Chapter I: KNOW no better way of preaching to you the gospel of Easter, the good (3)

I doubt not that many here will be far more able than I am practically to apply the facts which I have been adducing to the cause of the hospital for which I am pleading. But there is one consequence of them to which I must beg leave to draw attention more particularly, especially at the present era of our nation. If, then, these discoveries of science be indeed revelations and inspirations from God, does it not follow that all classes, even the poorest and the most ignorant, the most brutal, have an equal right to enjoy the fruits of them? Does it not follow that to give to the poor their share in the blessings which chemical and medical science are working out for us, is not a matter of charity or benevolence, but of _duty_, of indefeasible, peremptory, immediate duty? For consider, my friends; the Son of God descends on earth, and takes on Him not only the form, but the very nature, affections, trials, and sorrows of a man. He proclaims Himself as the person who has been all along ruling, guiding, teaching, improving men; the light who lighteth every man who cometh into the world. He proclaims Himself by acts of wondrous power to be the internecine foe and conqueror of every form of sorrow, slavery, barbarism, weakness, sickness, death itself. He proclaims Himself as One who is come to give His life for His sheep—One who is come to restore to men the likeness in which they were originally created, the likeness of their Father in Heaven, who accepteth the person of no man—who causeth His sun to shine on the evil and on the good, who sendeth His rain on the just and on the unjust, in whose sight the meanest publican, if his only consciousness be that of his own baseness and worthlessness, is more righteous than the most learned, respectable, and self-satisfied pharisee. He proclaims Himself the setter-up of a kingdom into which the publican and the harlot will pass sooner than the rich, the mighty, and the noble; a kingdom in which all men are to be brothers, and their bond of union loyalty to One who spared not His own life for the sheep, who came not to do His own, but the will of the Father who had sent Him, and who showed by His toil among the poor, the outcast, the ignorant, and the brutal, what that same will was like. With His own life-blood He seals this Covenant between God and man. He offers up His own body as the first-fruits of this great kingdom of self-sacrifice. He takes poor fishermen and mechanics, and sends them forth to acquaint all men with the good news that God is their King, and to baptize them as subjects of that kingdom, bound to rise in baptism to a new life, a life of love, and brotherhood, and self-sacrifice, like His own. He commands them to call all nations to that sacred Feast wherein there is neither rich nor poor, but the same bread and the same wine are offered to the monarch and to the slave, as signs of their common humanity, their common redemption, their common interest—signs that they derive their life, their health, their reason, their every faculty of body, soul, and spirit, from One who walked the earth as the son of a poor carpenter, who ate and drank with publicans and sinners. He sends down His Spirit on them with gifts of language, eloquence, wisdom, and healing, as mere earnests and first-fruits; so they said, of that prophecy that He would pour out His Spirit upon all flesh, even upon slaves and handmaids. And these poor fishermen feel themselves impelled by a divine and irresistible impulse to go forth to the ends of the world, and face persecution, insult, torture, and death—not in order that they may make themselves lords over mankind, but that they may tell them that One is their Master, even Jesus Christ, both God and man—that _He_ rules the world, and will rule it, and _can_ rule it, that in His sight there is no distinction of race, or rank, or riches, neither Jew nor Greek, barbarian, Scythian, bond or free. And, as a fact, their message has prevailed and been believed; and in proportion as it has prevailed, not merely individual sanctity or piety, but liberty, law, peace, civilisation, learning, art, science, the gifts which he bought for men with His blood, have followed in its train: while the nations who have not received that message that God was their King, or having received it have forgotten it, or perverted it into a superstition and an hypocrisy, have in exactly that proportion fallen back into barbarism and bloodshed, slavery and misery. My friends, if this philosophy of history, this theory of human progress, or as I should call it, this Gospel of the Kingdom of God mean anything—does it not mean this? this which our forefathers believed, dimly and inconsistently perhaps, but still believed it, else we had not been here this day—that we are not our own, but the servants of Jesus Christ, and brothers of each other—that the very constitution and ground-law of this human species which has been redeemed by Christ, is the self-sacrifice which Christ displayed as the one perfection of humanity—that all rank, property, learning, science, are only held by their possessors in trust from that King who has distributed them to each according as He will, that each might use them for the good of all, certain—as certain as God’s promise can make man—that if by giving up our own interest for the interest of others, we seek first the kingdom of God, and the righteousness between man and man, which we call _mercy_, according to which it is constituted, all other things, health, wealth, peace, and every other blessing which humanity can desire, shall be added unto us over and above, as the natural and necessary fruits of a society founded according to the will of God, and declared in his Son Jesus Christ, and therefore according to those physical laws, whereof He is at once the Creator, the Director, and the Revealer?

