THE SWORD OF THE LORD IN THE LAND,
AND
PROUD BOASTING OUR BESETTING SIN AS A NATION
TWO SERMON'S
Preached in chrlst church and st. John's,
SAVANNAH,
On the 2d and 3d Sundays in Lent,
IN CONNEXION WITH
THE AWFUL CATASTROPHE ON BOARD THE PRINCETON,
BY THE RT. REV. STEPHEN ELLIOTT, JR., D. IX
-o-
PCBLISHED AT THE REQUEST OE THE VESTRY OP ST. JOHN'S.
O
SAVANNAH;
W. T. WILLIAMS.
1844.
SERMON I.
THE SWORD OF THE LORD JN THE LAND.
O thou sword of the T.okd, how long1 will it be ere thou be quiet ? Put
up thyself into thy scabbard, rest, and be still. JtH..MiAU, xlvii, 6.
Would to God that the people of this land were given the
heart to see that God had whet his glittering sword ; and in the
proper spirit of humiliation to ask at his mouth the question of
the Prophet, "O thou sword of the Lord, how long will it be ere
thou be quiet1?" Until ihey do, they shall have no other answer
than that which was given to the Prophet : " How can it be
quiet, seeing the Lord hath given it a charge against Ashkelon,
and against the sea-shore"? there hath he appointed it." Jer.
xlvii. 7.
Aye, how can it be quiet, when the land is polluted with ini¬
quity from the great river even unto the sea; when ungodliness
pervades the people from the humblest walks of life, even to the
highest places of power ? How can it be quiet when the solemn-
est duty of the people, that of self-government, is exercised in the
midst of the vilest revelry, the shouts of drunkenness and profane-
ness, entering the ears of the Lord God of Sabaoth as their only
thanksgiving for the blessings they enjoy 1 How can it be quiet,
when the Halls of Legislation are become the arena of violence, of
blasphemy, of blood 1 How can it be quiet, when God's light
hand is not only forgotten, but despised; not only despised, but
mocked ; not only mocked, but openly and scornfully ridiculed 1
It cannot be quiet, for the Lord hath given it a charge against us,
and we must take up the voice of lamentation, and cry : " The
crown is fallen from our head : Woe unto us that we have sin-
ed !" Lam. v. 16.
Three times, within as many years, hath the sword of the Lord
descended upon the rulers of this land, and each time hath it
G
made a nation to stand in awe, so sudden hath been its stroke, so
awfully incongruous the time of its descent. Such a thing, once
happening, should make a people pause and meditate; but when
God hath struck thrice, and every time in the same wonderful
manner, may not the Prophet of the Lord proclaim unto the peo¬
ple of the Lord : "Hear ye, and give ear; be not proud : for the
Lord hath spoken." Jer. xiii. 15.
Three times hath the sword of the Lord descended upon the
highest places of power, and each time under circumstances so
peculiar, yet teaching so precisely the same lesson, that the na¬
tion must be judicially blind, if it read riot the meaning of this
awful handwriting! These visitations have not been lessons for
individuals ; they are lessons for a nation, and should be inter¬
preted for the understanding of a nation; else will the next hand¬
writing be not against the rulers of the land, but against the peo¬
ple; not against the Governors, but against the Government; be
Mene, Mene, God hath numbered thy kingdom, and finished
it." Dan. v. 26.
Every time that the sword of the Lord hath fallen, hath it
taught, as I said just now, the same lesson, yet, under a varying
aspect, the lesson which the Psalmist hath pressed upon our no¬
tice : " It is better to trust in the Lord, than to put confi¬
dence in Man." Ps. cxviii. S. Each noble head, as it bowed
beneath the glittering sword of the Lord, was made to speak this
language to the nation It was first spoken from amidst the
peaceful halls of legislation ; then it rose above the shouts which
glorified man upon our country's first battle-field; it hath come
to us but yesterday in the awful discomfiture of man's vain at1
tempt to rest the defence of his country upon any other arm than
that of God !
There has been probably no occasion in the history of our
country, -in which the people were looking more earnestly and
more confidingly to an arm, of flesh for deliverance from theif
troubles, than in the last Pfesidential election. Without enter*
ing at all into,the politics of the country; without pretending for
a moment to give any reasons for the condition of things which
prevailed in the land dtiring the years immediately preceding it,
these fac^s are undisputed — that a general gloom and despoil*
7
dency bad overspread the country,—that war was hanging its ter¬
rible cloud ominously over us, war with our own brethren of a
common blood and a common Christianity,—that ruin and bank¬
ruptcy stared in the face every class of the community. What
was to be done? There were two sources to which the people
might turn for he]p and deliverance, the arm of God, and the arm
of flesh. The choice was before them, to bow down in humilia¬
tion before the Supreme Ruler of the Universe, confess their
sins, and find forgiveness; or else to turn to man, and make a
God of him, and put their trust in his wisdom and in his power !
