Amos 3:6 Shall a trumpet be blown in the city, and the people not be afraid? shall there be evil in a city, and the LORD has not done it? There is no doubt that in all ages there has been as much evil done, and as much good prevented, during epidemics, by certain theological theories on what are rightly called God's judgments, as there has been good done and evil overcome by the self-denying devotion of those who hold these theories. In fact, the good they do is less than the evil. Devotion to the sick relieves a few individuals; a superstitious idea leads astray all the souls of a nation for centuries, and retards the salutary work of science. It is very hard on scientific men that their conscientious obstructors in every age have been those religious men who, from want of faith in a God of order and truth, and from blind cleaving to blind opinions, have opposed instead of assisting those whose objects were the welfare of the race through the discovery of truth. It is almost too strange to think that the spirit of the inquisitors who condemned Galileo has not yet died out. CHOLERA AS A JUDGMENT. The home of this dreadful disease is in India. But we have no real knowledge of how it originates, of the cause of its curious periodicity, of the means whereby it is propagated. Nor have we any knowledge how to cure it. The disease is singularly capricious. Put yourself back into old Athenian times, what would be the result of such a new phenomenon, which they could refer to no law? It could not be the work of any of their common gods. At once they leaped to the conclusion that it was the doing of some unknown god, whom, in soma way or other, they had offended. Hence they strove to propitiate him by sacrifice and prayer. The story goes that, at least once, they let loose some sheep from the Areopagus, and wherever the wandering animals lay down, built an altar to the unknown deity, and sacrificed them to appease his wrath. One thing they did not do. They did not try to investigate the causes of the disease; they did not collect facts about it. They assumed it was supernatural, instead of assuming it was natural. We, who know God as the Unalterable, the Uncapricious, whose unchangeable love constitutes unchangeable law, we do not impute this plague, of which we know nothing, and the strangeness of which seems to separate it from other diseases, to a caprice on the part of God which He will remove on our imploring Him to let us off. Yet a part of our religious world is guilty, with regard to the cholera, of grosser superstition than the Athenians. We talk, and pray, and teach, as if it had no natural cause, obeyed no natural laws. We call it, theologically, not religiously, a judgment of God, and we use the term with a supernatural meaning attached to it. What are the results of this superstition? According to this theory, the cholera is supernatural. "Nothing will stop it but prayer." So all energy is diminished, all effort against the evil is crushed. Fortunately, though the supernatural theory is taught, it is not generally acted upon. It is good for exciting fear. for hiding from men's eyes the real evils which the cholera points out to us as deserving of God's anger. It is good for nothing else. It creates a miserable fear and terror. God is regarded as a foe who is to be bought off, or coaxed by prayer, to give up His wrath. Is there no truth then in the phrase, "a judgment of God"? Yes, plenty of truth. These things — famine, pestilence, revolution. war — are judgments of the Ruler of the world. A Ruler who rules in an orderly manner. Each judgment is connected with its proper cause, and is the result of a violation of a particular law, or set of laws. God says, Find out My laws, and accord with them your action, and My judgment will become to you not punishment but blessing. Sometimes the scientific man, enamoured of his laws and his results, says so-called judgments are nothing but natural laws working out their results. The Christian believes judgment to be much more. These natural laws, these series of causes and effects are ordered by a Divine intelligence and a moral will. Their violation is a transgression, but the moment man becomes aware that evil follows on their violation, it is not only a transgression but a sin. Moral guilt attends the nation which refuses to take measures for the extinguishing of disease. We find ourselves not only in the presence of mere law, we are brought into the presence of God. These judgments are God's judgments. He is displaying His justice in punishment, but the very punishment itself is a proof of His love. For the disease does not only punish evils, it points them out, it discloses to us the evils we were ignorant of, in order that we may remedy them. This is God's love in judgment. Apply these principles to the cholera. The conditions in which it develops itself are national sins. It laid its finger on the disgrace of England, the canker which eats into the heart of a nation — the neglected state of the poor. Again, it has been proved that want of a continual supply of pure water is the fruitful cause, not only of cholera, but of half the diseases that decimate the poor. Cholera can be diminished, as smallpox has been, by destroying the conditions when it becomes deadly to life. In Cheshire, years ago, some new plants, quite unknown beforehand in the country, sprang up beside the canals by Which the salt was carried and in the pools around the salt works. At last some one recognised the plants as those which haunt the ledges of the rocks just above the flow of the tide, but within the wash of the spray. The germs of the plants had been carried inland, by wind or bird, for years, but the conditions under which they could grow had only recently arisen. So with cholera. The poison-germ may be in the air, but everything depends on conditions of development, and these, in measure, are in our control. (S. A. Brooke, M. A.) Parallel Verses KJV: Shall a trumpet be blown in the city, and the people not be afraid? shall there be evil in a city, and the LORD hath not done it? |
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