What is the meaning of these things?—­for a meaning there must be; and we, I dare to believe, must be meant to discover it; for we are the children of God, into whose hearts, because we are human beings and not mere animals, He has implanted the inextinguishable longing to ascertain final causes; to seek not merely the means of things, but the reason of things; to ask not merely How? but Why?

May not the reason be—­I speak with all timidity and reverence, as one who shrinks from pretending to thrust himself into the counsels of the Almighty—­But may not the reason be that God has wished thereby to condemn not the persons, but the systems?  That He has punished them, not for their private, but for their public faults?  It is not the men who are judged, it is the state of things which they represent; and for that very reason may not God have made an example, a warning, not of the worst, but of the very best, specimens of a doomed class or system, which has been weighed in His balance, and found wanting?

Therefore we need not suppose that these sufferers themselves were the objects of God’s wrath.  We may believe that of them, too, stands true the great Law, “Whom the Lord loveth, He chasteneth, and scourgeth every son whom He receiveth.”  We may believe that of them, too, stands true St Paul’s great parable in 1 Cor. xii., which, though a parable, is the expression of a perpetually active law.  They have built, it may be, on the true foundation:  but they have built on it wood, hay, stubble, instead of gold and precious stone.  And the fire of God, which burns for ever against the falsehoods and follies of the world, has tried their work, and it is burned and lost.  But they themselves are saved; yet as through fire.

Looking at history in this light, we may justify God for many a heavy blow, and fearful judgment, which seems to the unbeliever a wanton cruelty of chance or fate; while at the same time we may feel deep sympathy with—­often deep admiration for—­many a noble spirit, who has been defeated, and justly defeated, by those irreversible laws of God’s kingdom, of which it is written—­“On whomsoever that stone shall fall, it will grind him to powder.”  We may look with reverence, as well as pity, on many figures in history, such as Sir Thomas More’s; on persons who, placed by no fault of their own in some unnatural and unrighteous position; involved in some decaying and unworkable system; conscious more or less of their false position; conscious, too, of coming danger, have done their best, according to their light, to work like men, before the night came in which no man could work; to do what of their duty seemed still plain and possible; and to set right that which would never come right more:  forgetting that, alas, the crooked cannot be made straight, and that which is wanting cannot be numbered; till the flood came and swept them away, standing bravely to the last at a post long since untenable, but still—­all honour to them—­standing at their post.