I grieve to say the nation turned not to God. There was no
prayer as a nation. There was no humiliation as a nation. There
was no confession of national sins and iniquities. God was not
in all the thoughts of the people. They turned each and every
one to his own idol. The whole land met in bitter strife, brother
against brother, and father against son, and it rung on every hand
with revelry and fierce conflict. Was this,—I ask it of you all,—
the proper aspect of a Christian people under the circumstances
in which we were then placed 'I How much more seemly would
have been crowded churches of God, than crowded places of
political meeting"? How much more appropriate would have
been a brotherly gathering together around the altar of the Lord,
to make inquiry at his mouth, than a gathering in wrath to lay
the blame of God's punishment for sin upon each other's heads !
Perchance if ye had come in the spirit of soberness and truth,
and consulted your own hearts and the oracles of God, ye would
have found that it was sin, the sin of us all, that was covering
the land with the tokens of God's wrath, and scattering desola¬
tion through its borders. But the people came not to God, and
therefore He came to them ; in the midst of their triumph, at the
very moment when they had placed the man of their choice in
his place of power, He came, with his sword in his red right hand,
and taught the solemn lesson : " It is bettkr to trust in the
Lord, than to pur confidence in Man and when he had cut
down him whom they had set up in his-room,— cyt him down,
not because he bated him, for he was, as we are told, his child by
adoption and grace,—cut him down, perchance, because he loved
him, he rolled off every cloud that darkened our horizon, rolled
8
them off. " without hands," [Dan. ii. 45. ] as we may say, and we
find ourselves this day, thinks be to his mercy, once again in the
broad sunshine of prosperity.
But this was not enough ! We had not yet learned the lesson
that God is a je ilous Uod ; that the God of battles will not give
his glory to another; that the monuments which a Christian
people is to erect, must be monuments to God, and not to man !
An I • to 1 chase his ti ne to teach this second lesson ; selected
the victim who had that moment burst upon the nation with al¬
most unrivalled renown for eloquence, foi letters, for the qualities
of a statesman. It was an unequalled scene of pomp. Hun¬
dreds of thousands, of every age and sex, had gathered to a na¬
tion's festival ! Those who filled the highest stations of the land
deemed the occasion not unworthy of their presence, and among
those whose heaits fluttered in anticipation of that day's glory,
was he whom (rod had marked as the lofty head that was to bow
beneath his arm of judgment, to tell his people of their sins ! A
li'tle paragraph in the newspaper informed the nation that the
indisposition of the Acting-Secretary of State, kept him from that
splendid pageant ; another day comes, and the nation is awe¬
struck with the intelligence that in the midst of that scene of fes¬
tivity— at the very moment when man was raising a monument to
glorify man —the sword of the Lord had descended upon one of
the most conspicuous of men, and made the monument of his
supremacy as glaring as the monument of a nation's vanity ; nay
more — had taught the race of man, that he was frailer far than
the very marble he was piling over the ashes of the dead! What
an awful manifestation of the value which God set upon man was
the death of Legahe ; of the value which he intended that the
nation should set upon man! In that vast assemblage nothing
spoke of death save the marble that they were consecrating; and
the voices of life that echoed around it, drowned for the time its
utterance. But, in this world, Death overcomes Life, and the
memorials of death outlast the voices of Life. The marble which
that day spoke of death, hath already outlasted some of the no¬
blest voices of the living, and will continue to speak of Death, for
ages after all that rent the Heavens that day with their tones of
life, shall have been gathered, Earth to Earth, Ashes to Ashes,
9
Dust to Dust. The language of that day's glory was to give the
praise of a Nation's deliverance to the valour of m-dn ; (Jed's lan¬
guage was: " Cease ye from man, whose breath is in his nostrils;
for wherein is he to be accounted of"?" Ismui ii. 22.
And here let me apply this individually to yourselves, resting
awhile from our national application of these mournful topics.
Just as it was with this gifted man, shall it be with all of you!
