Part 5 (1/2)

XIII--FIRST SERMON ON THE CHOLERA

(Sunday Morning, September 27th, 1849.)

G.o.d's judgments are from above, out of the sight of the wicked.-- PSALM X. 5.

We have just been praying to G.o.d to remove from us the cholera, which we call a judgment of G.o.d, a chastis.e.m.e.nt; and G.o.d knows we have need enough to do so. But we can hardly expect G.o.d to withdraw His chastis.e.m.e.nt 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 G.o.d, in a general way, that we believe He is punis.h.i.+ng 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 G.o.d is punis.h.i.+ng 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 G.o.d, ”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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d; 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 G.o.d 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 superst.i.tious 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 G.o.d'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 G.o.d's will, it is a very pleasant thing to talk about G.o.d'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 G.o.d'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 G.o.d's will, even when they DO look for it, and then they go and cant about G.o.d'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, G.o.d's judgment? Do you merely mean that G.o.d is punis.h.i.+ng 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 G.o.d is a G.o.d of justice, much less a G.o.d 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d at all, they only believe about Him--they believe that they ought to believe in Him. They have no living personal faith in G.o.d or Christ; they do not know G.o.d; they do not know G.o.d'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 G.o.d. Therefore G.o.d's judgments are far away out of their sight; therefore they make themselves a G.o.d in their own image and after their own likeness, lazy, capricious, revengeful; therefore they are not afraid or ashamed to say that G.o.d sends pestilence into a country without showing that country why it is sent. But another great reason, I believe, why G.o.d'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 G.o.d did not understand English, because they cling superst.i.tiously 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 G.o.d'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, p.r.o.nounced and inflicted afterwards. His judgment, I say, is his OPINION about the person's guilt, and even so G.o.d's judgments are the expression of His opinion about our guilt. But there is this difference between man and G.o.d in this matter--a human judge gives his opinion in words, G.o.d 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 rest.i.tution, or work out the price of what he stole in hard labour. For this is G.o.d's plan--G.o.d 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. G.o.d 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 G.o.d and His laws, we shall find it true even in our smallest private sorrows. G.o.d is unchangeable; He does not lose His temper, as heathens and superst.i.tious 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 G.o.d's judgment, G.o.d'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 G.o.d has appointed for nations.

They have lost courage and prudence, and trust in G.o.d, 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 G.o.d's judgment, G.o.d'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 G.o.d'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 G.o.d has appointed for nations, and its ruin is G.o.d's judgment, G.o.d'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 G.o.d'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 const.i.tution which G.o.d has made for this world we live in, and which if we break them, though G.o.d 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 G.o.d's judgment, G.o.d's opinion, G.o.d'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 G.o.d's laws, G.o.d's laws will not break them. Oh! do not think me harsh, my friends; G.o.d knows it is no pleasant thing to have to speak bitter and upbraiding words; but when one travels about this n.o.ble land of England, and sees what a blessed place it might be, if we would only do G.o.d's will, and what a miserable place it is just because we will not do G.o.d'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 G.o.d'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. G.o.d 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 G.o.d 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 gra.s.s on the earth, instead of being the smoky, stifling hot-beds of disease which they are now--and how from the city of G.o.d 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 G.o.dliness--when G.o.d 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 G.o.d's likeness. Then all these distresses and pestilences, which, as I have shown you, come from breaking the will of G.o.d, will have pa.s.sed 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 G.o.d'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 G.o.d's will might be done unless He had known surely that G.o.d'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 G.o.d's judgments just because they were man's own fault, because they were G.o.d'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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d'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 pa.s.sed 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 G.o.d. And yet you do lay the fault on G.o.d 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 G.o.d--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 G.o.d should be just in punis.h.i.+ng all mankind for Adam's sin, and yet unjust in punis.h.i.+ng 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 G.o.d. ”By one man sin entered the world, and death by sin, and so death pa.s.sed 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, G.o.d'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, G.o.d 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. G.o.d'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 pa.s.sionate parents have pa.s.sionate 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 G.o.d'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 G.o.d has placed him, and so he and the whole estate must suffer for the follies of generations past. If that is not G.o.d 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d does must be right. That is true, but it is a poor way of getting over the difficulty. G.o.d 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 G.o.d not to break that law of right. And we may expect the same of G.o.d. And I may be able, I hope, in my sermon next Sunday, to show you that in this matter G.o.d 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 G.o.d'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 G.o.d'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, dest.i.tute--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. G.o.d 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.