Page images
PDF
EPUB

have been repudiated by those who | Lord sent a pestilence upon Israel." would seem to be wise above what Without controversy, therefore, the is written, and who have an over- fact is indisputable on the authority weening confidence in the strength of the revealed word; and the same of their own powers, and the import- interposition, which was exercised in ance of their own views on these and one, may continue to be exhibited in on other speculative subjects. In all every subsequent age, should it so inquiries after truth, the direction of will the divine mind, either for the the wise man should be observed; reformation of individuals or the pu"Trust in the Lord with all thine nishment of nations. The instrument heart, and lean not unto thine own by which the pestilence was sent, in understanding." And the principle, this particular instance, having been I conceive, upon which this direction noticed, a few words only will be is founded, is this, that as the under- necessary to state the occasion upon standing of man, even in its highest which this act of divine interposition state of cultivation is still obscured took place. The passage of Scripby much error, and liable to much ture is well known. prejudice, from which it is hopeless while its connection with the flesh subsists, entirely to emancipate it; it is both the holier and the happier course to trust in the Lord with the whole heart for light and illumination on every subject of inquiry, and even in every department of literature-that no investigation into the mysteries of nature or science should be pursued without its being made subservient to that knowledge and to those discoveries with which the Scriptures enlighten and satisfy every truly philosophical intellect. Imbibing their spirit, and guided by their light, there is no perversity of opinions or eccentricity of views, into which the inquirer will fall to bewilder his own mind, and unsettle the principles and sentiments of others by insidious hints and sceptical remarks, which have no foundation in truth and wisdom and, therefore, have little weight or influence. Not irrelative do I consider these reflections to the doctrine inculcated, or, perhaps, I should better say, to the fact recorded in my present text. What is that doctrine, or fact? One of direct interposition, on the part of GOD, in the internal affairs, and national punishment, of the Israelites. "The

David for the purpose of ostentatious display-and acting without any direct authority from GOD, by whom he professed to be guided in all his transactions, but now trusting only in an armed flesh, and in the pride and circumstance of his host of subjectscaused the people to be numbered. In the book of Chronicles it is recorded, that this act was done at the instigation of satan. Be this, however, as it may, it subsequently produced in the mind of David great contrition, and we read that "his heart smote him after that he had numbered the people. And David said unto the Lord, I have sinned greatly in that I have done." Though nothing of the kind is recorded, I have little difficulty in believing that the act itself was in contravention of some implied or expressed prohibition on the subject, on the part of GOD, since the subsequent punishment seems to be so disproportioned to the individual crime. The criminality of the act, however, having been so public, a public exhibition of Divine displeasure might seem requisite; and grievous, indeed, was the calamity to which the nation was doomed, in consequence of individual criminality. "The word of the Lord

came unto the prophet Gad, one of
David's seers, who was instructed to
submit the following choice of evils
to the king's selection, Go and say
unto David, I offer thee three things;
choose thee one of them, that I may
do it unto thee'"-"He had the choice
of the famine, the sword, or the pes-
tilence. After being in much hesi-
tation and in a “great strait," as to |
which of these scourges he should
select, he decided upon one which
an ancient writer terms "an evil, to
which kings equally with their sub-
jects were exposed"-the pestilence.
Wealth might ward off effects from
the famine, and a multitude of forces
from the vengeance of the sword and
the horrors of war, but no exuberance
of riches, no elevation of rank-
nought indeed could place the so-
vereign or the noble on a different
level from the people-from the in-
vasion and ravages of the pestilence.
It equally affected all; and herein the
choice which David made of these
three evils, proved the sense he en-
tertained of the iniquity of his own
conduct, and that he more than others
ought to be punished with this scourge
of the Almighty. "I have erred, I
have done wickedly: but these sheep,
what have they done? let thine hand,
I pray thee, be against me and against
my Father's house."

