Jerusalem with famine, Ezechiel had to eat nothing but the dung of cows and oxen for three hundred and ninety days. All these things were signs of the future wrath of God; but at the same time they were proofs of His present mercy. With reason does the Prophet David say to his God: “Thou hast given a warning to them that fear Thee, that they may flee from before the bow, that Thy beloved may be delivered.”[1]
Yet very few sinners of those times shall be converted. Now, my dear brethren, you see how it is that those terrible signs that are to announce the wrath of God before the last day are at the same time proofs of the divine mercy and goodness, intended for the conversion and amendment of the sinner, And yet, what should excite our utmost astonishment, a very small number of sinners shall then be moved to bewail and amend their wicked lives. The natural fear and anguish inspired by such awful phenomena will cause them to wither away with terror, that is true; but when their fear is past they will not be a whit better than before; they will be like the people of the time of Noe when he was preparing for the flood; they will not even believe that those signs are to announce the last day, nor that the general judgment is at hand; but will rather laugh at the good who will believe in them, and ridicule their credulity as too simple, and so they will continue in sin until the fire carries them off impenitent before the tribunal of God; and that shall be the case with many. Is not that, I ask, a most astonishing thing? Yet why should we be surprised at it, my dear brethren? Do we not act in precisely the same manner in our own days when the Almighty sends us or threatens us with public calamities? We shall see that in the
Second Part.
Public calamities are also proofs of God’s mercy, and of His desire for the sinner’s conversion. Public calamities are to us what the signs that are to precede the last day shall be to those who are to live towards the end of the world. They shall be exceedingly terrified and dismayed, “for there shall be then great tribulation, such as hath not been from the beginning of the world until now.”[2]Such, too, is the effect of calamities on us; they terrify us and fill us with the anguish; when we feel them we commence to moan and sigh: alas! how wretched we are! etc. And yet, as with the signs of the
