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.
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