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ART. II.-PRELUDES OF JUDGMENT.

STRANGELY and sorely during the past year has God been smiting our land! The disasters by land and sea have of late become most appalling, so that we are made to feel as if in some peculiar way beset with perils on every side, and that to a far greater extent than have been known in other

years. Railway accidents, as they are called, have multiplied tenfold, in spite of precautions, and penalties, and warnings; and the increase of speed in journeying is proving to be a poor and perilous compensation for increase of disaster. We cannot here number up or picture the scenes which, month after month-we might almost say week after week-have been presented to us during the twelve past months. Happy families leave their quiet home at morning they speed onward in cheerful security-their destination is almost reached—when the rushing train diverges from its path, or comes into fierce shock with some other in its course; in a moment there comes the recoil, and the crash, and the wild outcry of terror, and father, mother, children, servants, lie scattered, with splintered fragments, on every side, -wounded, scorched, crushed,dying, or dead! Ah! surely God has been covering our railways with sackcloth, and writing upon this iron scroll, lamentation, and mourning, and woe.

Nor have our disasters by sea been less terrible. Nay, more so. The number of shipwrecks during the past year is almost incredible; and the amount of human life that has been swallowed up by the unsparing deep is fitted to weigh us down with the profoundest grief. And, as if to mark the special hand of God in all this, these calamities have been of every various kind. The raging fire, the rushing storm, the treacherous rock, the starting plank, the bewildering snowblast, the blinding darkness, all these have been at work by turns; and vessel after vessel has gone down, some at midnight, some at noontide, some amid the rage of the tempest, some in the still serenity of the calm, some far out at sea, in utter loneliness, beyond even the echo of the sea-bird's cry, some at the very haven's mouth, within sight and sound, nay, almost within grasp, of loving friends, stretching out their hands in vain, hearing the last cry of drowning agony, as the white wave broke over one, and another, and another; and then, watching on the shore, hour after hour, till the spent billow shall roll upon the sand the lifeless form of father, mother, brother, sister, or betrothed bride. Ah! yes;-God

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has spoken to us from the mighty waste of waters that circle our island shore, from the wave, and the foam, and the rock, and the sand. He has made wailing to come up in our ears from that very ocean which was our strength and our pride. "There is sorrow on the sea, and it cannot be quiet (Jer. xlix. 23). The sea has been our boast, our pride, the theme of our songs, as that which could never fail us, and from which there could come no tidings save those of good, no sounds save those of triumph, to our shores; and God has been making us feel how easily and how quickly he can turn our songs into weeping, our boasting into shame.*

These are not things to be lightly passed over, as if a sigh or a sentiment were all that is needful to bestow upon them ere they are forgotten. They are not merely intended to form the exciting topic of conversation at the fireside or in the market-place, nor to fill up an interesting column in a newspaper, nor to be the subject of keen discussion in the senatehouse. They are meant for other and wider ends than these. "Shall there be evil in the city, and the Lord hath not done it?" We own his hand in the pestilence and the famine, and why not in these disasters which are falling upon our land like the first drops of the world's last thunder-storm? Shall there be havoc and death upon our railways, and the Lord hath not sent it? Shall there be sorrow on the sea, and the Lord hath not raised it? Shall our shores be strewed with shipwreck, and the Lord know nothing of it? Shall the fire consume, or the rock splinter, or the wave devour the strong-ribbed, storm-proof bark, and the Lord hath not given them the command? Shall we, month after month, hear the rumour of invasion by foreign armies pass through the land, and the Lord hath not bidden it go forth? Shall the spring become as the winter to us, sweeping off our flocks from their hills, and threatening, by its snows and inclement blasts, to deny the husbandman a seed-time, and is it not the doing of the Lord? Yes, these things are not the work of chance or man's unskilfulness, or the blind laws of nature, as men call them. They are the interpositions of Jehovah's hand, the distinct and superhuman tones of his Almighty voice; and it becomes us to consider them. It is needful that we should ask what they Are they meant for other nations, but not for us?

mean.

* In 2 Chron. xx. 35, 37, we read of Jehoshaphat's ships, which had been made to go to Tarshish, being broken, simply because of his alliance with Ahaziah, king of Israel," who did very wickedly." Have our alliances with Popery nothing to do with our recent calamities? Rome, like a sunken rock, has, in many an age besides the present, wrecked both ships and empires.

Are they smooth messages of peace, fitted to allay, not to excite alarm? Are they meant only for those places, or those families, on whom they have specially fallen; or are they intended for the whole nation, as if God's angel had taken his station right over the centre of our land, and blown his trumpet in a way fitted to startle the millions of the kingdom, from the sovereign in her palace to the poor half-housed fisherman of our remotest island; or as if a second Jonah, with the awful message of "Yet forty days," had been sent to every city, and every street, and every village, and every hut throughout our farthest borders?

Let us inquire into God's meaning in those sore visitations that have fallen on the land. What are they designed for?

