doubt, in many other cases. But
our blessed Lord has specially forbidden us to settle when it is
true to say that any particular set of people are destroyed for
their sins: forbidden us to say that the poor creatures who perish
in this way are worse than their neighbours.

'Thinkest thou,' he says, 'that those Galilaeans whose blood Pilate
mingled with their sacrifices, were sinners above all the
Galilaeans? Or those eighteen, on whom the tower in Siloam fell,
and killed them; think you that they were sinners above all who
dwelt in Jerusalem? I tell you nay.'

'Judge not,' he says, 'and ye shall not be judged,' and therefore we
must not judge. We have no right to say, for instance, that the
terrible earthquake in Italy, two years ago, came as a punishment
for the sins of the people. We have no right to say that the twenty
or thirty thousand human beings, with innocent children among them
by hundreds, who were crushed or swallowed up by that earthquake in
a few hours, were sinners above all that dwelt in Italy. We must
not say that, for the Lord God himself has forbidden it.

But this we may say (for God himself has said it in the Bible), that
these earthquakes, and all other disasters, great or small, do not
come of themselves--do not come by accident, or chance, or blind
necessity; but that he sends them, and that they fulfil his will and
word. He sends them, and therefore they do not come in vain. They
fulfil his will, and his will is a good will. They carry out his
purpose, but his purpose is a gracious purpose. God may send them
in anger; but in his anger he remembers mercy, and his very wrath to
some is part and parcel of his love to the rest. Therefore these
disasters must be meant to do good, and will do good to mankind.
They may be meant to teach men, to warn them, to make them more wise
and prudent for the future, more humble and aware of their own
ignorance and weakness, more mindful of the frailty of human life,
that remembering that in the midst of life we are in death, they may
seek the Lord while he may be found, and call upon him while he is
near. They may be meant to do that, and to do a thousand things
more. For God's ways are not as our ways, or his thoughts as our
thoughts. His ways are unsearchable, and his paths past finding
out. Who hath known the mind of the Lord, that he may instruct him,
or even settle what the Lord means by doing this or that?

All we can say is--and that i