But this is not all. Here is a nearer enemy. The earth threatens to swallow you up. Where is your protection now? What defence do you find from thousands of gold and silver? You cannot fly; for you cannot quit the earth, unless you will leave your dear body behind you. And while you are on the earth, you know not where to flee to, neither where to flee from. You may buy intelligence, where the shock was yesterday, but not where it will be to-morrow――to-day. It comes! The roof trembles! The beams crack. The ground rocks to and fro. Hoarse thunder resounds from the bowels of the earth. And all these are but the beginning of sorrows. Now what help? What wisdom can prevent? What strength resist the blow? What money can purchase, I will not say, deliverance, but an hour’s reprieve? Poor honourable fool, where are now thy titles? Wealthy fool, where is now thy golden god? If any thing can help, it must be prayer. But what wilt thou pray to? Not to the God of heaven: you suppose him to have nothing to do with earthquakes. No: they proceed in a meerly natural way, either from the earth itself, or from included air, or from subterraneous fires on waters. If thou prayest then (which perhaps you never did before) it must be to some of these. Begin. “O earth, earth, earth, hear the voice of thy children. Hear, O air, water, fire!” And will they hear? You know, it cannot be. How deplorable then is his condition, who in such an hour has none else to flee to? How uncomfortable the supposition, which implies this, by direct necessary consequence, namely, that all these things are the pure result of meerly natural causes! But supposing the earthquake which made such havock at _Lisbon_, should never travel so far as _London_, is there nothing else which can reach us? What think you of a comet? Are we absolutely out of the reach of this? You cannot say we are; seeing these move in all directions, and through every region of the universe. And would the approach of one of these amazing spheres, be of no importance to us? Especially in its return from the sun? When that immense body is (according to Sir _Isaac Newton_’s calculation) heated two thousand times hotter than a red-hot cannon ball. The late ingenious and accurate Dr. _Halley_ (never yet suspected of enthusiasm) fixes the return of the great comet in the year one thousand seven hundred and fifty eight: and he observes that the last time it revolved, it moved in the very same line which the earth describes in her annual course round the sun: but the earth was on the other side of her orbit. Whereas in this revolution it will move not only in the same line, but in the same part of that line wherein the earth moves. And “who can tell (says that great man) what the consequences of such a contact may be?”