Some day shall the merchant be missing from his desk, and those
who seek for him will be told that he is sick, and another day
will command then that he is dead ! Some day the lawyer shall
be wanting at his office, and the student will tell his anxious cli¬
ent that he is not well, and then that he is dead ! Some day the
soldier shall be absent from his muster-roll, and his comrades will
learn that he has a fever, or a cough, and when another day has
passed, the muffled drum shall beat him to his rest! Some morn¬
ing the mother shall be missing from her table, and the loving
children will be told that she has kept her bed, and then that they
are motherless ! Some night the gay girl shall not be seen in
the circles of gaiety, and it will be whispered that she is indis¬
posed, and in a week that same gay throng will follow her to her
burial, and, while they pity her, learn not a single lesson of wis¬
dom from her fall. Yes ! this is life ! We run a certain round
of duty, and some day we are missing from it, and then we are
carried to the tomb. Our place fills up, and the world goes on,
and the man who takes the very chair we have vacated, or nes¬
tles in the bed that we have died upon, measures not the number
of his days, but treads his path as careless and as unconcerned as
if a departed spirit had not trodden it but a moment before him!
Yes ! this is Life ! It is not a year since the sword of the Lord
struck Lk.<i.\ke from the Chair of State, and that same sword —
that unquiet sword, unquiet because of our hardness of heart —
hath struck another gifted man from the very same place of pow¬
er! Is not this a veiification of the truth just uttered] and
what an awful verification! Struck not only him, but his gifted,
colleague, and the honored companions of their hour of exulta¬
tion ! "O thou Sword of the Lord, how long will it be ere thou
be quiet V' Another lesson for the Nation ! Another repetition
of the same truth: "It is better to trust in the Lord, than
10
•jo put confidence in man." Oh God! how terribly bast thou
spoken ! Spoken again too, as if in mockery of man, in the very
moment of his festivity and boasting ! Oh Man ! can anything
be more clear than the meaning of God 1 Had he written it in
letters of fire upon the blue vault of Heaven, could it have told
you more plainly not to trust in an arm of flesh ! What more
could he do, to impress this upon you, than to make the very en¬
gine of destruction, which thou proudly boastedst was to change
the whole face of war, and make thy country impregnable, the
instrument of the annihilation of the civil arm of the common¬
wealth ! If you hear not this voice, coming to you from the wa¬
ters as the former ones came to you from the land, making a mock¬
ery of the one arm of your defence,— a dreadful mockery, but a
wholesome one if the nation will but take it to heart,— as it had
already made of the other, God will cease to teach, and will bare
his Holy Arm for a general vengeance ! The angel hath already
planted one foot upon the land, and another upon the sea, and
issued to the nation the proclamation of Jehovah : " Thus saith
the Lord : Cursed be the man that trusteth in man, and maketh
flesh his arm, and whose heart departeth from the Loud." Jer.
xvii. 5.
Oh that we were prepared to say to the sword of the Lord :
" Put up thyself into thy scabbard, rest, and be still." We may
say it, my hearers, but only when we are in a state of humiliation,
only when we shall have turned to the Lord with weeping, and
fasting, and mourning! God hath given to his people this pow¬
er over the sword of the Lord, that, if they take warning, they
shall deliver their souls from its power. " Son of man," saith
the Lord to Ezekiel, " speak to the children of thy people, and
say unto them, When I bring the sword upon a land, if the peo¬
ple of the land take a man of their coasts, and set him for their
watchman : If, when he seeth the sword come upon the land, he
blow the trumpet, and warn the people : Then whosoever hear-
eth the sound of the trumpet, and taketh not warning; if the
sword come and take him away, his blood shall be upon his own
head. He heard the sound of the trumpet, and took not warning,
his blood shall be upon him : but he that taketh warning shall
deliver his soul." Ezek. xxxiii. 2-5. Beloved brethren, the
11
bwoi'd of the Lord is in the land ! Our rulers are cut down suc¬
cessively before our eyes,— they are swept off as with a flood.
Take warning and deliver your souls. Enter not, I beseech you,
upon afresh caieer of political sin. Begin not anew in the land
the bitter strife, and the cruel violence, and the mad revelry
which have brought down upon us the judgments of the Lord.
The sword of the Lord can never be quiet, until the people ac¬
knowledge God, not only with their lips, but in their lives. Vio¬
lated Sabbaths, angry passions, fierce contentions, blood meeting
blood, words of blasphemy, nights of revelry, are not the spells
that will charm back the sword of the Lord into its scabbard!
