ey too shall be weighed in the balance of God's
eternal justice, and found wanting.

But another lesson we may learn from the text, which I wish to impress
earnestly on your minds. These Galilaeans, it seems, were no worse than
the other Galilaeans: yet they were singled out as examples: as warnings
to the rest.

Believing--as I do--that our Lord was always teaching the universal
through the particular, and in each parable, nay in each comment on
passing events, laying down world-wide laws of His own kingdom, enduring
through all time--I presume that this also is one of the laws of the
kingdom of God. And I think that facts--to which after all is the only
safe appeal--prove that it is so; that we see the same law at work around
us every day. I think that pestilences, conflagrations, accidents of any
kind which destroy life wholesale, even earthquakes and storms, are
instances of this law; warnings from God; judgments of God, in the very
strictest sense; by which He tells men, in a voice awful enough to the
few, but merciful and beneficent to the many, to be prudent and wise; to
learn henceforth either not to interfere with the physical laws of His
universe, or to master and to wield them by reason and by science.

I would gladly say more on this point, did time allow: but I had rather
now ask you to consider, whether this same law does not reveal itself
throughout history; in many great national changes, or even calamities;
and in the fall of many an ancient and time-honoured institution. I
believe that the law does reveal itself; and in forms which, rightly
studied, may at once teach us Christian charity, and give us faith and
comfort, as we see that God, however severe, is still just.

I mean this--The more we read, in history, of the fall of great
dynasties, or of the ruin of whole classes, or whole nations, the more we
feel--however much we may acquiesce with the judgment as a whole--sympathy
with the fallen. It is not the worst, but often the best, specimens of a
class or of a system, who are swallowed up by the moral earthquake, which
has been accumulating its forces, perhaps for centuries. Innocent and
estimable on the whole, as persons, they are involved in the ruin which
falls on the system to which they belong. So far from being sinners
above all around them, they are often better people than those around
them. It is as if they were punished, not for being who they were, but
for being what they were