But another lesson we may learn from the text, which I wish to impress earnestly on your minds.  These Galilaeans, it seems, were no worse than the other Galilaeans:  yet they were singled out as examples:  as warnings to the rest.

Believing—­as I do—­that our Lord was always teaching the universal through the particular, and in each parable, nay in each comment on passing events, laying down world-wide laws of His own kingdom, enduring through all time—­I presume that this also is one of the laws of the kingdom of God.  And I think that facts—­to which after all is the only safe appeal—­prove that it is so; that we see the same law at work around us every day.  I think that pestilences, conflagrations, accidents of any kind which destroy life wholesale, even earthquakes and storms, are instances of this law; warnings from God; judgments of God, in the very strictest sense; by which He tells men, in a voice awful enough to the few, but merciful and beneficent to the many, to be prudent and wise; to learn henceforth either not to interfere with the physical laws of His universe, or to master and to wield them by reason and by science.

I would gladly say more on this point, did time allow:  but I had rather now ask you to consider, whether this same law does not reveal itself throughout history; in many great national changes, or even calamities; and in the fall of many an ancient and time-honoured institution.  I believe that the law does reveal itself; and in forms which, rightly studied, may at once teach us Christian charity, and give us faith and comfort, as we see that God, however severe, is still just.

I mean this—­The more we read, in history, of the fall of great dynasties, or of the ruin of whole classes, or whole nations, the more we feel—­however much we may acquiesce with the judgment as a whole—­sympathy with the fallen.  It is not the worst, but often the best, specimens of a class or of a system, who are swallowed up by the moral earthquake, which has been accumulating its forces, perhaps for centuries.  Innocent and estimable on the whole, as persons, they are involved in the ruin which falls on the system to which they belong.  So far from being sinners above all around them, they are often better people than those around them.  It is as if they were punished, not for being who they were, but for being what they were.

History is full of such instances; instances of which we say and cannot help saying—­What have they done above all others, that on them above all others the thunderbolt should fall?

Was Charles the First, for example, the worst, or the best, of the Stuarts; and Louis the Sixteenth, of the Bourbons?  Look, again, at the fate of Sir Thomas More, Bishop Fisher, and the hapless monks of the Charterhouse.  Were they sinners above all who upheld the Romish system in England?  Were they not rather among the righteous men who ought to have saved it, if it could have been saved?  And yet on them—­the purest and the holiest of their party—­and not on hypocrites and profligates, fell the thunderbolt.