But when God gives to a whole country a distinct and solemn warning,
especially after giving that country an enormous bounty in an
abundant harvest, He surely means that country to take the warning.
And, if I dare so judge, He means us perhaps to think of the
earthquake, and somewhat in this way.
There is hardly any country in the world in which man's labour has
been so successful as in England. Owing to our having no
earthquakes, no really destructive storms,--and, thank God, no
foreign invading armies,--the wealth of England has gone on
increasing steadily and surely for centuries past, to a degree
unexampled. We have never had to rebuild whole towns after an
earthquake. We have never seen (except in small patches) whole
districts of fertile land ruined by the sea or by floods. We have
never seen every mill and house in a country blown down by a
hurricane, and the crops mown off the ground by the mere force of the
wind, as has happened again and again in our West India Islands.
Most blessed of all, we have never seen a foreign army burning our
villages, sacking our towns, carrying off our corn and cattle, and
driving us into the woods to starve. From all these horrors, which
have, one or other of them, fallen on almost every nation upon earth,
God has of His great mercy preserved us. Ours is not the common lot
of humanity. We English do not know the sorrows which average men
and women go through, and have been going through, alas! ever since
Adam fell.
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