Take those same .Sabbaths, and hallow them to the Lord; sub¬
due those angry passions beneath the influence of God's Holy
Spirit; change those fierce contentions, into contentions for the
glory of God ; let the blood which meeteth blood, be the blood
of Calvary washing you who have resisted, if needs be, even unto
blood; turn your words of blasphemy into songs of melody ; and,
instead of the chaste moon and the glittering stars being frighten¬
ed from their propriety by the screams and yells of an infuriated
people, let the atmosphere be redolent with the incense of prayer;
and instantly will that sword obey the incantations of God's peo¬
ple, and rest, and be still! And especially do I warn you, com¬
municants of the table of the Lord, to beware how you provoke
the Lord your God to anger. But for the soundness which God's
children infuse into a corrupt world, the sword of the Lord would
break forth on the right hand and on the left, and glut itself with
the blood of an idolatrous people ! "Ye ar-e the salt of the earth:
but if the salt have lost his savour, wherewith shall it be salted V
Matt. v. 13. If ye take not warning when the watchman utters
his voice, who shall deliver their souls 1 Come out, my people,
come out from these excesses of the world. Do your duty as
citizens, but at the same time remember your duty as Christians!
You have a vast responsibility resting upon you. It is for you
to preserve the virtue of your country, not to corrupt it! to train
the young after a lofty standard of morals, not to teach them how
to lose that which they have learned around their fire-side ! It
is for you, by prayer, by self-discipline, by obedience, to avert
the judgments of the Lord from the land. If ye so act as to
12
increase the evil, as to whet the vengeance of the Lord, ye shall
perish in your blood, and that blood shall be upon your own heads,
for, as a watchman set upon the high places of Israel, do 1 warn
you this day that the sword of the Lord is in the Land.
And terrible is the fate of a people when the sword of the Lord
goeth forth against them,— when the Lord says to aland : " Be¬
hold, L am against thee, and will draw forth my sword out of his
sheath, and will cut off' from thee the righteous and the wicked."
" It shall not return any more. Sigh, therefore, thou son of man,
with the breaking of thy loins ; and with bitterness sigh before
their eyes. And it shall be when they say unto thee. Wherefore
sighest thou 1 that thou shalt answer, For the tidings ; because
it cometh : and every heart shall melt, and all hands shall be fee¬
ble, and every spirit shall faint, and all knees shall be weak
as water: behold, it cometh." Ezek. xxi. 3-7. Let us sigh
now, beloved brethren, out of broken and contrite hearts, and per¬
chance we may avert the sighing of misery in days to come. Let
us gird our loins now with sackcloth for our sins, and perchance
there will be no breaking of loins for the judgments of God Let
Us invoke the sword of the Lord to rest, and be still; invoke it
by all the means of grace, and by all the charities of life, by a
devotion to our Saviour, and a life to the glory of God!
That the sword of the Lord will never bequietso long as there
is sin in the land — such crying sin as there is, sin going before
the people to judgment— is declared to you in the memorial
which we keep this day of the sacrifice of the death of Christ.*
It was for man's sin that the decree went forth from the mouth
of Jehovah: "Awake, O sword, against my Shepherd, and against
the man that is my fellow, saith the Louo of Hosts." Zeoh. xiii.
7. It was for the sin of man that that sword never returned into
its scabbard, until the Shepherd was smitten, and the Son of God
poured out his soul unto death. And if he spared not his own
Son, think ye that he will spate you 1 if he permitted not that
sword to rest and be still until his violated law was satisfied, think
ye that it can be quiet, so long as that law is daily broken through
the length and breadth of the land ? It cannot be. That sword
will follow sin, wherever it rears its odious head; will follow it
* It was the regular comrtmhion day of the Church.
13
with judgment, and with vengeance, until judgment be meted to
the uttermost farthing, and vengeance be glutted in the blood of
the sinner ! And yet God willeth not the death of the sinner,
and this we likewise learn in the memorial we celebrate this
day. What are these elements the tokens of? Of a love passing-
knowledge, of a compassion more unsearchable even than his
judgments ! This bread and wine which you gaze at, many of
you with so much unconcern, are voices of God, speaking to you
of his vengeance and of his mercy,—of his vengeance against sin,
of his mercy for the repentant sinner! Let them not speak in
vain, bat coming to you, as they do, simultaneously with this aw¬
ful illustration of their meaning, let us humble ourselves, and ask
in humiliation of the Lord: "O thou sword of the Loid, how
long will it be ere thou be quiet'?" and let us pray reeply, ear¬
nestly : "Put up thyself in thy scabbard, rest, and be still."
SERMON II.
PEODD BOASTING OUR BESETTING SIN AS A NATION,
Talk no more so exceeding proudly; let not ai-rogancy come out of
your mouth : tor the Loiin is a God of knowledge, and by him actions
are weighed, I. Samuei., ii. 3.
Although I touched, the last Lord's day, upon the judgments
of God which seemed to be abroad in the land, supposing that I
should have no further opportunity of improving the subject for
you, yet as it was hastily done, and my sermon upon that occa¬
sion partook more of a special than a general consideration of
God's dealings with national sins, I will renew the subject to-day,
for truly it needs a deep, permanent, and prayerful consideration;
and unless the impulse to that consideration be given from the
Temples of God, I know not whence we shall look for the trum¬
pet sound that shall warn the people of the land that the sword
of the Lord is drawn, furbished, and whetted.
