A DAY OF HUMILIATION. [TO THE EDITOR OF THE "SPECTATOR."
SIR,—Is it any wonder that with all our blood-guiltiness, pro- fessing as we do to be a Christian nation, the Almighty should allow calamities and chastisement to fall upon us, turn our figures and calculations upside down as it were, to show us that there is some one else to reckon with, and that we cannot have it all our own way ? The lines of Cowper are familiar to some of your older readers, but they are well in place here. Speaking of England's fast-days for national sine, he writes :— "Thy fastings, when calamity at last Suggests the expedient of a yearly fast,
What mean they ? Canst thou dream there is a power
In lighter diet at a later hour, To charm to sleep the threatening of the skies, And hide past folly from all-seeing eyes ?
The fast that wins deliverance, and suspends
The stroke that a vindictive God intends, Is to renounce hypocrisy ; to draw Thy life upon the pattern of the law ; To war with pleasure idolised before ; To vanquish lust and wear its yoke no more. All fasting else, whate'er be the pretence, Is wooing mercy by renewed offence."
The only mistake Cowper has made in the above lines is in describing God as vindictive, whereas we know he is a God of love. The advocates for a day of humiliation, on the other hand, regard him as a God of war. Which is the more
Christian view P—I am, Sir, &c., J. LATCHMORE. [We have been obliged to leave out half of our cone- spondent's letter for reasons of space.—En. Spectator.]
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