urther contended that it was yet more
difficult to realise that our earthly home would become the
scene of a vast physical catastrophe. Imagination recoils
from the idea that the course of nature--the phrase helps to
disguise the truth--so unvarying and regular, the ordered
sequence of movement and life, should suddenly cease.
Imagination looks more reasonable when it assumes the air of
scientific reason. Physical law, it says, will prevent the
occurrence of catastrophes only anticipated by an apostle in
an unscientific age. Might not there, however, be a
suspension of a lower law by the intervention of a higher?
Thus every time we lifted our arms we defied the laws of
gravitation, and in railways and steamboats powerful laws
were held in check by others. The flood and the destruction
of Sodom and Gomorrah were brought about by the operation of
existing laws, and may it not be that in His illimitable
universe there are more important laws than those which
surround our puny life--moral and not merely physical
forces? Is it inconceivable that the day will come when
these royal and ultimate laws shall wreck the natural order
of things which seems so stable and so fair? Earthquakes
were not things of remote antiquity, as an island off Italy,
the Eastern Archipelago, Greece, and Chicago bore
witness.... In presence of a great earthquake men feel how
powerless they are, and their very knowledge adds to their
weakness. The end of human probation, the final dissolution
of organised society, and the destruction of man's home on
the surface of the globe, were none of them violently
contrary to our present experience, but only the extension
of present facts. The presentiment of death was common;
there were felt to be many things which threatened the
existence of society; and as our globe was a ball of fire,
at any moment the pent-up forces which surge and boil
beneath our feet might be poured out ("Pall Mall Gazette,"
December 6, 1886).

The preacher appears to entertain the notion that the occurrence of a
"catastrophe"[18] involves a breach of the present order of
nature--that it is an event incompatible with the physical laws which
at present obtain. He seems to be of opinion that "scientific reason"
lends its authority to the imaginative supposition that phy