Do you ask me what I suppose to be the purpose of this visitation—and what, therefore, we have to do as a nation and as individuals by way of repentance and amendment? I venture not to answer _particularly_, picking out the precise sins which characterise us as a people, for which God is provoked, to visit us with present wrath, or for which He is but graciously chastising us, that we may cease from them ere they bring forth His displeasure. I rather bid you consider for what reasons God sent His sore plagues among His people of old, and then ask yourselves what there is in us like unto them, what we lack that God thus laboured to produce in them. I do not even venture to say that God is visiting sin at all. He is the Judge, not I. When I am called to the bedside of a sick man, I am bidden by the Church to admonish him—“Whatsoever your sickness is, know you certainly that it is God’s visitation.” There may be a natural cause for it—he may know it, and I may know it—he may have inherited it, or “accidentally and innocently,” as we say, caught it, or by wicked conduct incurred it; he may be able to connect it throughout with its earthly origin, tracing the effect clearly and completely to a natural cause. Nevertheless, I tell him “It is God’s visitation.” I then enumerate some of the purposes of God’s visitations: to try patience, to increase faith, to correct what is amiss. If I know his life—or he opens his mind to me and reveals it—I point out what seem to be provoking sins, or crying defects, and bid him consider whether these are not among the probable causes of his trouble—anyhow, (I tell him) they are things which he is now admonished to correct; and, if he accuses and condemns himself for all that he can discern as amiss, and resolves by all means to draw nearer to God, this will be accounted an acknowledgment of God’s ownership and rule of him, which will cause the Holy One to return from His hiding-place, and show again the favour of His countenance.