Two English gentlemen set off to-morrow across the desert with a single guide to Damascus, to examine the means of communication by water between the Mediterranean and Aleppo. From thence, should they be spared, they purpose going to Beer, and thence pass down the Euphrates with the view of ascertaining its fitness for steam navigation. Surveys have already been completed between this and Bussorah, of both the Tigris and Euphrates, by Mr. Ormsby, in part assisted by Mr. Elliot, and from Ana to Felugia by Captain Chesney of the Royal Artillery, and there remains between Beer and Ana to be examined. Through all that has yet been surveyed there is no obstruction, but it is expected there will be a little labour required in one or two points of what remains to be surveyed, before steam communications could proceed on the rivers. If these gentlemen thus labour for what perishes in the using, and run such risks, going as they are across the desert with a guide, whose language they do not understand, ought it to be called tempting God, in us going for such a work as ours is, to run similar risks and encounter similar dangers.
The deaths at present from the plague are confined to the Mohammedans and the Jews. To avoid it, many of the Jews have gone to Bussorah, and the Kourds who brought it here have fled from the city; a large caravan of Christians are now thinking of returning to Mosul, who were driven from Mosul three or four years ago by plague and its attendant famine.
The poor Jews have been robbed of every thing by the Arabs, and sent naked back, and there seems little better prospect for those who are going to Mosul: they have the Arabs on one side the road, and the Kourds on the other.
It is striking how fully and simply the Mohammedans admit the expected coming of our Lord and the end of the world. The end of our Lord’s coming they conceive to be to set his seal to Mohammed’s mission, and that all Christians will become Mohammedans. Still these fundamental errors in their views do not prevent a clear and distinct expectation similar to that of the heathen at the time of our Lord’s coming. Certainly no people can have a worse opinion of the state of the professors of their religion than the Mohammedans have; still, with the loss of zeal for their own, their heart seems full of a strong delusion to believe a lie, and hate the way of life, and above all, the Lord who is the true God and eternal life.
How blessed the 91st Psalm feels at such moments as these, in looking round on one’s little family, to know that every arrow that flies, winged with death, is no random shot, but that the Lord who is your life, and by whom your life is hid in God, directs them all. Call upon me, says the Lord, in the day of trouble, and I will deliver thee, and thou shalt glorify me. Blessed Lord, when thou hast (as thou most assuredly wilt do) delivered us, may we never forget to glorify and bless thee. Oh! what a blessed feeling it is to know that you are not under the general but especial and particular government of Jehovah—that he has redeemed you, and you are his—that he has engraven you on the palms of his hands; and that day and night he is watching to preserve you.
April 3.—An immense crowd of poor Jews left the city this morning, to escape the destruction of the plague. The Christians also are leaving in every direction they can find open. I fear these poor creatures in their flight can hardly fail to carry the plague with them.
I have lately read several of Erskine’s works, or little portions of his writings, and never did I see the pernicious effects of system displayed more legibly than in several of his most interesting, but as a whole, most delusive publications. In his view of Gospel freeness, and other places where similar views to those contained in that little work are promulgated, there seems, to my mind, a radical defect, that nothing in so good a man accounts for but the baneful effects of a system, and a secret insurmountable repugnance to the sovereignty of God’s government, and the individuality of God’s election in Christ Jesus, from before the foundation of the world. I do not mean that these doctrines are denounced; but they evidently are not entertained as the comfort and consolation of the soul, nor as they are represented by the Apostles, as the most overwhelming reasons for unlimited devotion to his service, who has thus chosen us with our bodies, souls, and spirits, which are his. He talks of spreading the beauty of the Lord Jesus, and the excellency of God’s love, not only as the pasture of their souls, who are born again of the Spirit, of which they undoubtedly are the legitimate, the only food and means of their spiritual growth, but as the cause of spiritual life in the unregenerate by being believed. Now, this appears to me a radical and fundamental error. Food does not give life, though it sustains and expands it. What he says of the effects of love, in moulding the soul to the likeness of the object beloved, is most true; but in order to the existence of this love, not merely faith in God’s love seems to be necessary, nor the reality of the things promised, but such a new creation in the soul, as shall see a desirableness in it and them. As we see in nature, when the heart is engaged by one object of affection, any demonstration of affection from another, which involves the relinquishment of it, not only does not give pleasure, but positive pain, though you know its reality, purity, and intensity; the fact is, the affections are occupied, and there is no place. So it is by nature with every man, and while he remains in this state, no knowledge of love, however real, intense, and devoted, when he sees its tendency to disconnect him from the only source of known enjoyment, by the substitution of that which he has no senses to appreciate, will ever be found available. It appears to me, that the spiritual immortal generation of the second Adam, the Lord from heaven, is in Scripture represented to be as real and absolute as the generation from our earthly head, and only invisible from being spiritual. It has its proper food, its proper growth. Without being thus begotten from above, though you could display all the beauties of him who is the chief among ten thousand, the altogether lovely, though you could display all the Father’s love to the church from the day he commanded his gathering it, till this day, it would be as powerless as spreading the most sumptuous banquet before the dead.
