Great Disasters and Horrors in the World's History

by Allen Howard Godbey

and soon or late he is overtaken. Privation or pain is the inexorable penalty. Nature with trumpet voices shouts incessantly, “Whatsoever a man soweth that shall he also reap.”

The dominion of law is shown in the punishment of intentional disobedience—what men call sin. Its natural consequences are remorse, degradation, and spiritual death. A being of loftiest make is reduced to the likeness of a vile and venomous thing, crawling on its belly through the dust. Higher enjoyments are exchanged for such as are brutish and vile,—so to speak, the life of a humming-bird, flitting through all sunny climes and scenes and feeding on nectar, is exchanged for the life of a swine, feeding on offal, and wallowing in the mire. And never once is a wound made by the lash of law healed without a scar; in other words, transgression leaves its permanent impress on the soul, and the transgressor, despite the incantations of priest or prophet, finds himself poorer forever. He has forfeited the peace of them that do well. He has peopled the past with bitter memories; the future with gloomy forebodings. Reason untrammeled, loyal to the truth and pursuing it with success, has been substituted with reason fettered with chains of prejudice and vile affection, loving and making a lie.

Habit, with every successive stroke of action, has riveted these chains more firmly, till the victim is fast bound hand and foot, and delivered over to despair. The order of downward progress is, transgression, spiritual pain, stupor, insensibility, permanent degradation, which is spiritual death. In all this, there is no immediate or special judgment of God; no working of the Supernatural apart from natural law. If there were no God at all, while the constitution of man and the universe should remain as they are, the consequences to the transgressor would, in no wise, be altered. The sinner has nothing to fear but natural law, and sooner or later he finds this terrible enough.

But the punishment of sin is not the most impressive proof of the dominion of law. We feel that the willful transgressor is entitled to the punishment of his deed; hence, even when his punishment is severest, he fails to command our fullest sympathy. That the organization of Nature should be such as systematically to afflict the sinner, is not more than our sense of justice would prompt us to expect.

But the punishment of ignorance offers a more impressive spectacle—a more striking exhibition of the dominion of law. It seems that ignorance, especially when absolutely unavoidable, might be pleaded in bar of punishment; but nature obviously does not accept the plea. Nor does it avail us in this emergency to appeal from Nature to the Supernatural. The Supernatural refuses to entertain the appeal—positively declines to interfere—and natural law is left to take its course. The ignorant must suffer as surely as the guilty, and often his suffering is not less severe. For the slightest mistakes men forfeit happiness or life,—mistakes not of themselves alone, but mistakes of others. The sin or the error belongs to one man; the weight of the suffering often falls to another. Even our benevolence seems to be punished; for quite frequently the effort to help others brings disaster to ourselves—to our fortunes, to our families, our lives. Seeking to rescue another from fire or water, from the assassin or the robber; from the domestic tyrant or the foreign invader, we lose life, and, for lack of our help, our children are uneducated, exposed to moral evil, neglected, turned out of doors. The very tramp whom, for pity, we took in from the street, robs us, or murders us. Meanwhile the Supernatural beholds and makes no sign—gives no indication that it is at all concerned.

The suffering which comes through unavoidable ignorance, or which is visited upon the innocent through the deeds of the guilty, is, in its sum total, appalling and unspeakable. It is a dark and fathomless ocean, whose waves have been incessantly beating on the shores of this dreary world since time began. Every drop of this mighty ocean has been wrung out through the operation of natural law. An omniscient eye, every hour of the day and night, through countless ages, has gazed into these waters of anguish, and has declined to lessen their quantity by a single atom. No order from the Supernatural has gone forth to countermand any decree of Nature. Man has stood alone, grappling with his antagonist; and though he has cried incessantly, heaven has left him to his fate. Could there be a more awful demonstration of the supremacy of natural law?

Nature slays in babyhood one-third of all the children that are born into the world, just because they have not strength to resist her; meanwhile she carefully preserves such tyrants as Tiberius to finish their three score years and ten, though every added year means the murder of a thousand of the best men and women to be found in a wide empire. Why does not the Supernatural rise up from his place and smite the tyrant to the earth? Is it not plain that we are dealing with natural forces alone?

For six thousand years—God knows how long—Africa has been a hell, than which perhaps no man need ever fear a worse. If the pulpit may convince a sinner that as a result of his ways he shall be turned black, body and soul, and sent to Africa, there perpetually to renew his life as often as it is extinguished by the superstition and fiendishness of his fellows, and the said sinner do not then begin to live more wisely, it will be useless to talk to him of fire and brimstone. Upon this horrible theater of action perhaps 600,000,000 of human beings have been projected in every century, coming without their will to a heritage of nakedness and superstition and barbarity absolutely prohibitive of happiness here or hope for the hereafter; and yet there has been no interposition of the Supernatural in their behalf. The laws of birth and death preside, just as if there were no power above us that cares for either.

It is one of the ordinances of nature that life without nourishment shall not be prolonged. There is reason to believe that God would see the last man starved from off this planet, and the planet itself plunged onward into the void, tenantless forever, before he would command that stones should be made bread. Not twenty years ago, 18,000,000 in the northern provinces of China starved to death in a single year. What horrible anxiety of hollow-eyed mothers for gasping babes; what hideous deaths day by day; what acres of unburied corpses; what throngs about religious altars, wringing their hands, and screaming to the heavens, till it would seem that the agony of their prayers would have shaken the very stars from the sky; and yet there was none that heard, nor any that regarded. Not a single stone was turned into bread; not a single life was sustained without food; and if any survived, it was the heartless brother who wrested the last morsel from his weak and dying sister. A ghastly instance of the dominion of law, attested by 18,000,000 of dead witnesses. Can we look upon such a scene and ever again expect a petty interposition in behalf of an individual when it has been denied to a nation, and when the Continent of Africa has waited for it through countless ages?

Instances might be multiplied to infinity. Every horror recorded in this book is a proclamation of the supremacy of law—a warning to men that if they would shun the effect they must avoid the cause; that they must foresee the laws and attributes of nature, and provide; or they must perish. Strange that after ages of such awful teaching man is yet a fool—too lazy, too stupid to open his eyes; vigorously fighting against knowledge when every interest of his soul and body are at stake; saying supinely, “it makes no difference whether you know much or little, or what you believe, provided only you are sincere;” and in the same breath dishonestly hearkening to his prejudices or his passions; becoming a compound of ignorance, superstition and self-will, which first defies and rouses the powers of Nature, and then flies howling to the Supernatural for deliverance. When we think how little man has learned, notwithstanding the severity of his schooling, we are less disposed to accuse the harshness of Nature’s administration.