4. EARTHQUAKE. Of all judicial dispensations, that which appoints the earthquake, is the most terribly vindictive; when the earth, thrown into dreadful concussions, cracks and opens like the gaping grave, or heaves and swells like the agitated ocean. Even the sword, the pestilence, and the famine, are mild in their effects, and slow in their progress, when compared with the earthquake. It often gives no warning, but overwhelms in a moment. Its subterraneous motions tear the bowels of the earth, and make its solid pillars bend, like a reed shaken with the wind; while the sound of thunder from beneath, and the crash of falling structures from above, are often heard at the same instant. A few minutes put a period to the works of ages; to wisdom’s archives; to all the boasted monuments of conquest and of fame; to all the pageantry of the great, and all the hoarded riches of the wealthy; to all the illicit pleasures of the licentious, and all the busy schemes of the proud or factious contending for sway. The loftiest towers, the strongest rocks, afford no hiding-place from its fury, but often increase the ruin. Nor is there any security in flight; since in the open field or spacious plain, a yawning gulf may open and devour multitudes in an instant, or jam them between the closing earth. “Tremendous issue! to the sable deep, Thousands descend in business, or asleep.” To the desolations which this messenger of Almighty vengeance has spread through the earth, let Lima, Callao, Catania, Jamaica, Lisbon, bear witness. In the last place, soon after the dreadful visitation which, in 1755, disturbed the procession of the cursed _Auto de fe_, and shook the foundations of that bloody tribunal, which Popish barbarity and superstition had set up; the king of Portugal represented his distresses to the king of Spain in a letter, in which was the following affecting passage:—“I am without a house, living in a tent; without subjects, without servants, without money, and without bread.” How humiliating the stroke, which reduces royalty to the dust, or brings all the dignity of crowned heads to a level with the common beggar! Such, but accompanied with circumstances infinitely more terrible and abasing, will that final catastrophe be, when “the Lord shall arise to shake terribly the earth; when it shall reel to and fro like a drunkard, and shall be removed like a cottage; and the transgression thereof shall be heavy upon it, and it shall fall and not rise again;” Isa. xxiv. 20; when “the loftiness of man shall be bowed down, and the haughtiness of men shall be made low, and they shall go into the holes of the rocks, and into the caves of the earth, for fear of the Lord, and for the glory of his majesty.” Isa. ii. 17, 19.