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there is the yet farther and deeper mischief of intimating that it is retributory and vindictive infliction . But on this point we have already animadverted , ( p . 48 . ) Cholera is not more closely connected with crime than with calamity . It attacks those who drink , but it spares pot those who oply starve . It seizes alike on the constitution which vicious indulgences have shattered , and on that which virtuous privations have enfeebled . There is but one way in which vice is punished by Providence here , and that is by the sufferings , physical or
mental , which are its natural consequences . Of these , cholera may be an incidental aggravation , but certainly with no such precision as to entitle it to be selected and proclaimed as a divine punishment . Its career over the earth has evidently been guided by some other than a . retributory principle , and by one which is not moral but physical . The highest estimate , then , which can
be entertained of the efficacy of prayer and fasting , does not authorize any anticipation of their arresting its progress . Sinful enough we are , but that sin is aggravated , though professedly repented of , when we talk of the wrath and indignation of our heavenly Father in connexion with one of the results of those physical laws which are the operations of his unfathomable
wisdom and unbounded love . The efficacy of prayer is not in changing the course of nature . Since the age of miracles its force has been never physical but moral , it is the devout expression of our wishes , but can never effect the accomplishment of our wishes if they be inconsistent with those laws of nature which are the will of God . It may heal the wounded spirit , but not the maimed body . It may purify the heart , but not the atmosphere . In its province it is mighty , beyond that it is powerless . The slow and clumsy
machinery of the church has worked so as to furnish a strange exhibition of the futility of its forms . Prayers were issued by authority that the supposed plague might not reach our shores , and these having been read in the northern towns , through its rise , prevalence , and decline there are followed by others , in which , after having so long prayed that the disease , which was come ,
might be kept away , they now humble themselves on account of its arriving , when from them it has already gone . This is one of the frequently occurring absurdities of prescribed devotions . Thus it is , that a state religion attempts to avail itself of the supposed efficacy of prayer . In what the efficacy of fasting is presumed to consist , we cannot tell . The Lord Chancellor has
sorely misled JLord Londonderry if fasting have any physical power in the prevention of cholera . Fasting is the natural consequence xrf grief , and , therefore , in early ages and eastern countries , men endeavoured to express and to produce mental sorrow and abasement by abstinence from food . False and superstitious veligtona have generally abounded in fastings . , They have been
Untitled Article
The Fast Day and the Cholera ,. 151
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), March 2, 1832, page 151, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct1808/page/7/
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