air—foul food—foul water, or careless and dirty contact with infected persons; so that by this God showed that He and not chance ruled the world, and that he was indeed the living and willing God.  He showed at the same time that He was the wise God of order and of law; and that gas and earth, wind and vapour, fulfil His word, without His having to break His laws, or visit us by moving, as people fancy, out of a Heaven where He was, down to an earth, where He was not.

But, lastly, remember what I told you before, that the cholera being a visitation means that God, by it, has been visiting our hearts, knocking loudly at them that He may awaken us, and teach us a lesson.  And be sure that in the cholera, and this our own parish fever, there is a lesson for each and every one of us if we will learn it.  To the simple poor man, first and foremost, God means by the cholera to teach the simple lesson of cleanliness; to the house-owner He means to teach that each man is his brother’s keeper, and responsible for his property not being a nest of disease; to rulers it is intended to teach the lesson that God’s laws cannot be put off to suit their laziness, cowardice, or party squabbles.  But beside that, to each person, be sure such a visitation as this brings some private lesson.  Perhaps it has taught many a widow that she has a Friend stronger and more loving than even the husband whom she has lost by the pestilence—the God of the widow and the fatherless.  Perhaps it has taught many a strong man not to trust in his strength and his youth, but in the God who gave them to him.  Perhaps it has taught many a man, too, who has expected public authorities to do everything for him, “not to put his trust in princes, nor in any child of man, for there is no help in them,” but to hear God’s advice, “Help thyself and God will help thee.”  Perhaps it has stirred up many a benevolent man to find out fresh means for rooting out the miseries of society.  Perhaps it has taught many a philosopher new deep truths about the laws of God’s world, which may enable him to enlighten and comfort ages yet unborn.  Perhaps it has awakened many a slumbering heart, and brought many a careless sinner (for the first time in his life) face to face with God and his own sins.  God’s judgments are manifold; they are meant to work in different ways on different hearts.  But oh! believe and be sure that they are meant to work upon all hearts—that they are not the punishments of a capricious tyrant, but the rod of a loving Father, who is trying to drive us home into His fold, when gentle entreaties and kind deeds have failed to allure us home.  Oh my friends! if you wish really to thank God for having preserved you from these pestilences, show your thankfulness by learning the lesson which they bring.  God’s love has spoken of each and every one of us in the cholera.  Be sure He has spoken so harshly only because a gentler tone of voice would have had no effect upon us.  Thank Him for His severity.  Thank Him for the cholera, the fever.  Thank Him for anything which will awaken us to hear the Word of the Lord.  But till you have learnt the lessons which these visitations are meant to teach you, there is no use thanking Him for taking them away.  And therefore I beseech you solemnly, each and all, before you leave this church, now to pray to God to show you what lesson He means to teach you by this past awful visitation, and also by sparing you and me who are here present, not merely from cholera and fever, but from a thousand mishaps and evils, which we have deserved, and from which only His goodness has kept us.  Oh may God stir up your hearts to ask advice of Him this day! and may He in His great mercy so teach us all His will on this day of joy, that we may not need to have it taught us hereafter on some day of sorrow.

XVII.

THE COVENANT

The Lord hath chosen Jacob unto himself, and Israel for his own possession.  For I know that the Lord is great, and that our Lord is above all gods.  Whatsoever the Lord pleased, that did he in heaven and earth, and in the sea, and in all deep places.—Psalm cxxxv. 4, 5, 6.

Were you ever puzzled to find out why the Psalms are read every Sunday in Church, more read, indeed, than any other part of the Bible?  If any of you say, No, I shall not think you the wiser.  It is very easy not to be puzzled with a deep matter, if one never thinks about it at all.  But when a man sets his mind to work seriously, to try to understand what he hears and sees around him, then he will be puzzled, and no shame to him; for he will find things every day of his life which will require years of thought to understand, ay, things which, though we see and know that they are true, and can use and profit by them, we can never understand at all, at least in this life.