It is neither an easy, nor yet a sate thing, to read the judg¬
ments of God upon individuals, let alone upon nations. The
more complicated the subject upon whom the judgment is in¬
flicted, the more the relations and contingencies of which it ad¬
mits, the more difficult is it to determine, in many cases, the con¬
nexion between it and the dealings of God. But, nevertheless,
there are such judgments, and there are many, many instances,
in which the connexion between the sin of the people and the
avenging hand of the Lord is so plain, that it strikes at once upon
the moral sense of the land, and forces from every tongue the
acknowledgement of that connexion. So far as the moral feeling
of the country has yet been borne to us, in view of the successive
strokes with which we have been visited, it is wonderfully unani¬
mous in its confession of the hand of the Lord, and wonderfully
hai'moninus in the cause to which it ascribes these visitations.
All, with one accord, lay it at the door of our exceeding pride
16
and arrogancy ; and therefore we utter to you, to-day, the words
of the Scripture, words spoken in view of the majesty and supre¬
macy of God : " Talk no more so exceeding proudly ; let not ar¬
rogancy come out of your mouth: for the Lord is a God of knowl¬
edge, and by him actions are weighed."
This is the great lesson which we need to learn, — to learn, not
as a mere thing of the head, but to learn so as to believe it, and
feel it sensibly affecting our lives, — " that the Lord is a God of
knowledge, and by him actions ate weighed." As individuals
we do not realize it enough, but, as a Nation, we do not recog¬
nize it at all. Because we coukl not adopt a State Religion, it
almost seems as if we considered ourselves as a Nation without
any religion at all! And as the necessary result of our not ac¬
knowledging God in Christ as a people, we have come to think
that God will not — nay, has no right to — interfere in our con¬
cerns, either in the way of mercies or judgments. This view,
strange as it muy sound, is much more nearly the truth than one
would imagine who has not weighed it well; more nearly the
truth, because it is merely adopting and diffusing throughout the
mass, — making that general which before was individual,— the
common opinion of irreligious men, that because they have not
bound themselves t<> God, in his Church, by direct personal vows,
they are, to a great degree, exempt from those spiritual respon¬
sibilities and spiritual dealings which are operative between God
and his professing people !
But this is a sad mistake, both as it regards individuals, and as
it regards a Nation:—sad, because it leads, in both cases, to
misery and ruin. Whether man, in his personal or in his social
capacity, recognizes or forgets his God, still is he — and no un¬
godliness of his creatures can ever make it otherwise,— " a God
of knowledge, and by him actions are weighed." And it is no fault
of his that his creatures will not know this and consider it; for
besides those manifest strokes of his wrath,— of which we spake
just now, and which the Pagans acknowledged and trembled at,—
he has given us a plain account, in the Old Testament Scriptures,
of his dealings with peoples as well as with individuals, — with
nations which recognized him not, as well as with those whom
he chose and guided according to the purpose of his own will.
17
That record is history written by the finger of God ; and as 6uch
should be studied by all who desire to understand the ways of
God,—by all who are not satisfied to look upon history merely as
the relation of nation to nation, but as a narrative of all the causes
which operate to elevate or depress a people in the scale of
things. And in this record we see the hand and the sword of the
Lord forever at work, dealing righteous judgment upon the right
hand and upon the left, rooting out, and pulling down, and de¬
stroying, and building, and planting. Jer. i. 10. Before us
does the inspired penman make all the great monarchies of the
Earth to pass in review, and upon their fate sheds a divine light,
which the spiritual mind appreciates, but which those who rule
nations, for the most part, scorn and ridicule. And as if to leave
man no excuse for disregarding him in the affairs of nations, he has
beforehand written, in prophetic characters, the history and fate
of many of them, that, when it came to pass, men might confess
his hand, and in their judgment of the causes of their decline and
fall, mingle his will and purposes with the secondary causes that
have operated to produce the effects which are seen upon the face
of the Earth. But this will, and these purposes of God, men
will not take into the account, even when the event has fully and
exactly verified the prophecy, but will rest altogether in the prox¬
imate causes which God has used merely as his means and instru¬
ments, showing the aversion which they have to acknowledge his
immediate interference in the events of the world, and removing,
at the same time, by their pertinacious assertion of man's free
agency, the most plausible argument wherewith the Devil could
furnish them against turning unto the Lord as the Supreme Ruler
of the Universe in humiliation and prayer,—the argument of an
unchangeableness in the Divine decrees !
