The preacher further contended that it was yet more difficult to realise that our earthly home would become the scene of a vast physical catastrophe.  Imagination recoils from the idea that the course of nature—­the phrase helps to disguise the truth—­so unvarying and regular, the ordered sequence of movement and life, should suddenly cease.  Imagination looks more reasonable when it assumes the air of scientific reason.  Physical law, it says, will prevent the occurrence of catastrophes only anticipated by an apostle in an unscientific age.  Might not there, however, be a suspension of a lower law by the intervention of a higher?  Thus every time we lifted our arms we defied the laws of gravitation, and in railways and steamboats powerful laws were held in check by others.  The flood and the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah were brought about by the operation of existing laws, and may it not be that in His illimitable universe there are more important laws than those which surround our puny life—­moral and not merely physical forces?  Is it inconceivable that the day will come when these royal and ultimate laws shall wreck the natural order of things which seems so stable and so fair?  Earthquakes were not things of remote antiquity, as an island off Italy, the Eastern Archipelago, Greece, and Chicago bore witness....  In presence of a great earthquake men feel how powerless they are, and their very knowledge adds to their weakness.  The end of human probation, the final dissolution of organised society, and the destruction of man’s home on the surface of the globe, were none of them violently contrary to our present experience, but only the extension of present facts.  The presentiment of death was common; there were felt to be many things which threatened the existence of society; and as our globe was a ball of fire, at any moment the pent-up forces which surge and boil beneath our feet might be poured out ("Pall Mall Gazette,” December 6, 1886).

The preacher appears to entertain the notion that the occurrence of a “catastrophe"[18] involves a breach of the present order of nature—­that it is an event incompatible with the physical laws which at present obtain.  He seems to be of opinion that “scientific reason” lends its authority to the imaginative supposition that physical law will prevent the occurrence of the “catastrophes” anticipated by an unscientific apostle.

Scientific reason, like Homer, sometimes nods; but I am not aware that it has ever dreamed dreams of this sort.  The fundamental axiom of scientific thought is that there is not, never has been, and never will be, any disorder in nature.  The admission of the occurrence of any event which was not the logical consequence of the immediately antecedent events, according to these definite, ascertained, or unascertained rules which we call the “laws of nature,” would be an act of self-destruction on the part of science.