Without dwelling further on this historical narrative, and only stating that “the plague was stayed from Israel" by the subsequent penitence and at the earnest instigation of David, after a great sacrifice of human lives, I shall now proceed to the main object for which I have selected this passage of Scripture for present consideration - namely, to describe the character and effects of that epidemic, which has been intruded into this country, now raging with a mitigated influence indeed amongst us, but which, from its first commencement, has swept off up to the period at which I am writing, nearly sixty thousand or more of the people and, in a neighbouring country within a few weeks only, upwards of twenty thousand souls! Of this judgment, then, with which we are now visited, in mercy I believe to our souls-for the consideration of

our ways, and the reformation of our lives, if not for the punishment of our sins-the judgment of the pestilence, which the Lord hath sent upon our Israel, let us reflect a little upon its nature and properties. We shall find the pestilence to be a very sore and grievous calamity indeed. There is no fortress or defence against the plague—no armour of proof is sufficient to ward off the envenomed point of this arrow-no fence so strong as to keep it out, but the poison of it creeps upon us in an indiscernible, invisible manner, and men are many times ready to drop into their graves, before they well know whether or not they have received the infection. "The pestilence," saith the Psalmist, "walks in darkness." It proceeds from hidden causes, of which we are unable to give any certain account. There is less of second causes, and greater appearance of the special interposition of GOD in this, than in other judgments with which we are scourged. It depends not upon the corruption of the air, or the putrefaction of the humours. No one knows the nature, nor can ascertain the properties of pestilential poison, and, therefore, it pursues and overtakes as it is directed and appointed, let the care and vigilance of men be ever so great to prevent its approach and avoid its infection or mitigate and subdue its effects. Men flee from the sword into forts and citadels and other places, in which their persons are protected and their lives preserved. Not so the pestilence-it will pursue them thither-it will reach them there, as saith the Prophet Ezekiel, “they that be in the pits, and in the caves shall die of the pestilence." It not only enters the cottages of the poor, but it boldly invades the mansions of the nobility and the palaces of the princes. In the strong graphic language of the same Prophet, "it lays the land most desolate causing the pomp of her strength to cease,' and the mountains of her Israel to be laid low. King Hezekiah was sick of it, and, saith the Prophet Jeremiah, "death is come up into our windows and is entered into our palaces, to cut off the children from without and the young men from the

streets" so that no place is secured from this arrow.

required, many valuable lives have been sacrificed. In such a state of The plague bereaves a man of his un- destitution, it may be said, their derstanding and reason. It is a high and houses have been rendered cheerless furious fever, the hot and noxious va- prisons, and in a manner, while living pours of which turn the brain, and occa- in, they may be described as almost sion those whom it has infected to roar living out of the world-a living enand to rage. And how awfully affect tombment-none dare approach that ing such a spectacle of human agony sepulchre, to tender aid and adminisand suffering! When we leave this ter consolation; and there the sufferer world, we all hope that our thoughts lies stretched on the couch of death, may be collected-our frame calm in silent and speechless expectation and unruffled in the closing hours of of what God will do to him. And it mortal existence. But, in a case so is not the least of his miseries that he piteous as the above, the unhappy is now excluded from the assemblies of individual can neither dispose of his the Lord's people and is bereft of all outward affairs with discretion, nor public use of the ordinances of God, attend to his spiritual concerns with receiving indeed those private admothat composure and tranquillity with nitions of love and consolation which which we are anxious to yield our the ministers of religion never deny souls into the hands of our Creator to the sick, however loathsome their and Redeemer; he is in no situation disease and infectious their comin which he can judge of his estate, plaints! However others may feel and adjust his accounts; he can on such subjects I presume not to neither meditate nor pray, nor, with say, but to a true Christian I know the dying saint, utter those few em- of no deprivation that can be so great, phatic words, "Lord Jesus, into thy as that of being separated and bahands I commend my spirit;" he nished, as it were, from the courts of can recall no gracious promises to the Lord's house incapacitated by cheer, and not one blessed saying to corporeal and mental debility from support his mind, for his mechanism joining in the edifying services and is deranged, and its powers prostrate the hallowed prayers and enrapturing -all is unhinged and like chaos in hymns and spiritual songs of the disorder and confusion, and he goes sanctuary. If we can say from the to death as the ox does to the slaugh- heart, "I was glad when they said, ter; passing into eternity without the let us go into the house of the Lord," slightest care or preparation. Now the bereavement of that blessed priis not this a sore evil of this judg-vilege must be felt as a loss indeed ment, that a man is bereft of his understanding at the very moment in which death is drawing nearer, and at that moment too in which he has most need of all its capacities and powers, and energies and recollections to the well ordering of the soul, ere it goes hence and enters on its final and eternal state.