If we believe the Bible, then, my hearers, we must believe that
God weigheth the actions of nations; for it is there all done be¬
fore our very eyes, and his judgment upon those actions exhibited
and executed If we believe the Bible, and the great mass of the
people throughout this land professes to believe it, we can resort
to it and see, as in a mirror, the sins which most provoked the wrath
of Jehovah ; and, in his punishment of those sins, lead the fate
which awaits us, if we indulge ourselves in them. God's ways
<a
18
are without repentance, and the sins which he haled then, he
hates now; and ihe sins which he punished then, will he punish
now. The like pride and arrogancy which brought down ihc
stroke of his sword in those days, will cause it to descend upon
us, and we shall writhe under it until we confess the sin, and turn
aside the wrath ! May we be prudent in time, as a Nation, and
study those records which can make us wiser than all ancients
or teachers ! Ps. cxix. 9S-100.
Among the sins which most surely brought down the vengeance
of God upon individuals and peoples, was proud boast/ng con¬
spicuous. It was one of those national iniquities which God
seems never to have passed over. When Pharaoh said, "Who is
the Lord, that I should obey his voice to let Israel go 1 I know
not the Lord, neither will I let Israel go," Exod. v. 2. he was
soon made to know who he was, in his own discomfiture, and the
overthrow of his hosts. When Moses had brought the children
of Israel to the borders of the land of promise, and was pressing
upon them his dying admonitions, how frequently he dwelt upon
this theme : " Beware," was his language, "lest when thou hast
eaten and art full, and hast built goodly houses, and dwelt therein;
and when thy herds and thy flocks multiply, and thy silver and
thy gold is multiplied, and all that thou hast is multiplied ; then
thy heart be lifted up, and thou forget the Lord thy God, which
brought thee forth out of the land of i'^gypt, from the house of
bondage ; and thou say in thy heart, My power, and the might of
my hand, hath gotten me this wealth." And, if they did, what
was the doom predicted against them? " As the nations which
the Lord desfroyeth before your face, so shall ye perish !" Deut.
viii, 11-20. And when David numbered the people, provoked
to it, as the Scripture tells us, by Satan, this seemingly slight re¬
liance upon the arm of flesh brought down the displeasure of the
Lord upon Israel, and he sent pestilence upon Israel, "and there
fell of Israel seventy thousand men. And God sent an angel unto
Jerusalem to destroy it: and as he was destroying, the Lord be¬
held, and he repented him of the evil, and said to the angel that
destroyed, It is enough, stay now thy hand." "And David lifted
up his eyes, and saw the angel of the Lord stand between the
earth and the heaven, having a drawn sword in his hand,
19
stretched out over Jerusalem." 1 Chron. xxi, 14-16. Although
God had led up Sennacherib against Jerusalem, yet when he ut¬
tered blasphemous words against him, despising God, and setting
himself above him, saying to Hezekiah, " Let not thy God, in
whom thou trustest, deceive thee, saying, Jerusalem shall not be
given into the hand of the King of Assyria." " Have the gods of
the nations delivered them which my fathers have destroyed V—
Isaiah xxxvii, 10, 12. his answer was: "Whom hast thou re¬
proached and blasphemed?" "By thy servants hast thou reproach¬
ed the Lord, and hast said, By the multitude of my chariots am I
come up to the height of the mountains, to the sides of Leb¬
anon; and I will cut down the tall cedars thereof, and the choice
fir-trees thereof: and I will enter into the height of his border,
and the forest of his Carmel " "Because thy rage against me, and
thy tumult, is come up into mine ears, therefore will 1 put my hook
in thy nose, and my bridle in thy lips, and I will turn thee back by
the way by which thou earnest." Isaiaii xxxvii, 23,24, 29. And ill
like manner, everywhere throughout the Uld Testament, is this sin
of putting confidence in Jlesh, in our own arm, in horses and chari¬
ots, instead of trusting in the arm of the Lord, visited with the
uniform, unvarying displeasure of Jehovah. " The Lord thy
God is a jealous God," is written upon every event of that most
awful record of God's dealings with his creatures !
If there is one sin more than another for which we stand con¬
spicuous, as a nation, it is this sin of speaking exceeding proudly.
There is no limit to our vain boasting ! If it were the boasting
of a Christian people, rejoicing because the God of Israel is their
God, because the Redeemer promised to ages and generations is
their Saviour, because the laws and the statutes of a Holy God are
the provisions of their moral code, because all the blessings which
Christianity fetches in her train are richly showered upon their
heads, it would enter as sweet incense into the presence of the
Lord, and crown us and our children with a lasting and a benefi¬
cial prosperity. But such is not our boasting! It is not in this
God of Israel that we put our trust. It is not in this Redeemer
that we rest as our strong tower and house of defence. It is not
in the lofty morality of Jesus that we look for our success. It is
not in the ameliorations of Christianity that we triumph and exult.
