THE following extract from a recent daily paper affords a solemn warning from the world's history of the sudden destruction that shall overtake the careless and impenitent:—
In the year 63 of the Christian era an earthquake skewed the city of Pompeii on what tenure her lease was held. Whole streets were thrown down, and the evidences of hasty repair are still to be detected. From this period occasional warnings were given in slight shocks, until, in the year 79, Vesuvius poured out all his old accumulation of terrors at once; and on the clearing away of the cloud of fire and ashes which covered Campania for four days, Pompeii, with all its multitude, was gone.
The Romans seem to have been fond of villas, and the whole southern coast, declares a writer to "The Architect," was covered with the summer palaces of those lords of the world. Vesuvius is now a formidable foundation for a house whose inhabitants may not wish to be sucked into a furnace 10,000 fathoms deep, or roasted sub œre aperto, but it was then asleep, and had never flung up a spark or stone from time immemorial. To those who look upon it now in its terrors, grim, blasted, and lifting up its sooty forehead among the piles of perpetual smoke that are to be enlightened only by its bursts of fire, the very throne of the powers of darkness, no force of fancy may picture what it was when the Roman built his palaces and pavilions on its side.
A pyramid of 3,000 feet high, painted over with garden, forest, vineyard and orchard, ripening under the southern sun, "zoned" with colonnades and turrets and golden roofs and marble porticoes, with the eternal azure of the Campanian sky for its canopy and the Mediterranean at its feet, glittering in the colors of sunrise, noon,, and evening, like an infinite Turkey carpet let down from the steps of a throne—all this was turned into cinders, lava, and hot water, on (if we can trust to chronology) the first day of November, A.D. 79, in the first year of the Emperor Titus.
The whole story is told in the younger Pliny's letters; or, if the illustration of one who thought himself born for a describer, Dio Cassius, be sought, it will be found that this eruption was worthy of the work it had to do, and was a handsome recompense for the long slumber of the volcano. The Continent, throughout its whole southern range, probably felt this vigorous awakening. Rome was covered with the ashes, of which Northern Africa, Egypt, and Asia Minor had their share; the sun was turned into blood and darkness, and the people thought that the destruction of the world was come.
At the close of the eruption Vesuvius stood forth the naked giant that he is at this hour; the palaces and the gardens were all dust and air; the sky was stained with that cloud which still sits like a crown of wrath upon his brow; the plain at his foot, where Herculaneum and Pompeii spread their circuses and temples, like children's toys, was covered over with sand, charcoal, and smoke, and the whole was left for a mighty moral against the danger of trusting to the sleep of a volcano.
Oh, heed the warning God gives in the scripture "The clay of the Lord will come as a thief in the night; in the which the heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat; the earth also, and the works that are therein shall be burned up.
Seeing then that all these things shall be dissolved, what manner of persons ought ye to be in all holy conversation and godliness; looking for and halting unto the coming of the day of God, wherein the heavens, being on fire, shall be dissolved, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat?"
“He that trusteth in his own heart” is a fool; and he that trusteth his own conclusions is no better.