With respect to the general design of vindicating the government of God from the charge of partiality, which I feel to be at the bottom of Mr. Erskine’s views, I do not see that the Lord has committed it to us, but, whenever in the Old Testament or in the New, he pleads with his children against their ingratitude, it is from the specialty of his love. He does not say to the Israelites, I have dealt with you after a common dealing with all; but, with what nation has the Lord dealt as with Israel. So, in the New, he says, “I have chosen you, not you me.” In the prayer of our Lord, in John xvii. in the Epistles of Paul and Peter—in the Revelations, and so in all the called and chosen, and faithful, who are written in the Lamb’s book of life, and have been from the foundation of the world, from the beginning to the end, I see a constant reference made, and the warmest and most enlarged attachment of the affections demanded, on the ground of peculiar, especial, and personal choice on the part of God. That all this is consistent with every perfection of God’s character, and, therefore, with his equal justice and mercy, I have the fullest assurance, but that we are in possession of the means of shewing it, or that the Lord requires it at our hands, I feel fully assured of the contrary. And the danger Mr. E. seems to apprehend from stating the doctrines of election as they are usually stated, are more imaginary than real. For God, who by his Holy Spirit begets the soul again in the likeness of the divine nature, gives to that nature thus begotten the power of discriminating in its food between night-shade and sweet pasture.—When he has created in the soul of any human being the love of himself, he gives him, with this love, the privilege to rejoice that his name is written in heaven, and the minister of Christ is by no means embarrassed by all these apparent difficulties, for he has to display all the beauty of Christ, all the love of the Father, all the graces of the Spirit before the assembled world, knowing that all the sheep will hear, and feed, and grow, and that the goats will cavil and stamp down the pasture with their feet. But, ye believe not, because ye are not of my sheep, as I said unto you, My sheep hear my voice and I know them, and they follow me. Again, he that is of God hath God’s words, ye therefore hear them not, because ye are not of God. How and why this is we are not able nor willing to try to answer: all we can say is, hath not the Lord right to do what he will with his own. Shall the thing formed say to Him that formed it, “What makest thou?” And “Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right.” And many, many more like it.
April 4.—We were last night alarmed by the voices of apparently thousands of persons on the other side of the river; by degrees the discharges of guns were mingled with the cries, which gradually extended also to this side the river. We concluded it must be from a tribe of Arabs having broken into the city, the noise being exactly similar, only much more violent, to that of the two tribes of Arabs who were contending the other day. But after an hour’s suspense, we heard it was a concourse of Arabs to supplicate from God the removal of the plague from them.
The deaths from the plague do not seem to increase with any rapidity, these two or three days; 150 perhaps is the highest any day. On a preceding occasion, about 60 years ago, it amounted to near 2000 a day. There is with us the father of our schoolmaster, who had the plague at that time, and says you might have walked from one gate of the city to the other, and hardly have met a person or heard a sound. We trust it may be the Lord’s gracious purpose to take off the heaviness of his judgment, and spare yet a little longer this sinful city.