These are the perils of prosperity. God be merciful to us! We are not only wicked and cowardly in our conduct and character; we are mean and vulgar. Our fathers lived in times of trouble which tried men's souls. We are exposed to a sadder trial which more dangerously racks the man. For forty years the nation has had no outward peril, no war, no famine, nothing to fear from abroad. We have increased amazingly in numbers and riches. Now the nation is drunk with power and nauseous with wealth. We are like the savages in the neighbourhood of the Rocky Mountains, who, when the green corn came, sat down to eat and rose up to play, and ate till their health went from them: every tenth man died. I suppose a prophet, who was as sternly merciful as Jesus of Nazareth, would pray for some great affliction, some famine, some pestilence, some war, some bankruptcy, that the nation might recover its soberness once more, and also remember its God.
When the Hebrews were rich and easy, they relapsed into the licentiousness of the Tyrians or Chaldees, the Philistines or Egyptians. With what savage rods did Isaiah and Jeremiah scourge their own people! But when war came, when the temple smoked, the exiles hung their harps on the willows of Babylon, and thought of Mount Zion and the Jehovah who had brought them out of the iron house of bondage. It was at such times that there sprung up, in the religious corner of their heart, the hopes of a Messiah and a “kingdom of heaven.”
I know not what is before us. Some calamity: for no doubt America, like other nations, must have her time of trouble; a day of sickness when she also will sit with ashes on her head, and pray to the God of the red men we have slain, and the black men we have enslaved, and then find mercy.
Calamity is not half so calamitous as constant prosperity. When the prodigal, in riotous living, is wasting his substance with dice, and wine, and harlots, he thinks not of his father; but when the husks are refused him, he then says, “How many hired servants of my father's have bread enough and to spare, and I perish with hunger! I will arise and go to my father, and ask that I may be made, not his son, but only one of his hired servants.”
