.

History is full of such instances; instances of which we say and cannot
help saying--What have they done above all others, that on them above all
others the thunderbolt should fall?

Was Charles the First, for example, the worst, or the best, of the
Stuarts; and Louis the Sixteenth, of the Bourbons? Look, again, at the
fate of Sir Thomas More, Bishop Fisher, and the hapless monks of the
Charterhouse. Were they sinners above all who upheld the Romish system
in England? Were they not rather among the righteous men who ought to
have saved it, if it could have been saved? And yet on them--the purest
and the holiest of their party--and not on hypocrites and profligates,
fell the thunderbolt.

What is the meaning of these things?--for a meaning there must be; and
we, I dare to believe, must be meant to discover it; for we are the
children of God, into whose hearts, because we are human beings and not
mere animals, He has implanted the inextinguishable longing to ascertain
final causes; to seek not merely the means of things, but the reason of
things; to ask not merely How? but Why?

May not the reason be--I speak with all timidity and reverence, as one
who shrinks from pretending to thrust himself into the counsels of the
Almighty--But may not the reason be that God has wished thereby to
condemn not the persons, but the systems? That He has punished them, not
for their private, but for their public faults? It is not the men who
are judged, it is the state of things which they represent; and for that
very reason may not God have made an example, a warning, not of the
worst, but of the very best, specimens of a doomed class or system, which
has been weighed in His balance, and found wanting?

Therefore we need not suppose that these sufferers themselves were the
objects of God's wrath. We may believe that of them, too, stands true
the great Law, "Whom the Lord loveth, He chasteneth, and scourgeth every
son whom He receiveth." We may believe that of them, too, stands true St
Paul's great parable in 1 Cor. xii., which, though a parable, is the
expression of a perpetually active law. They have built, it may be, on
the true foundation: but they have built on it wood, hay, stubble,
instead of gold and precious stone. And the fire of God, which burns for
ever against the falsehoods and follies of the world, has tried their
work, and it is burned and lost. But they themselves are saved; yet as
through fire.

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