This was the faith of our forefathers, both laity and clergy—that the Lord was King, be the people never so unquiet; that men were His stewards and His pupils only, and not His vicars; that they were equal in His sight, and not the slaves and tyrants of each other; and that the help that was done upon earth, He did it all Himself. Dimly, doubtless, they saw it, and inconsistently: but they saw it, and to their faith in that great truth we owe all that has made England really noble among the nations. Of the fruits of that faith every venerable building around us should remind us. To that faith in the laity, we owe the abolition of serfdom, the freedom of our institutions, the laws which provide equal justice between man and man; to that faith in the clergy, and especially in the monastic orders, we owe the endowment of our schools and universities, the improvement of agriculture, the preservation and the spread of all the liberal arts and sciences, as far as they were then discovered; so that every one of those abbeys which we now revile so ignorantly, became a centre of freedom, protection, healing, and civilisation, a refuge for the oppressed, a well-spring of mercy for the afflicted, a practical witness to the nation that property and science were not the private and absolute possession of men, but only held in trust from God for the benefit of the common weal: and just in proportion as in the 14th and 15th centuries those institutions fell from their first estate, and began to fancy that their wealth and wisdom was their own, acquired by their own cunning, to be used for their own aggrandizement, they became an imposture and imbecility, an abomination and a ruin. And it was this faith, too, in a still nobler and clearer form, which at the Reformation inspired the age which could produce a Ridley, a Latimer, an Elizabeth, a Shakspeare, a Spenser, a Raleigh, a Bacon, and a Milton; which knit together, in spite of religious feuds and social wrongs, the nation of England with a bond which all the powers of hell endeavoured in vain to break. Doubtless, there too there was inconsistency enough. Elizabeth may have mixed up ambitious dynastic dreams with her intense belief that God had given her her wisdom, her learning, her mighty will, only to be the servant of His servants and defender of the faith. Men like Drake and Raleigh, while they were believing that God had sent them forth to smite with the sword of the Lord the devourers of the earth, the destroyers of religion, freedom, civilisation, and national life, may have been unfaithful to what they believed their divine mission, and fancied that they might use their wisdom and valour that God gave them for their selfish ends, till they committed (as some say) acts of rapacity and cruelty worthy of the merest buccaneer. But _that_ was not what made them conquer—that was not what made the wealth and the might of Spain melt away before their little bands of heroes; but the same old faith, shining out in all their noblest acts and words, that “the Lord _was_ King, and that the help that was done upon earth, He did it all Himself?” So again, Bacon may have fancied, and did fancy in his old age, that he might use his deep knowledge of mankind for his own selfish ends—that he might indulge himself in building himself up a name that might fill all the earth, that he who had done so much for God and for mankind, might be allowed to do at last somewhat for himself, and tempted, by a paltry bribe, fall for awhile, as David did before him, that God, and not he, might have the glory of all his wisdom. But then he was less than himself; then he had but lost sight of his lode-star. Then he had forgotten, but only for awhile, that he owed all to the teaching of that God who had given to the young and obscure advocate the mission of affecting the destinies of nations yet unborn.

