PASTOR OF THE AMITY STREET BAPTIST CHURCH, NEW YORK.

THE LESSONS OF CALAMITY.

"Or those eighteen, upon whom the tower of Siloam fell, and slew them, think ye that they were sinners above all men that dwelt in Jerusalem? I tell you, Nay; but, except ye repent, ye shall all likewise perish."-Luke xiii. 4, 5.

It was one of the characteristic excellences which marked the teachings of our Saviour, that he preached, in the highest and best sense of that phrase, to the times, and his ministry was thus a word in season. He addressed himself to men's present duties, and their present sins and snares; and the passing events of the day, or the scenery of the spot where he taught, furnished him with ready and apposite illustrations. The news of a cruel butchery, or a melancholy calamity; the tidings that told of the Galileans slaughtered over their sacrifices; or of the unhappy victims in Siloam, crushed by a falling tower-the news that for the time was the burden of all tongues, and made all ears to tingle, was seized by him as affording the occasion of riveting some keen truth upon the memory and conscience of the multitude. And thus it might be, and ought to be, with us. The journals of the day, too often taken up but in the gratification of an idle curiosity, that seeks ever to learn and tell some new thing, might preach to us of Providence and Eternity. We might consult them to see, in the changes they record, how God is governing his own world, with a care that never slumbers, and a wisdom that never falters. For all that occurs, from the fall of a dying sparrow to the crash of an empire overthrown, is but as He bids or permits it, who "doeth according to his will in the army of heaven, and among the inhabitants of the earth."+

An event such as that upon which our Redeemer commented, has occurred amongst ourselves. In the metropolis of our nation, the seat of our government, where so much of the intellect of the nation is congregated, and whence so wide an influence goes forth to the ends of our Jand, death has made recently its fell inroads. The shadows of the

• A Discourse, on occasion of the explosion in the U. S. ship of war, PRINCETON, near Washington, on the 28th Feb., 1844, by which the Secretary of State, and the Secretary of the Navy, with others, lost their lives. Delivered before the Amity street Baptist Church, Sabbath morning, 3d March, and before the Oliver street Baptist Church, Sabbath evening, 10th March, 1844.

† Daniel iv. 35.

VOL. XVIII.-NO. IV.

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sepulchre have fallen, as in sudden and disastrous eclipse, upon the high places of our republic. A new vessel of war, built with lavish expenditure, in which science had shown her terrible skill in inventing new engines of death of fearful potency, had become to that city the theme of general curiosity and admiration. Hundreds of guests thronged her decks. Some of them were the young, the gay, and the fashionable; others were the aged, the experienced and the influential, citizens distinguished by the station they occupied, or the talents they had displayed. Little did that stately vessel, beneath a brilliant sky, in her holiday trim, and with her exulting company, seem the fitting scene for auguries of disaster, or the intrusion of distress. Below, all was merrimeut and gaiety, whilst the laugh, the jest, and the song, were intermingled with their feastings. The spot consecrated in the hearts of this nation, as that of the abode and last resting-place of the Father of his country, was near. The memory of the mighty dead_was not forgotten by the inmates of that vessel as she floated along. But alas! death was much nearer to that rejoicing throng, than in the tomb where reposed the mortal remains of Washington. "Couched in grim repose," the destroyer had already marked fresh and nearer prey. Above, on the deck of that majestic ship, preparations are made to discharge anew the piece of ordnance already so famed for its destructive power, hut soon to obtain yet more disastrous fame. Men eminent in station, acting some of them in the cabinet of our Chief Magistrate, as his chosen advisers, and one of their number but a few days installed in his high trust, had gathered around. The discharge took place. Amid the smoke and din, shrieks were heard. When that smoke had passed away, the newly invented engine of destruction was seen itself a ruin, after having made that deck a scene of desolation and carnage. Two of the ministers of our government, the Secretary of State, and the Secretary of the Navy, with others of the distinguished visiters, lay on that blood-bespattered deck, disfigured and mutilated, either breathless or gasping their last. How startling and hideous the contrast between the scenes which but the narrow breadth of that deck then separated; the mangled, the dying and the dead, who were above it, and their nearest relatives, their daughters and their wives, who, cheerful and unconscious, were gathered in joyous groups below it, as yet utterly ignorant of the appalling reality. Those thus suddenly deprived of friends had discerned, in the shock of the discharge, no unwonted and foreboding sounds, nor did they dream of the irreparable bereavement that one brief moment had brought upon its wings of doom. Who shall paint the anguish of an attached wife, that had gone forth in the morning radiant in happiness and hope, but who was now to return at evening to a desolate home and an orphan charge, a new-made widow, meeting her fatherless babes with the cry of Naomi in her heart: "Call me Mara, for the Almighty hath dealt very bitterly with me, for I went out full, and the Lord hath brought me home again empty;"-of daughters held back by friendly violence, from the sight of a father's mangled remains-of children left in an instant fatherless,