No. Our idols are our political institutions; our oracles are out
frail, short-sighted fellow-creatures; our tower of strength is our
numbers ; our shield is the immensity of our domain, and the vast-
ness of our resources; our rule of life is a tyrannous public
opinion. Every day is the ear of God vexed with the arrogancy
of our mouths, with our exceeding proud talk. Let what may
be the subject, it ends in self-glorification ! Our public speak¬
ers, from him that addresses himself to his fellow-citizens of the
same parish, to him that speaks for the ears of a Nation, all in¬
dulge the same exulting strain,—nay, are obliged to indulge it,
for a national vanity craves it, and is not satisfied without it. And
worse, the pulpit too, that which should humble man perpetually
to the dust, prostitutes itself to the same vile flattery, and fears to
speak to man the truths which he should hear and feel, if perad-
venture God may bless them to his soul. For these things God
will surely visit. Our sins will surely find us out. And have
they not already found us out ] In what has our proud boasting
of the perfectibility of human nature under free institutions ended?
In our being the bye-word of the world as repudiators and faith¬
less. In what has our arrogant talk of the superior acuteness of
our people resulted r( In covering the land from the one end to
the other, with cunning and roguery. In what has our haughty
maintenance of the freedom of opinion terminated 1 In every
man's being afraid of having any opinion of his own, so that virtue
and vice, justice and injustice, morality and immorality, stand upon
the same platforrq, and are covered over with the same mantle;
and that, not a mantle of charity, but of fear. And so will it go
on, until we turn from these vanities to serve the living God, until
we trust not in refuges like political institutions, and mortal men,
and public opinion, but take the arm of the Lord for our defence,
and the word of the Lord for our rule of life, and the spirit of the
Lord for our counsellor and guide. Subject after subject of
boasting will be snatched from us by the withering hand of the
Almighty, until laws, institutions, country, shall all be mingled in
one common ruin. And as the nations which the Lord destroyed
before our face, so shall we perish.
The natural effect of this exceeding proud talk, is beginning to
he perceived in a growing contempt for the word of God, and
21
the precepts of the Bible. No allowance is made lor the vvisdou-
of a Being like God, who sees the end from the beginning, and
knows the effects of kis positive, as well as his moral arrange¬
ments, upon the characters and conduct of his creatures, and the
wisdom of a people so exceeding wise, as we are every day told
that we are, is preferred to that which dictated the Bible, and
promulged its morals. Nothing is bowed to, even though it
come from the Bible, even though it be writ there with a pen¬
cil of light, unless it can be shown to be accordant with a limit¬
ed reason, or a short-sighted utilitarianism. All the positive
institutions of religion are beginning to be sneered at. The
Sabbaths are polluted, because man thinks one day as good as
another, although God has directly commanded its being hallow¬
ed, and reckoned it among the chief sins of Israel, as ye have
heard read in the Scriptures this day,* that they were not kept
sacred. The ministry is degraded, because man thinks one re¬
ligious person is as good as another, although God has distinctly
set apart an order of men for that vocation, with whom he prom¬
ised always to be, to the end of the world, and grievously pun¬
ished those who assumed its functions, under that dispensation
where immediate rewards and punishments testified his approba¬
tion or disapprobation. The sacraments are despised, thousands
going to their graves without baptism, or the sacrament of the sup¬
per, because man thinks faith in the heart is all that is necessary,
although Christ has said : " Except a man be born of water, and
of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God," John iii.
5. and," Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of Man, and drink
his blood, ye have no life in you." John vi. 53. And, from the
positive institutions of the Bible, be assured we shall very soon
pass over to the moral precepts ;— nay, have we not already as¬
saulted them 1 and shall pronounce murder, and adultery, and
theft, not such crying sins as God would make us believe. Alas
for my country; that it should so soon have run to such crying
corruption. Not yet a century old, yet vitiated to the core with
unbelief and immorality, and the people loving to have it so !
