Wesley Corpus

You may buy intelligence, where the shock was yesterday, but not where it will be to-morrow, to-day. It comes I The roof trembles J The beams crack | The ground rocks to and fro! Hoarse thunder resounds from the bowels of the earth ! And all these are but the beginning of sorrows. Now, what help? What wisdom can prevent, what strength resist, the blow 7 What money can purchase, I will not say deliverance, but an hour's reprieve? Poor honourable fool, where are now thy titles? Wealthy fool, where is now thy golden god? If any thing can help, it must be prayer. But what wilt thou pray to? Not to the God of heaven; you suppose him to have nothing to do with earthquakes. No; they proceed in a merely natural way, either from the earth itself, or from included air, or from subterraneous fires or waters. If thou prayest, then, (which perhaps you never did before,) it must be to some of these. Begin: “O earth, earth, earth, hear the voice of thy children : Hear, O air, water, fire !” And will they hear? You know it cannot be. How deplorable, then, is his condition, who in such an hour has none else to flee to ! How uncom fortable the supposition, which implies this, by direct necessary consequence, namely, that all these things are the pure result of merely natural causes! But supposing the earthquake which made such havoc at Lisbon should never travel so far as London, is there nothing else which can reach us? What think you of a comet? Are we absolutely out of the reach of this? You cannot say we are; seeing these move in all directions, and through every region of the universe. And would the approach of one of these amazing spheres be of no importance to us? especially in its return from the sun; when that immense body is (according to Sir Isaac Newton’s calculation) heated two thousand times hotter than a red-hot cannon-ball. The late ingenious and accurate Dr. Halley (never yet suspected of enthusiasm) fixes the return of the great comet in the year 1758; and he observes that the last time it revolved, it moved in the very same line which the earth describes in her annual course round the sun; but the earth was on the other side of her orbit.