The plague breaks off the performance of mutual offices of affection and kindness between friends and relations and neighbours. The infected person is condemned to solitude like the lepers of old, his touch is avoided and his person is loathed. All men flee from his presence and dread his conversation; and it has not unfrequently happened that by this desertion and the want of those necessaries and comforts this situation

of no ordinary kind; and I believe that it is so felt in many a chamber of sickness, and by many a christian patient in suffering.

Another distressing effect incident to the plague is, that it usually deprives society of the choicest and most useful of its members, the strong and the healthy; those who are of the purest temperament and the best constitutions, and the most delicate complexions are among its first and earliest victims. And, that the young and lusty are those whom it seizes sooner than it does the old, the decrepid, and infirm, is generally admitted. Of all complexions, the sanguine are most susceptible of receiving the infection. Now the sanguine are usually persons of high elastic spirits, no less remarkable for

ance.

the quickness of their apprehensions, | West-Smithfield, upon which houses and the excellence of their parts, than are now erected, as a church-yard or for the soundness of their constitu- burying-place. During this pestition, or the genuine goodness of their lence, fifty thousand persons were health. What an impressive com- there buried. In the reign of the ment is this on the text, "in the emperor Vespatian, in Rome alone, midst of life we are in death," and there died ten thousand daily, and how imperatively does it behove the this awful sacrifice of human lives young to remember how soon they continued for several days. And in may be like the flower, now beautiful the year 1345, the pestilence was so and blooming, but in the evening general throughout the Christian withering by the blast or the breath of world, that it destroyed more than some infectious disease and cut down, one half of those whom its infection fleeing like the shadow and disap- | reached. In the reign of Justinian, pearing from the stay, on which is at Constantinople, there died fifty engraven in ineffacible characters thousand daily. The African plague both for young and old-no continu- was no less awful and destructive in its track. Commencing at Carthage, it destroyed in its course in Numidia alone, eighty thousand; on the seacoast of Africa, two hundred thousand; and about Utica, thirty thousand soldiers. In the time of Petrarch, in Italy, such was the desolating march of the plague which then prevailed, that out of every thousand not ten persons survived. In the metropolis, at the great plague about a century and a half since, it has been calculated that more than one hundred thousand souls perished in the city and the adjacent villages. The disconsolate city deserted by its inhabitants-trade ceased-the courts of law closed, and the whole country as in a state of mourning for the poor and destitute condition of London.

The Hebrew word, which we render "pestilence," signifies, or is rather derived from a word that signifies, to speak. And truly, indeed, God speaks aloud in the pestilence; and when he speaks, it is but fit that young and old, the weak and strong, should obey his voice, and resign all to him, even should that all be the best and dearest object of our earthly affections and solicitude!

The plague kills by multitudes, and sweeps off thousands at once. Like another Sampson, it lays heaps upon heaps. In the time of the plague, and in the midst of its ravages, we may say of it as Isaiah said of the grave, "hell hath enlarged herself, and opened her mouth without measure: and their glory, and their multitude, and their pomp, and he that rejoiceth shall descend into it." At such a time persons of all classes post on apace unto their graves; so that many times there are more guests than there are receptacles, and the living are scarcely sufficient to bury the dead; or the church-yard to receive the multitude of its tenants! That this is no ideal representation of the march and effects of its ravages, a reference to historical facts will abundantly attest. In the year 1349, the plague raged in England to such a fearful extent, as that scarcely a tenth part of the population of the country, of all classes, was left alive! The churches and church-yards could not contain the dead; and in the metropolis, it was found necessary to consecrate a large spot of ground, in