• Whereunto will all this come ? It will have first, my hearers,
* Ezek. xx. to v. 27, was the Morning Lesson for the 3d Sunday in
Lent.
unless the Spirit of the Lord raise a standard against tiio over¬
whelming flood, a natural punishment, and then be visited judi¬
cially l»y the Lord. These are two distinct results, as distinct as
the capital puni.>hment which awaits the murderer at the hands
of the law, and the remorse of conscience which he suffers as the
natural consequence of his crime. The spirit of pride, leading
to unbelief, to self-confidence, to a reliance upon human wisdom
and natural virtue, will very soon cover the country with the
fruits uf infidelity, and the works of the flesh, with lawlessness,
with adultery, with fornication, with uncleanness, with laacivi-
ousness, with hatred, variance, strife, envyings, murders, drun¬
kenness, and such like, until all virtuous persons shall feel that
the natuial punishment is so sore, they will long and pray for
a judicial visitation of the Lord, to purify and cleanse the foul¬
ness which is all about them. And it will come, in some
shape or other, "for the Loud is a God of knowledge, and by him
aci ions <ii e weighed,"—in just such shape as shall be most humi¬
liating to us, as shall cast our pride and our arrogancy to the dust.
God is nut satisfied that evils shall run only to their natural re¬
sults; upon those results he superinduces, in all the arrangements
of his punishments, a positive wrath, which will fall in judgment
upon those whose actions he has weighed, unless they deprecate
his wrath and turn away his fury ! Although, for the moment,
we see not that wrath gathering around us, still all actions are
open before his eyes, all actions are weighed in his balances—the
balances of the sanctuary; arid when the sins of the people are
tilled up, the sword descends, and they find the word "Tekf.l"
written against them : " Thou art weighed in the balances, and
found wanting !"
That such may not be our fate, let us strive and pray my be¬
loved fellow-Christians! What should we do in an emergency
like this, — an emergency pressing every day more and more up¬
on us, — but cry unto the Lord for help ! Although the prophe¬
cy had gone forth against Nineveh, yet when the people turned
unto the Lord with all their heart, in repentance, and in sackcloth,
God forgave them the wickedness of their sin, and remt ved his
avenging angel from over them. Although he had led up the
Assyrians against Jerusalem, yet when his Servant turned unto
kJ
him in earnest prayer, he sent his sword into the midst of his
enemies, and delivered them. Let us turn in like manne*' W'W
We know not what may be oveihanging us. We know not
what the Lord, whose eyes run to and fro in the earth, has seer
in us for punishment and wrath Our consciences fain tell us
that he has seen enough ! His successive strokes upon our ru¬
lers tell us that he has seen enough ! Let us take warning from
these glimpses which we have had of his glittering sword ! II
the gleam of that sword be so awful, what must be its full ven¬
geance, when it is poured out in fury upon a people 1 God avert
it from us!
But" in vain shall we pray if we do nothing," says old Bishop
Hall; " our prayers serve only to testify the truth of our desires;
and to what purpose shall we pretend a desire of that, which we
endeavour not to effect1?" Let us begin the remedy! "Let us
talk no more so exceeding proudly. Let not arrogancy come out oi
our mouths. Let us clear our skirts, at least, of this vain boasting,
of which the country is so guilty. Ten righteous men in Sodom
would have saved it, and a few determined Christians may avert
the wrath of the Almighty from this land. Will you be these
Christians '( Will you humble yourselves before God, and give
him the praise and the glory of all the good which we enjoy, and
take to yourselves the shame and the contusion of face which be¬
long to the guilty1? If ye will, that humiliation will give power
to your praye'S, and earnestness to your endeavours. If ye will,
ye may set an example that shall bless your homes for ages to
come.
One question more ; will ye add to this prayer and this humi¬
liation, a Scriptural view of vice''? Ah, my hearers, we are all
guilty in this particular, calling good, evil, and evil, good,—sweet,
bitter,and bitter, sweet. We do not make the distinctions which
we should do, in our conversation, in our actions, in our social in¬
tercourse, between virtue and vice. Besides the punishment upon
vice wherewith God has promised to visit it, there is a punishment
which society is bound to inflict—sternly to inflict—else will that
society itself reap the bitter fruits of its neglect! Every crime
which society lightly passes over, is, iti so far, encouraged by so¬
ciety ; lor ofttimes the severest punishment of vice is the social
24
punishment. Man can often better bear death, than the stern se¬
verity of the social circle ; but that severity is needful, until re*
pentance and a sufficient probation shall have again opened the
door for the readmission of the contrite penitent. But the im¬
penitent sinner should be frowned from its ranks! its doors should
be closed in his face, as the virtue of our own firesides is regard¬
ed ! his name should never cross the lips of the virtuous, save fof
reprobation, or for prayer. Hear, Christian, what the Epistle
for the day prescribes as your duty 1 " And have no fellowship
with the unfruitful works of darkness, but rather reprove them.
For it is a shame even to speak of those things which are done of
them in secret." Is this so ? See to it that it be so, for if it b*
not, God will draw his sword against the righteous and the wick¬
ed together, and then shall it not return into its scabbard!