1. To humble us. We have been proud,-personally and nationally proud. We have been proud of our past history and our present position among the nations. We have been proud of our fame in peace and our renown in war. We have been proud of our commerce, proud of our industry, proud of our science, proud of our agriculture, proud of our army, proud of our navy. We have been proud of our land, as in truth the metropolis of the world, proud of our colonies, with all their varied stores of gold and silver, and fruits and spices, and gems. We have been proud of the myriad branches and appendages of our empire-an empire (as has been truly said, without aught of poetic exaggeration) on which the sun never sets an empire, the like of which, for extent, and wealth, and greatness, the old ages of Babylon, or Tyre, or Egypt, never saw, and the old conquerors, Sennacherib, Pharaoh, Alexander, Cæsar, never knew nor dreamt of. Of these we have been proud, as if we had been the doers of all, not giving God the glory, nor ascribing to his sovereign grace the honour which has been conferred upon us, and by which we have been lifted up above all other nations of the earth. We have looked round about us, like Nebuchadnezzar on his palace-roof, and, surveying the almost boundless grandeur of our kingdom, have said, in his spirit, "Is not this the great empire which we have builded for ourselves?" "by the strength of our hands have we done it, and by our wisdom, for we are prudent."

And now God is smiting us and wounding us. He is vexing us and cutting us short, as he did to Israel in their day of pride. He is directing his strokes against the strongholds of our power, the very objects of our pride and boasting. He does not strike at random, but selects these blows on purpose to teach us the great lesson of humility, which we

as a nation have been so unwilling to learn. He is not overwhelming us in a moment, as in the case of Sodom and Gomorrah, for "he is merciful and gracious, long-suffering, and of great kindness, and it repenteth him of the evil." He is visiting us with stripes, but not with destruction. His desire is, not that we should be crushed and swept away, but that we should be humbled before him-made ashamed of our pride and boasting. We have sung of our island as the queen of the seas, saying, with Tyrus of old, "I am a god, I sit in the seat of God, in the midst of the seas" (Ezek. xxviii. 2); and Jehovah is saying to us, as he did to that proud city of the ancient world, "Thou art a man, and not God, though thou set thine heart as the heart of God." It is time that we were humbled, when the hand of the Lord is upon us. And let each inhabitant of the isle, poor as well as rich, confess his sin in this matter, and humble himself before the Lord. Let each of us feel as if it were for our own personal sin, our own pride, our own vaunting, that God is now vexing us in his displeasure. We are but units, yet we are as much parts of the nation as our statesmen or our princes. Let us feel the share that we have in the nation's sin, and let us without delay feel the necessity of taking part in the nation's confession and abasement.

2. To bring us to a sense of dependence on Jehovah.When pride springs up, and boasting is indulged in, immediately there follows the idea of self-dependence, or independence of God. Imperceptibly and unconsciously the feeling of creaturehood is lost, and the link between the creature and the Creator, between the nation and the God of nations, begins to loosen and dissolve. Looking back to the beginning of this century, and remembering how marvellously we were exempted from the horrors in which the Continental nations were successively plunged, we have begun to imagine that we owed this immunity to our own skill, and goodness, and national superiority, forgetting the God who threw around this, his favoured island, the everlasting arms, and for his own glory's sake preserved us in the hour of peril. Looking back to 1815, when, single-handed, we fought and overthrew the conqueror of Europe, we have taken credit to ourselves for the wisdom and the prowess by which that victory was accomplished, not acknowledging Him who taught our hands to war and our fingers to fight, so that the bow of steel was broken by our arms. We have been relying upon the arm of flesh, and losing sight of the Infinite arm, on which a nation ought to rest. We have thought ourselves invincible and our

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shores impregnable, and God has, by means of the rumours of foreign invasion, made us feel how liable to assault and how defenceless we were. We have been shouting for forty years past

"Britannia needs no bulwarks,

No towers along the steep,

Her march is o'er the mountain-waves,
Her home is on the deep; "

and God has been making us feel that this has been part of our self-confidence, and that the improvements of modern warfare have laid us open to invasions such as our fathers knew not. He has arrested our march over the mountainwave, and made us know how insecure and perilous is our home upon the deep. What a rebuke to our self-dependence have been the disasters of the past year! How truly was it said,

66 They trust in navies, and their navies fail,-
God's curse can cast away ten thousand sail."

And then, in another direction, how great and loud have our vauntings been! By our agricultural improvements we have begun to think ourselves beyond the reach of famine, beyond the capricious influences of the seasons, so that we might treat a harvest as a certainty which nothing could interfere with; nay, we have imagined that, by our science and perseverance, we had succeeded in so altering the climate as well as the soil, that failure in the fruits of the field was impossible. Thus we had set ourselves aloft as rulers of the seasons, as the arbiters of a nation's commercial and agricultural destinies; and, having removed all legal restrictions on the produce of the earth, we had begun to calculate on ages of prosperity and abundance, as if the appliances of agriculture could shield us from the displeasure of a righteous God,-as if the discoveries of chemistry could eradicate the curse that blights creation,-or as if the enactments of Parliament could impart fruitfulness to the soil, or make us independent of the blessing or the judgments of the Most High.

To reprove our self-dependence, God has brought us to the very edge of a year of famine. His snows and frosts have mocked the care of the shepherd and the skill of the husbandman. A very little longer continuance of the inclemencies which covered spring with the garment of winter, and we should have been pining under the desolations of famine! But, having brought us to the edge of the rock, he drew us back from it in the meantime. He has done enough, however,

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