Page:The Philosophy of Earthquakes, Natural and Religious.djvu/46

 42 of asserting, and exerting the infinitely superior value, and powers, and excellency of the spiritual part of us, destin'd to an immortal duration. And of all the great and public calamities, which affects us mortals, earthquakes claim the first title to the name of warnings and judgments. None so proper to threaten, or to execute vengeance upon a guilty people. Nor has any other, those annexed terrors, so much of the unusual, the unavoidable, the sudden and the horrible apprehension of being crush'd to death, or buried alive. And when in our own sight, these rare and extraordinary phænomena appear, it cannot but be a lesson to us, to do our duty toward that great Being, who, by a drop of water, can produce effects so prodigious.

That earthquakes proclaim themselves to mankind in this light, is further deducible from this observation, the ninth in our recapitulation of circumstances; that they are peculiarly directed to great cities, and maritime towns, those nurseries of wealth, luxury, and of all the evils naturally flowing therefrom. It would be childish to recharge from old history, or modern, a proof of it. We have no other notices of them. Look upon these two shocks we have here felt. We own that Hampsted-heath and Finchley-forest and Kennington-common were affected with it; yet it is notorious, that London was the center, the