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(John Angell James, "The Crisis--or, Hope and Fear
Balanced, in Reference to the Present Situation of
the Country" Sunday Morning, Nov. 28, 1819)

"From the day it was built until now, this city has so
aroused My anger and wrath that I must remove it
from My sight!" Jeremiah 32:31

Let us devoutly acknowledge both the source and
the justice of our calamities. The origin of the evils
that afflict us, is often to be found in the sins which
disgrace us.

Sin is the only thing in all the universe which God
hates, and this He abhors wherever He discovers it.

With our limited understanding, and feeble powers of
moral perception, it is impossible for us to form an
adequate idea of the evil of sin, or the light in which
it is contemplated by a God whose understanding
is infinite, and whose purity is immaculate. That law
which men are daily trampling upon, equally without
consideration, without reason, and without penitence,
is most sacred in His eyes, as the emanation and the
transcript of His own holiness. He is also omnipresent
and omniscient. There is not a nook or corner of the
land from which He is excluded. Of every scene of
iniquity He is the constant, though invisible witness.
The whole mass of national guilt, with every the
minutest particular of it, is ever before His eye!

His justice, which consists in giving to all their
due, must incline Him to punish iniquity--and His
power enables Him to do it!

He is the moral governor of the nations, and
concerned to render His providence subservient
to the display of His attributes. And if a people so
highly favored as we are, notwithstanding our
manifold sins, escape without chastisement--will
not some be ready to question the equity, if not
the very exercise of His administration?

His threatenings against the wicked are to be found
in almost every page of holy Scripture. Nor are the
threatenings of the Bible to be viewed in the light
of mere unreal terrors, as clouds and storms which
the poet's pencil has introduced into the picture; the
creatures of his own imagination, and only intended
to excite the imagination of others.

No! They are solemn realities, intended to operate
by their denunciation as a check upon sin; or if not
so regarded, to be endured in their execution as a
punishment upon our sins! Scripture gives us many
examples in which this has happened. It has preserved
an account of the downfall of nearly all the chief empires,
kingdoms, and cities of antiquity; and that, not as a
mere chronicle of the event, but as a great moral
lesson to the world. Scripture carefully informs us,
that sin was the cause of their ruin!

Volcanoes terrify with their eruptions, and submerge
towns or cities beneath their streams of lava!

Earthquake's convulsive throes bury a population
beneath the ruins of their own abodes!

Hurricanes carry desolation through a country!

Famine whitens the valleys with the bones of the
thousands who have perished beneath its reign!

Pestilence stalks through a land, hurrying
multitudes to the tomb, and filling all that
remain with unutterable terrors!

Wars have been agents in the unparalleled
scenes of bloodshed and misery!

Scripture proclaims that these are to be regarded
as a fearful exposition of the evil nature of
sin, written by the finger of God upon the tablet
of the earth's history!

Visit, in imagination, my countrymen, the spots
where many of these cities once stood, and you
shall see nothing but desolation stalking like a
specter across the plain, lifting its eye to heaven,
and exclaiming, amidst the silence that reigns
around, "The kingdom and the nation that will
not serve You, shall utterly perish!" As you stand
amidst the moldering fragments of departed
grandeur, does not every breeze, as it sighs
through the ruins, seem to say, as a voice from
the sepulcher, "See, therefore, and know that it
is an evil and a bitter thing to sin against the Lord!"

Let us devoutly acknowledge both the source and
the justice of our calamities. The origin of the evils
that afflict us, is often to be found in the sins which
disgrace us.

"From the day it was built until now, this city has so
aroused My anger and wrath that I must remove it
from My sight!" Jeremiah 32:31





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