Another awful effect incident to the plague is,—it dispatches the infected in an instant, as it were. They who are blooming in their health and luxuriating in their strength, in a few hours are pale and speechless; and there they lie stretched, convulsed, and ghastly on the bed of death. Wherever it approaches, its work is quick and sure. It grasps its victim, and the moment it coils around him it crushes and flings him prostrate to the charnel house of the dead! It has been thought that the plague, to which my text refers, lasted but the space of nine hours: yet, however this be, or whether it continued the whole of three days, as originally threatened, within that short period of time it swept off from Dan to Beersheba, exclusive of women and children, seventy thousand men !

Thus, while Joab, by the direction of | yet tasted of any of those bitter cups, David, was engaged nine months in the very dregs of the gall and bitternumbering the people, the execution ness of which thousands and thouof this appaling judgment was comsands of those whom we hailed and pleted in so many hours, such quick recognised as countrymen have tasted work do judgments make, when sent even unto the death! We have not forth from the Lord to punish and tasted of the pestilence recorded in afflict the people for transgression and my text, nor much indeed have we sin! How long and potent was the suffered, practically nothing from those army of Sennacherib overnight; yet, other two judgments mentioned in in the morning, when they rose, there the chapter-I mean, the famine and was a number of dead corpses, no the sword. Of the famine happily, less than a hundred fourscore and it has visited us not. Thank GOD, of five thousand warriors, all these died war we have outlived its rage and in their tents, in one night! All the continuance for five and twenty years, first-born in Egypt were taken off by and sixteen or seventeen years of the plague in one night! Moses, peace have succeeded. May it be when Israel murmured, commanded perpetual; or should it be interAaron to haste and take his censor, rupted, may the same might, which and stand betwixt the living and the preserved us from a knowledge of dead; for the plague was begun, it war's actual and positive miseries, was but just begun, and Aaron ran still continue to be stretched out towith his incense, but when he came, ward and to keep off from our coasts in that short lapse of time, it had its multiplied horrors and internal mowed down no less than fourteen ravages-the devastation of our vilthousand and seven hundred, as you lages-the depopulation of our cities, will find on referring to that impor- and the extermination or slavery of tant chapter of Numbers, the six- their inhabitants, with all those teenth, so singular for its historical other evils incidental to the prenarrative and its typical or spiritual sence of war within our borders. signification! How striking is the The Almighty GoD has hitherto kept comparison employed by the psalmist, his bitter arrow of the plague from to represent the quick and sudden us. Let us consider within ourselves, manner in which the pestilence as- are we better than those who perished sails its victims-he calls it "an in the pestilence in Israel, or in the arrow that flies," intimating that its plague in London, or in that of Jepassage is so quick and its coming rusalem, or in that of Constantinople, so abrupt, as to afford them scarcely or in that of other places in which it any time to make their peace with so vehemently and destructively raged God, and to prepare for death and in times past, numbering the slain eternity. by tens and even by hundreds of thousands? Are not the same sins

My brethren, it is now time for me after having described the character and effects of this angel of destruction, to see whether some use, and what use may be made of this judgment and to press it upon your most serious regard and attention.

We have seen that of all heaven's visitations, sore, and most afflicting, is that of the pestilence. Now let this be the first use or improvement you make of it. Let it stir you up to give solemn and hearty thanks to GOD for his gracious dealings and wonderful goodness towards us, that the plague hath not come nigh our dwellings, nor assailed our persons— that yet we are safe. We have not

as great, and as many, to be found in us, as in other places? The Prophet exclaimed, "Oh Lord, take away my life," and he assigned this as the reason, "for I am not better than my Fathers; it is fit I die as well as they, for I am as bad as they." And may not we, with equal justice, adopt this ejaculation of Elijah, and admit that in consistency of living and purity of practice, we fall miserably below the measure and standard of Christian truth-that, in a word, we are not better than were our forefathers. We live,—well, but to whom is our existence to be ascribed? Surely nothing but to the distinguishing

« PreviousContinue »