If God's visit is over, my friends, and He is gone
away from us; if He is not just as near us now as He was in the
height of the cholera, the best thing we can do is to turn to Him
with fasting, and weeping, and mourning, and roll ourselves in the
dust, and instead of thanking our Father for going away, pray to Him,
of his infinite mercy, to condescend to come back again and visit us,
even though, as superstitious and ignorant men believe, God's
visiting us were sure to bring cholera, or plague, or pestilence, or
famine, or some other misery. For I read, that in His presence is
life and not death--at His right hand is fulness of joy, and not
tribulation and mourning and woe; but if not, it were better to be
with God in everlasting agony, than to be in everlasting happiness
without God.
Here is a strange confusion--people talking one moment like St. Paul
himself, desiring to be with Christ and God for ever, and then in the
same breath talking like the Gadarenes of old, when, after Christ had
visited them, and judged their sins by driving their unlawful herd of
swine into the sea, they answered by beseeching Him to depart out of
their coasts.
Why is this confusion?--Because people do not take the trouble to
read their Bibles; because they bring their own loose, careless, cant
notions with them when they open their Bibles, and settle beforehand
what the Bible is to tell them, and then pick and twist texts till
they make them mean just what they like and no more.
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