Good Hope, is volcanic. So is a large district stretching along the German side of the Rhine, and described from personal investigation by De Luc*. From different parts of the world examples might be accumulated almost without limit. In the materials of which such regions are composed, we read the records of sorrow and destruction; records not obliterated by the verdure, and the flowers, and the fruits, and the flocks and the herds, with which the now quiescent vaults may be overspread. Though Etna and Tomboro should rage no more, the aggregate of their former havock will be unchanged. The fields of Austerlitz and of Waterloo may be smiling with grain: but the carnage with which they were reddened is not diminished.

Earthquakes, which on some occasions are manifestly connected with volcanic fires, may originate, on others, from independent causes. From whatever source they originate, they are visitations which, though fully accordant with the condition of a world lying under the penalty

*Lettres Physiques et Morales, tom. iii. p. 501, to the end of the volume. Passim, tom. iv. 146–546. Many of the Letters are occupied by the subject.

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of transgression, would not be, we might presume, let loose upon a race of beings innocent and completely retaining the favour of their God.

Death, in its simple character, is not necessarily a proof that the beings on whom it attaches, have offended their Creator. Existence bestowed might be intended by the donor to be but temporary. And happy existence, even for a Eimited duration, would be a gratuitous gift, to be enjoyed and acknowledged with thankful. ness by percipient intelligences. Moreover, existence might be prolonged after death; and the stroke which seemed to involve the annihilasion of the individual, might be the instrument of his removal into another scene, and a more exalted modification of life. But death, sudden, widely spreading, supervening in an unknown and a horrid form, bears the aspect, not of a placid dismission from existence; not of a gra cices transplantation into another and a nobler province of the universal empire of the Almighty; but of the execution of judicial sen tence upon a race of transgressors.

disciples of our Saviour showed

posed to infer that the eighteen on whom the tower in Siloam fell, and the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices, must have been sinners above the rest of their countrymen; the feeling, though in its applica tion unauthorised and erroneous, was in its principle natural and reasonable. It did not become the disciples to institute needless and fruitless comparisons between the supposed guilt of the dead and of the living. The catastrophe which had taken place did not of necessity imply that the dead had been more sinful than their countrymen in general, or than the very disciples: but it did at least imply that the dead belonged to a race lying under the penalty of sin. If men had not forfeited by departure from holiness the primeval favour of a God of Love; the eighteen would not have been overwhelmed by the falling tower, nor would the blood of the sacrificing Galileans have flowed in a blended stream with that of the victims.

emendous destruction which ly wrought by earthquakes;

hs which have been

inations to suppose

that the thousands and the tens of thousands who have been engulphed by earthquakes were sinners, collectively or individually, above others, or above ourselves, would be impious presump. tion. But to behold in such fearful visitations evidences of the anger of God, and of the penal inflictions of His hand upon a world of transgressors; to behold in these visitations auxiliary testimony that the existing world is a world of transgressors; is natural, is consistent with reason, is a just conclusion of Natural Theology. Nay, so plainly is the conclusion rational, that in the volume of Revelation itself, and when earthquakes formed, as now, a part of the ordinary dispensations of Providence, the argument, as addressed to natural reason, is most awfully applied and illustrated in the miraculous judg ment on Korah and his associates in rebellion. "If these men die the common death of all men, or if they be visited after the visitation of all men: then the Lord hath not sent me. But if the Lord make a new thing, and the earth open her mouth and swallow them up, with all that appertain to them, and they go down quick into the pit: then ye shall understand that these

thy

men have provoked the Lord." The voice of the earthquake proclaims to the pupil of Natural Theology; "Man has provoked the Lord."

For confirmation of the antecedent reasoning, it is fitting to subjoin some examples, selected partly from ancient times, partly from more recent periods, of the havoc of human life and happiness, which in various parts of the globe has been wrought by earthquakes.

In the year 469, before Christ, a violent earthquake at Sparta destroyed more than twenty thousand Lacedæmonians; a calamity, says Diodorus, inflicted as by some angry deity exacting punishment. Forty-three years afterwards similar concussions were general in Greece; and produced marine inundations which overwhelmed various cities on the coast, and breaking through a peninsula of Locris, formed it into an island*.

Josephus mentions an earthquake of unprecedented violence in Judea, by which ten thousand persons perished under the ruins of their houses.

Diod. Sic. lib. xi. `Olymp. lxxvii. 4. Lib. xii, Olymp. lxxxviii. 3.