fall in agonies under the stroke. The bolted door is no barrier against its intrusion; the power of medicine no antidote to the noisome malady. Thousands and tens of thousands fall on the right hand and on the left; and it has been known that this sweeping scourge has often swelled the bills of mortality more in a few weeks, than the whole train of common diseases have in as many years. Never do death’s arrows fly so thick or so envenomed, as when he fills his quiver with the plague; and never is the grave so crowded with dead, as when the pestilence waiteth at its gates. Though the land before it should resemble the garden of Eden, yet behind it the scene will be like a desolate wilderness. And were it not for that hand, which guides its progress, and limits its commission, nothing but rapid desolation and destruction would ensue; especially if we consider, that there follows close at his heels, 3. FAMINE. As bread is the staff of life, if the prop be removed, the constitution must necessarily fall. The vitals deprived of their wonted nutriment, must languish and die, under one of the most painful and insatiate sensations of nature. As famine is an evil in effect, the causes which produce it may be various. The spread of war, the want, or excess of rain, parching or vitiating the fruits of the earth, great inundations, blasting and mildew, long sieges, intense heat, a long frost or multitudes of devouring insects, locusts in particular, called by one of the prophets, “God’s army,” may, and often have, in their turns, introduced the plague of famine. But who can describe, or bear a description of such scenes as those which mark the effects of this pale visitant! when, as in Samaria’s siege, those things which the stomach would nauseate the very mention of, in a time of plenty, are coveted as food, when the unhappy sufferers have been driven to the horrid necessity of turning cannibals, and casting lots for each others’ persons, till at last a want of every resource brings death, and closes the ghastly scene. A visitation this, one would think, sufficient to alarm and reform a careless people; and yet it is recorded, as an astonishing instance of stupidity and hardness of heart in Israel, that when God “gave them _cleanness of teeth_ in all their cities, and want of bread in all their places, they returned not” unto him that smote them. Amos, iv. 6. So that divine justice was obliged to repeat the stroke, by that, which is of all others the most tremendous visitation of Jehovah, the