What do you mean by a calamity? Is it a mere accident, or an essential factor in the realization of the divine purpose in human history?
Are appalling calamities, like floods and earthquakes, the result of the working out of natural laws? Are they unmitigated evils? Were the floods in China and the plagues in India, which destroyed millions of lives, seemingly essential to the welfare of the surviving inhabitants of those overpopulated lands?
What were the effects of the Chicago fire and the San Francisco earthquake upon these cities? How far was the development of the modern commission form of city government one of the direct results of the Galveston flood?
To what extent is the modern progress in sanitation due to natural calamities? What calamities?
Is a great calamity often necessary to arouse the inhabitants of a city or nation to the development of their resources and to the realisation of their highest possibilities? What illustrations can you cite?
How do changes in the environment of men affect the moral quality of their acts? How do circumstances affect the kind of act that will be successful? During the Chinese revolution of 1912 in Peking and Nanking, looting leaders of mobs and plundering soldiers when captured were promptly decapitated without trial. Was such an act right? Was it necessary? What conditions would justify such an act in the United States? Would the same act tend equally to preserve the government in both countries?
Subjects for Further Study.
(1) Flood Stories among Primitive Peoples. Worcester, Genesis 361-373; Hastings, Dict. of Bible Vol. II, 18-22; Extra Vol. 181-182; Encyc. Brit.
(2) The Scientific Basis of the Biblical Account of the Flood. Ryle, Early Narratives of Gen. 112-113; Davis, Gen. and Semitic Traditions 130-131; Driver, Genesis 82-83, 99; Sollas, Age of the Earth, 316 ff.
(3) Compare the treatment accorded their rivals and competitors for power in their various fields by the following persons: Solomon, Caesar Borgia, the late Empress Dowager of China (Tz'u-hsi), Bismarck, the great political leaders of today in Great Britain and the United States and the modern combinations of capital known as trusts.