And believe me, my friends, even as it has been with our forefathers, so it will be with us. According to our faith will it be unto us, now as it was of old. In proportion as we believe that wealth, science, and civilisation are the work and property of man, in just that proportion we shall be tempted to keep them selfishly and exclusively to ourselves. The man of science will be tempted to hide his discoveries, though men may be perishing for lack of them, till he can sell them to the highest bidder; the rich man will be tempted to purchase them for himself, in order that he may increase his own comfort and luxury, and feel comparatively lazy and careless about their application to the welfare of the masses; he will be tempted to pay an exorbitant price for anything that can increase his personal convenience, and yet when the question is about improving the supply of necessaries to the poor, stand haggling about considerations of profitable investment, excuse himself from doing the duty which lies nearest to him by visions of distant profit, of which a thousand unexpected accidents may deprive him after all, and make his boasted scientific care for the wealth of the nation an excuse for leaving tens of thousands worse housed and worse fed than his own beasts of burden. The poor man will be tempted franctically to oppose his selfishness and unbelief to the selfishness and unbelief of the rich, and clutch from him by force the comfort which really belong to neither of them, in order that he may pride himself in them and misuse them in his turn; and the clergy will be tempted, as they have too often been tempted already, to fancy that reason is the enemy, and not the twin sister of faith; to oppose revelation to science, as if God’s two messages could contradict each other; to widen the Manichæan distinction between secular and spiritual matters, so pleasant to the natural atheism of fallen man; to fancy that they honour God by limiting as much as possible His teaching, His providence, His wisdom, His love, and His kingdom, and to pretend that they are defending the creeds of the Catholic Church, by denying to them any practical or real influence on the economic, political, and physical welfare of mankind. But in proportion as we hold to the old faith of our forefathers concerning science and civilisation, we shall feel it not only a duty, but a glory and a delight, to make all men sharers in them; to go out into the streets and lanes of the city and call in the maimed, and the halt, and the blind, that they may sit down and take their share of the good things which God has provided in His kingdom for those who obey Him. Every new discovery will be hailed by us as a fresh boon from God to be bestowed by the rain and the sunshine freely upon us all. The sight of every sufferer will make us ready to suspect and to examine ourselves lest we should be in some indirect way the victim of some neglect or selfishness of our own. Every disease will be a sign to us that in some respect or other, the physical or moral laws of human nature have been overlooked or broken. The existence of an unhealthy locality, the recurrence of an epidemic, will be to us a subject of public shame and self-reproach. Men of science will no longer go up and down entreating mankind in vain to make use of their discoveries; the sanitary reformer will be no longer like Wisdom crying in the streets and no man regarding her; and in every ill to which flesh is heir we shall see an enemy of our King and Lord, and an intruder into His Kingdom, against which we swore at our baptism to fight with an inspiring and delicious certainty that God will prosper the right; that His laws cannot change; that nature, and the disturbances and poisons, and brute powers thereof, were meant to be the slaves, and not the tyrants of a race whose head has conquered the grave itself.

This is no speculative dream. The progress of science is daily proving it to be an actual truth; proving to us that a large proportion of diseases—how large a proportion, no man yet dare say—are preventible by science under the direction of that common justice and mercy which man owes to man. The proper cultivation of the soil, it is now clearly seen, will exterminate fevers and agues, and all the frightful consequences of malaria. An attention to those simple decencies and cleanlinesses of life of which even the wild animals feel the necessity, will prevent the epidemics of our cities, and all the frightful train of secondary diseases which follow them, or supply their place. The question which is generally more and more forcing itself on the minds of scientific men is not how many diseases are, but how few are not, the consequences of man’s ignorance, barbarism, and folly. The medical man is felt more and more to be as necessary in health as he is in sickness, to be the fellow-workman not merely of the clergyman, but of the social reformer, the political economist, and the statesman; and the first object of his science to be prevention, and not cure. But if all this be true, as true it is, we ought to begin to look on hospitals as many medical men I doubt not do already, in a sadder though in a no less important light. When we remember that the majority of cases which fill their wards are cases of more or less directly preventible diseases, the fruits of our social neglect, too often of our neglect of the sufferers themselves, too often also our neglect of their parents and forefathers; when we think how many a bitter pang is engendered and propagated from generation to generation in the noisome alleys and courts of this metropolis, by foul food, foul bedrooms, foul air, foul water, by intemperance, the natural and almost pardonable consequence of want of water, depressing and degrading employments, and lives spent in such an atmosphere of filth as our daintier nostrils could not endure a day: then we should learn to look upon these hospitals not as acts of charity, supererogatory benevolences of ours towards those to whom we owe nothing, but as confessions of sin, and worthy fruits of penitence; as poor and late and partial compensation for misery which we might have prevented. And when again, taking up scientific works, we find how vast a proportion of the remaining cases of disease are produced directly or indirectly by the unhealthiness of certain occupations, so certainly that the scientific man can almost prophesy the average shortening of life, and the peculiar form of disease, incident to any given form of city labour—when we find, to quote a single instance, that a large proportion—one half, as I am informed—of the female cases in certain hospitals, are those of women-servants suffering from diseases produced by overwork in household labour, especially by carrying heavy weights up the steep stairs of our London houses—when we consider the large proportion of accident cases which are the result, if not always of neglect in our social arrangements, still of danger incurred in labouring for us, we shall begin to feel that our debts towards the poorer classes, for whom this and other hospitals are instituted, swells and mounts up to a burden which ought to be and would be intolerable to us, if we had not some such means as this hospital affords of testifying our contrition for neglect for which we cannot atone, and of practically claiming in the hospital our brotherhood with those masses whom we pass by so carelessly in the workshop and the street. What matters it that they have undertaken a life of labour from necessity, and with a full consciousness of the dangers they incur in it? For whom have they been labouring, but for us? Their handiwork renders our houses luxurious. We wear the clothes they make. We eat the food they produce. They sit in darkness and the shadow of death that we may enjoy light and life and luxury and civilisation. True, they are free men, in name, not free though from the iron necessity of crushing toil. Shall we make their liberty a cloak for our licentiousness? and because they are our brothers and not our slaves, answer with Cain, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” What if we have paid them the wages which they ask? We do not feed our beasts of burden only as long as they are in health, and when they fall sick leave them to cure themselves and starve—and these are not our beasts of burden; they are members of Christ, children of God, inheritors of the Kingdom of Heaven. Prove it to them, then, for they are in bitter danger of forgetting it in these days. Prove to them, by helping to cure their maladies, that they are members of Christ, that they do indeed belong to Him who without fee or payment freely cured the sick of Judæa in old time. Prove to them that they are children of God by treating them as such—as children of Him without whom not a sparrow falls to the ground, children of Him whose love is over all His works, children of Him who defends the widow and the fatherless, and sees that those who are in need or necessity have right, and who maketh inquiry for the blood of the innocent. Prove to them that they are inheritors of the Kingdom of Heaven, by proving to them first of all that the Kingdom of Heaven exists, that all, rich and poor alike, are brothers, and One their Master, He who ascended up on high and led captivity captive, and received gifts for men, the gifts of healing, the gifts of science, the gifts of civilisation, the gifts of law, the gifts of order, the gifts of liberty, the gifts of the spirit of love and brotherhood, of fellow-feeling and self-sacrifice, of justice and humility, a spirit fit for a world of redeemed and pardoned men, in which mercy is but justice, and self-sacrifice the truest self-interest; a world, the King and Master of which is One who poured out his own life-blood for the sake of those who hated him, that men should henceforth live not for themselves, but for Him who died and rose again, and ascended up on high and received gifts for men, that the Lord God might dwell among them.