and of friends who had gone forth to begin together a day of rejoicing, but its evening closed on the survivor mournfully bringing back his dead. The station of several of the victims, the presence of their dearest kindred, and the festive occasion that had assembled them, all heightened the horror of the scene. In the tumultuous and irrepressible distress of the hour, the mercy might perhaps be forgotten that was yet intermingled with the calamity-the guardian care that had given to the multitude endangered, so narrow an escape. For the time, dismay, amazement and horror, filled all hearts. Yet, as it is now easy to see, mercy had watched even over that scene of carnage, and lightened the weight of the infliction, or how easily might a far more sweeping desolation have occurred; and of the hundreds there embarked, but a few frenzied survivors only might have escaped the general wreck, each ready in his distraction to deem himself alone in his deliverance, and each eager to say in the language of those messengers who came with heavy tidings to the patriarch: "I only am escaped alone to tell thee."

"Hear ye the rod," cried the prophet," and who hath appointed it." Such is the command of our God, by his servant Micah, to the community thus suddenly and sorely visited. Does calamity befal us, it is not voiceless. It was no blind chance that launched the bolt. Trouble springs not out of the dust, nor is it dumb. The Scriptures give speech and articulate utterance as it were, to each such bereavement; and, as the tomb opens to receive its new tenants, a still small voice is heard issuing from its dim chambers, a voice of remonstrance and warning, of tender expostulation and compassionate entreaty. And as our text shows us, we have not only the warrant of our Saviour's example, for making such seasons the occasion of religious instruction; but we have here, in the records of the evangelist, the exact lessons which such scenes of sudden and public calamity were intended to illustrate and to enforce. May His Spirit enable us rightly to read, and honestly to apply, them.

Some of the judgments of the Divine Providence need no interpreter. Sorrow and guilt are, in the natural workings of man's conscience, and in the general estimate of mankind, closely conjoined. And there are times, as when a Nadab perishes before the altar he has desecrated, or an Uzzah is blasted beside the ark-as when the storm of fire comes down upon the cities of the plain, or the ark of Noah rides on the whelming waters past the hapless and despairing sinners who had derided his warnings-when God's judgments follow so closely man's transgressions, that he who runs may read the purport of the visitation, and see in the peculiar guilt of the sufferers, the reason of their peculiar fate. But it is not always so. Men are, in our days, as in the times of the Saviour they were, prone, on hearing of some strange and sudden calamity, to indulge themselves in rash and uncharitable judgments. They think of the sufferers as more careless or more criminal than others, and suppose them to have become thus the victims of an avenging Providence. Judging of character as the mass of mankind do, merely from the success which attends it, attributing excellence when

they see prosperity, and imputing guilt or weakness where they discover the presence of adversity, they adopt the rule on which Job's friends so tenaciously and cruelly insisted, that calamity is proof of crime; a rule that, in the use of it by those misguided patriarchs, God so signally disavowed and rebuked. It was on this same false principle that the Saviour himself was judged by his own countrymen and cotemporaries, "We," said the prophet, speaking by anticipation in the name of his people" we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted." And was he not heavily afflicted, stricken most sorely, and was it not God that smote and bruised him? It was indeed so; but not, as they supposed, for the peculiar sins of the sufferer himself. "The Man of Sorrows," on whom all griefs centered, was yet "holy, harmless, undefiled and separate from sinners." In our text, the Redeemer, as he speaks of the slaughtered Galileans, and of the falling tower, rebukes this spirit of rash judgment. He does not deny, indeed, that sin was found in Pilate's victims, and in those who died at Siloam: but he asks; "Were they sinners more than others? Were they more deserving this fate than yourselves; Except ye repent, ye shall all likewise perish." The connection which the mind of man traces, instinctively as it were, between sin and suffering, is not to be made to concentrate upon the individual, but rather to rebound back on the conscience of the race; not to rest on the head of the stranger who perishes, but rather on the heart of the survivor who witnesses it, and who, were God but strict in the immediate exaction of punishment, deserves to share the ruin which he has but beheld.

