“Deacon, can you tell me how far it is to hell?”
The deacon’s heart was pained to think that a young man like that should talk so lightly; he passed on and said nothing. When he came round the corner to the church, he found that the horse had thrown that young man, and he was dead. So you may be nearer the Judgment than you think.
When I was in Switzerland many years ago, I learned some solemn lessons about the suddenness with which death may overtake us. I saw several places where land-slides had occurred, completely destroying whole villages; or where avalanches had swept down the mountain sides, leaving destruction in their wake. A terrible calamity happened in the year 1806 to a village, called Goldau, situated in a fertile valley at the foot of the Rossberg mountain. The season had been unusually wet, and this had made the crops all the more abundant.
Early one morning a young peasant, passing the cottage of an old man whom he knew, saw him sitting at the door in the full rays of the sun.
“Good morning, neighbor,” said he; “we are likely to have a fine day.”
“Time we should have a fine day,” growled the old man; “it has been wet enough lately.”
“Have you heard the report?” said the other. “Those who were up the earliest this morning declare they saw the top of old Rossberg move.”
“Indeed! like enough,” said the old man. “Mark my words, and I have often said it before; I shan’t live to see it, but those who are now young will not live to be as old as I am before the top of yonder mountain lies at its foot.”
“I hope it will not be in my day,” said the young man; and he passed on, little thinking how near the prediction was to a fulfilment, and that the ripening fields of corn and the abundant clusters of luscious grapes would never be gathered; but so it was.
The springs of water in the mountain had been overcharged by the excessive rains, and these, in forcing their way to the surface and toward the valley below, had loosened the masses of rounded rock which had been cemented together by a kind of clay, of which material the upper part of the mountain was formed. These huge masses at length gave way and fell headlong into the valley, burying the entire village and about eight hundred of its inhabitants beneath their weight.