And because all general truths can only be verified in particular instances, verify your general faith in that Christianity which you profess in this particular instance, by doing the duty which lies nearest to you, and _giving_, _as it is called_, to this hospital for which I now plead.

Thanks to the spirit and the attainments of the average of English medical men and chaplains, to praise the management of any hospital which is under their care, is a needless impertinence. Do you find funds, there will be no fear as to their being well employed; and no fear, alas! either of their services being in full demand, while the sanitary state of vast streets of South London, lying close to this hospital, are in a state in which they are, and in which private cupidity and neglect seem willing to compel them to remain. It is on account of its contiguity to these neglected, destitute, and poisonous localities, that this hospital seems to me especially valuable. But though situated in a part of London where its presence is especially needed, it has not, from various causes which have arisen from no fault of its own, attracted as much public notice as some other more magnificent foundations; while it possesses one feature, peculiar I believe to it, among our London hospitals, which seems to me to render it especially deserving of support: I speak of the ward for incurable patients, in which, instead of ending their days in the melancholy wards of a workhouse, or amid those pestilential and crowded dwellings which have perhaps produced their maladies, and which certainly will aggravate them, they may have their heavy years of hopeless suffering softened by a continued supply of constant comforts, and constant medical solicitude, such as the best-conducted workhouse, or the most laborious staff of parish surgeons, and district visitors, ay, not even the benevolence and self-sacrifice of friends and relations, can possibly provide. I beseech you, picture to yourselves the amount of mere physical comfort, not to mention the higher blessings of spiritual teaching and consolation, accruing to some poor tortured cripple, in the wards of this hospital; compare it with the very brightest lot possible for him in the dwellings of the lower, or even of the middle classes of the metropolis; then recollect that these hospital luxuries, which would be unattainable by him elsewhere, are but a tithe of those which you, in his situation, would consider absolute necessaries, without which a life of suffering, ay, even of health, were intolerable—and do unto others this day, as you would that others should do unto you!

I might have taken some other and more popular method of drawing your attention to this institution.

I might have tried to excite your feelings and sympathies by attempts at pathetic or picturesque descriptions of suffering. But the minister of a just God is bound to proclaim that God demands not _sentiment_, but _justice_. The Bible knows nothing of the “religious sentiments and emotions,” whereof we hear so much talk nowadays. It speaks of _duty_. “Beloved, if God so loved us, we _ought_ to love one another.”

