The Crisis 3

3. As another reason for fear, I mention the view which God has given of his character in the scripture, together with the threatenings which he has denounced against the guilty. His holiness forms a conspicuous feature of his character, as it is delineated on the page of inspiration. Such is his purity, "that the very heavens are said to be unclean in his sight." Sin is the only thing in all the universe which God hates, and this he abhors wherever he discovers it. With our limited understanding, and feeble powers of moral perception, it is impossible for us to form an adequate idea of the evil of sin, or the light in which it is contemplated by a God whose understanding is infinite, and whose purity is immaculate. That law which men are daily trampling upon, equally without consideration, without reason, and without penitence, is most sacred in his eyes, as the emanation and the transcript of his own holiness. He is also omnipresent and omniscient. There is not a nook or corner of the land from which he is excluded. Of every scene of iniquity he is the constant, though invisible witness. The whole mass of national guilt, with every the minutest particular of it, is ever before his eye. His justice, which consists in giving to all their due, must incline him to punish iniquity, and his power enables him to do it. He is the moral governor of the nations, and concerned to render his providence subservient to the display of his attributes—and if a people so highly favored as we are, notwithstanding our manifold sins, escape without chastisement, will not some be ready to question the equity, if not the very exercise of his administration?

His threatenings against the wicked are to be found in almost every page of holy Scripture. "From the day it was built until now, this city has so aroused My anger and wrath that I must remove it from My sight!" "If you walk contrary to me," said Jehovah to the Jews, "I will walk contrary to you." To the same people he declared at another time, "If you do wickedly you shall be consumed, both you and your king." "Their silver and their gold will not be able to rescue them on the day of the Lord's wrath. The whole earth will be consumed by the fire of His jealousy. For He will make a complete, yes, a horrifying end of all the inhabitants of the earth." Nor are the threatenings of the Bible to be viewed in the light of mere unreal terrors, as clouds and storms which the poet's pencil has introduced into the picture; the creatures of his own imagination, and only intended to excite the imagination of others. No, brethren, they are solemn realities, intended to operate by their denunciation as a check upon temptation; or if not so regarded, to be endured in their execution as a punishment upon our sins!

4. The example which God has made of other nations, might well alarm us. If kingdoms as such, are ever punished for their sins, it must be in the present world, where alone they exist in their collective form. The solemnities of the future day of judgment are intended for mankind in their individual and personal characters. All human associations, families, churches, states, will then be melted down into one general mass of individuals, and every man, amidst surrounding millions, be judged separately. If the rod of the divine anger ever rest upon a collective body, it must be in the present state of things; and the Scripture gives us many examples in which this has happened. It has preserved an account, either in the way of history or prophecy, of the downfall of nearly all the chief empires, kingdoms, and cities of antiquity; and that, not as a mere chronicle of the event, but as a great moral lesson to the world. It carefully informs us, that sin was the cause of their ruin. It does not leave us to gather this truth by any laborious and doubtful inference, but proclaims that the wars and sieges, the bloodshed and miseries, which ended in their dissolution, are to be regarded by every succeeding age as a fearful exposition of the evil nature of sin, written by the finger of God upon the tablet of the earth's history!

Visit, in imagination, my countrymen, the spots where many of these cities once stood, and you shall see nothing but the genius of desolation stalking like a specter across the plain, lifting its eye to heaven, and exclaiming, amidst the silence that reigns around, "The kingdom and the nation that will not serve you, shall utterly perish." As you stand in other places amidst the moldering fragments of departed grandeur, does not every breeze, as it sighs through the ruins, seem to say, as a voice from the sepulcher, "See, therefore, and know that it is an evil and a bitter thing to sin against the Lord."

How exactly were God's threatenings accomplished upon the Jews, although they were his chosen people, and the seed of Abraham his friend. Nearly eighteen centuries has the wrath of God blazed upon the mountains of Judea, as a beacon against iniquity; while the tribes that once reposed in honor and peace in her fruitful valleys, are scattered through all lands as living witnesses to the truth of revelation, and living monuments of the terrors of divine justice. And have not the threatenings uttered by the Son of God to John, in his secluded isle, against the seven churches in Asia, been all executed with an exactness that robs every sinner of his last hope of impunity. Those lamps are all gone out, the candlestick is removed out of its place; those cities themselves, some of them, are abandoned to the foxes and the owls; the Koran is substituted for the Gospel; the Sun of Righteousness has set upon those scenes of apostolic labor, and in its stead the crescent of the Arabian impostor sheds its pale disastrous light. Tell me if Britain does not deserve the most severe of their destinies, if after beholding them go down successively to the dust under the power of iniquity, she take not the warning, and by shunning the cause of their ruin, avert her own.

5. Can we look at the present condition of the country without entertaining the most serious apprehensions? It is no false alarm that is now sounded in our ears; all parties agree that we are in a most critical situation, from which nothing can extricate us but such an interference of providence, as we know not how to describe or to expect. A trade reduced almost to stagnation, a bankrupt list augmenting continually, a declining credit, a load of national debt, and taxation almost overwhelming, yet insufficient to meet the exigencies of the state, an exhausted treasury, and an administration at a loss how to replenish it, the rapid removal of British capital to be invested in foreign securities, hundreds of thousands of our laboring population only half employed, and consequently reduced to the greatest distress, a restless faction taking advantage of the sorrows of the poor, one populous district in a state bordering upon insurrection, the Government making encroachments upon our liberty, to defend us from anarchy, the division of opinion that exists both as to the political and financial measures which are necessary for our safety, and, to finish the whole, the expected departure of that venerable monarch, who, in his amiable character preserved a center of union for the country, and who, though long hidden from our view, has sent from his deep and affecting seclusion, in the remembrance of his virtues, a plastic influence, which insensibly molded our hearts to loyalty. With such a picture before our eye (and it is not too deeply shaded,) the stoutest heart may tremble, and everyone turn an anxious look to the unknown but foreboding future.

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