grow, trade flourishes, and all is well, because God does not visit the earth. Ah! blind that we are; blind to the power and glory of God which is around us, giving life and breath to all things,-God, without whom not a sparrow falls to the ground,-God, who visiteth the earth, and maketh it very plenteous,—God, who giveth to all liberally and upbraideth not,God, whose ever-creating and ever-sustaining Spirit is the source, not only of all goodness, virtue, knowledge, but of all life, health, order, fertility. We see not God's witness in his sending rain and fruitful seasons, filling our hearts with food and gladness. And then comes the punishment. Because we will not keep up a wholesome and trustful belief in God in prosperity, we are awakened out of our dream of unbelief, to an unwholesome and mistrustful belief in him in adversity. Because we will not believe in a God of love and order, we grow to believe in a God of anger and disorder. Because we will not fear a God who sends fruitful seasons, we are grown to dread a God who sends famine and pestilence. Because

we will not believe in the Father in heaven, we grow to believe in a destroyer who visits from heaven. But we believe in him only as the destroyer. We have forgotten that he is the Giver, the Creator, the Redeemer. We look on his visitations as something dark and ugly, instead of rejoicing in the thought of God's presence, as we should, if we had remembered that he was about our path and about our bed, and spying out all our ways, whether

for joy or for sorrow. thought of his presence.

We shrink at the

We look on his visi

tations as things not to be understood; not to be searched out in childlike humility-an yet in childlike confidence-that we may understand why they are sent, and what useful lesson our Father means us to learn from them but we look on them as things to be merely prayed against, if by any means God will, as soon as possible, cease to visit us, and leave us to ourselves, for we can earn our own bread comfortably enough, if it were not for his interference and visitations. We are too like the Gadarenes of old, to whom it mattered little

that the Lord had restored the madman to health and reason, if he caused their swine to perish in the lake. They were uneasy and terrified at such visitations of God incarnate. He seemed to them a terrible and dangerous being, and they besought him to depart out of their coasts.

It would have been wiser, surely, in those Gadarenes, and better for them, had they cried-'Lord, what wilt thou have us to do? We see that thou art a being of infinite power, ' for mercy, and for punishment likewise. And 'thou art the very being whom we want, to teach us our duty, and to make us do it. Tell

us what we ought to do, and help us; and, if

need be, compel us to do it, and so to prosper 'indeed.' And so should we pray in the case of this cholera. We may ask God to take it away: but we are bound to ask God also, why he has sent it. Till then we have no reason to suppose that he will take it away; we have no reason to suppose that it will be merciful in him to take it away, till he has taught us why it was sent. This question of

T

cholera has come now to a crisis, in which we must either learn why cholera comes, or incur, I hold, lasting disgrace and guilt. And -if I may dare to hint at the counsels of God -it seems as if the Almighty Lord had no mind to relieve us of that disgrace and guilt.

For months past we have been praying that this cholera should not enter England, and our prayers have not been heard. In spite of them the cholera has come; and has slain thousands, and seems likely to slay thousands more. What plainer proof can there be to those who believe in the providence of God, and the rule of Jesus Christ our Lord, than that we are meant to learn some wholesome lesson from it, which we have not learnt yet? It cannot be that God means us to learn the physical cause of cholera, for that we have known these twenty years. Foul lodging, foul food, and, above all, natural and physical, foul water; there is no doubt of the cause. But why cannot we save English people from the curse and destruction which all this foulness brings? That is the question. That is our national scandal, shame, and sin

at this moment. Perhaps the Lord wills that we should learn that; learn what is the moral and spiritual cause of our own miserable weakness, negligence, hardness of heart, which, sinning against light and knowledge, has caused the death of thousands of innocent souls. God grant that we may learn that lesson. God grant that he may put into the hearts and minds of some man or men, the wisdom and courage to deliver us from such scandals for the future.

But I have little hope that that will happen, till we get rid of our secret atheism; till we give up the notion that God only visits now and then, to disorder and destroy his own handy work, and take back the old scriptural notion, that God is visiting all day long for ever, to give order and life to his own work, to set it right whenever it goes wrong, and re-create it whenever it decays. Till then we can expect only explanations of cholera and of God's other visitations of affliction, which are so superstitious, so irrational, so little connected with the matter in hand, that they would be ridi