I might also have attempted to flatter you into giving, by representing this as a “_good work_,” a work of charity and piety, well pleasing to God; a sort of work of Protestant supererogation, fruits of faith which we may show, if we like, up to a certain not very clearly defined point of benevolence, but the absence of which probably will not seriously affect our eternal salvation, still less our right to call ourselves orthodox, Protestants, churchmen, worthy, kind-hearted, respectable, blameless. The Bible knows nothing of such a religion; it neither coaxes nor flatters, it _commands_. It demands mercy, because mercy is justice; and declares with what measure we mete to others, it shall be surely measured to us again. If therefore my words shall seem to some here, to be not so much a humble request as a peremptory demand, I cannot help it. I have pleaded the cause of this hospital on the only solid ground of which I am aware, for doing anything but evil to everyone around us who is not a private friend, or a member of one’s own family. I ask you to help the poor to their share in the gifts which Christ received for men, because they are His gifts, and neither ours nor any man’s. Among these venerable buildings, the signs and witnesses of the Kingdom of God, and the blessings of that Kingdom which for a thousand years have been spreading and growing among us—I ask it of you as citizens of that Kingdom. Prove your brotherhood to the poor by restoring to them a portion of that wealth which, without their labour, you could never have possessed. Prove your brotherhood to them in a thousand ways—in every way—in this way, because at this moment it happens to be the nearest and the most immediate, and because the necessity for it is nearer, more immediate, to judge by the signs of the times, and most of all by their self-satisfied unconsciousness of danger, their loud and shallow self-glorification, than ever it was before. Work while it is called to-day, lest the night come wherein no man can work, but only take his wages.

Again I say, I may seem to some here to have pleaded the cause of this hospital in too harsh and peremptory a tone. . . . And yet I have a ground of hope, in the English love of simple justice, in the noble instances of benevolence and self-sacrifice among the wealthy and educated, which are, thank God! increasing in number daily, as the need of them increases—in these, I say, I have a ground of hope that there are many here to-day who would sooner hear the language of truth than of flattery; who will be more strongly moved toward a righteous deed by being told that it is their duty toward God, their country, and their fellow-citizens, than by any sentimental baits for personal sympathy, or for the love of Pharisaic ostentation.

XIII. FIRST SERMON ON THE CHOLERA.

(_Sunday Morning_, _September_ 27_th_, 1849.)

God’s judgments are from above, out of the sight of the wicked.—PSALM
x. 5.

WE have just been praying to God to remove from us the cholera, which we call a judgment of God, a chastisement; and God knows we have need enough to do so. But we can hardly expect God to withdraw His chastisement 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 God, in a general way, that we believe He is punishing 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 God is punishing 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 God, “_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 God 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 god; 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 God 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 superstitious 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 God’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 God’s will, it is a very pleasant thing to talk about God’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 God’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 God’s will, even when they _do_ look for it, and then they go and cant about God’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, God’s judgment? Do you merely mean that God is punishing 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 God is a God of justice, much less a God 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 God 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 God at all, they only believe about Him—they believe that they ought to believe in Him. They have no living personal faith in God or Christ; they do not know God; they do not know God’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 God. Therefore God’s judgments are far away out of their sight; therefore they make themselves a God in their own image and after their own likeness, lazy, capricious, revengeful; therefore they are not afraid or ashamed to say that God sends pestilence into a country without showing that country why it is sent. But another great reason, I believe, why God’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 God did not understand English, because they cling superstitiously 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 God’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, pronounced and inflicted afterwards. His judgment, I say, is his _opinion_ about the person’s guilt, and even so God’s judgments are the expression of His opinion about our guilt. But there is this difference between man and God in this matter—a human judge gives his opinion in words, God 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 restitution, or work out the price of what he stole in hard labour. For this is God’s plan—God 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. God 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 God and His laws, we shall find it true even in our smallest private sorrows. God is unchangeable; He does not lose His temper, as heathens and superstitious 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 God’s judgment, God’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 God has appointed for nations. They have lost courage and prudence, and trust in God, 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 God’s judgment, God’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 God’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 God has appointed for nations, and its ruin is God’s judgment, God’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 God’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 constitution which God has made for this world we live in, and which if we break them, though God 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 God’s judgment, God’s opinion, God’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 God’s laws, God’s laws will not break them. Oh! do not think me harsh, my friends; God knows it is no pleasant thing to have to speak bitter and upbraiding words; but when one travels about this noble land of England, and sees what a blessed place it might be, if we would only do God’s will, and what a miserable place it is just because we will not do God’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 _God’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. God 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 God 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 grass on the earth, instead of being the smoky, stifling hot-beds of disease which they are now—and how from the city of God 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 godliness—when God 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 God’s likeness. Then all these distresses and pestilences, which, as I have shown you, come from breaking the will of God, will have passed 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 God’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 God’s will might be done unless He had known surely that God’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 God’s judgments just because they were man’s own fault, because they were God’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 God 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 God’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 passed 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 God. And yet you do lay the fault on God 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 God—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 God should be just in punishing all mankind for Adam’s sin, and yet unjust in punishing 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 God. “By one man sin entered the world, and death by sin, and so death passed 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, God’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, God 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?