We cannot, then, misinterpret Providence, when we have thus the comments of the Lord himself, who wields the sceptre of the universe. It is the Legislator of the world, sitting to interpret his own statutes, and to expound the reasons of his own procedure. He teaches us, that the fate of one is the desert of all; that as sinners we all merit a sudden and violent end, and that except we repent, we ultimately and universally perish. These are humbling truths, it must be confessed, but they are salutary, Let us ponder them, in the order in which our Saviour's language presents them.

I. All of us are sinners.

Christ's hearers were such as well as the Galileans, the survivors as well as the sufferers, and we as well as those whose death we deplore. II. All of us are liable to sudden death.

III. Death to the impenitent sinner is destruction.

IV. Repentance is our only safeguard from eventual ruin. I. We are all sinners. "Think ye they were sinners above all men? I tell you, Nay: but except ye repent, ye shall all likewise perish."

The fact of man's sinfulness is one scarce needing to be argued. The conscience of the world and the history of the world, are here in accord with the Scriptures of the world's Maker and Judge. Our own observation and the experience of those around us, who have been most and longest conversant with Human Nature, and our complaints against our fellow men, attest the melancholy truth which Scripture ut

ters in no dubious terms. When God looked down from heaven to behold the children of men, he saw "none good, no not one." We are each, by nature, the children of wrath, even as others. We may dispute the statement as to ourselves, and a few select favorites, but we are generally prone not only to admit but to assert it of the mass of society. Our complaints of governments and whole classes of society and entire nations, show that we do not deem the multitude of mankind faultless. What page of the world's history is not blotted with tears and stained with blood-tears which man's misconduct has wrung from the eyes of suffering weakness-blood which man's violence has shed? But we need not go to men's vices to prove their sinfulness; it is proved too sufficiently by their very virtues. For what virtue save that exhibited in the one character of Christ, is perfect, symmetrical, stainless? The confessions of men, like Daniel, the man greatly beloved of heaven, under the old dispensation, and the defects of John, the beloved disciple of Christ under the new dispensation, are decisive as to the defective and imperfect character of man on the earth. And if not sinners, what need, again, had the race of a Redeemer? By the heights of glory from which the Ransomer needed to plunge when he rescued us, I may gauge the depths of debasement and guilt into which the ransomed had sunk; and the moral demerit of the first Adain may be inferred from the tremendous sacrifice, and the infinite dignity demanded in the second Adam, who came to deliver and to save him. Let us remember our sinfulness that we may know our true position before the Holy Ruler of the universe. We are not the innocent beings which He at first made us. We were formed upright, but we have "sought out many inventions," and perverse and rebellious inventions they have been. The guilt is our own, an invention of mankind. Hence it is, and not by any original perversion in our creation, that sorrov and anguish have entered our world, and become the heritage of our race. Bereavement and death are strangers, who have intruded into God's happy universe, and for whose admission into our own world, our own hands have torn a pathway. The very presence of death is evidence of sin. "Death" entered "by sin, and so death passed upon all men for that all men have sinned."* And when we view its ravages in those we love, or but read its record in the obituary or upon the gravestone, we are admonished afresh of that truth uttered beside the cross of the world's Redeemer. The lips of the dying thief then, at least, spoke truly, and what he said to an expiring companion, belongs as justly to each one of our dying race, "Thou art in the same condemnation." Afflictions and bereavements, the removal of our friends, the calamities witnessed in the high places of our land, are proofs of our common sinfulness.

But though afflictions prove our common sinfulness, they afford in this world no test as to our comparative sinfulness. The man less afflicted here on earth is not therefore more holy than his neighbor who is more

⚫ Romans v. 12.