United States or Sint Maarten ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
But this, as well as the taking of the Bastille, and other revolutionary falsehoods, will, I trust, be elucidated. The people are now undeceived only by their calamities the time may come, when it will be safe to produce their conviction by truth. Heroes of the fourteenth of July, and patriots of the tenth of August, how will ye shrink from it! Yours, &c. Amiens, Nov. 2, 1794.
Then he seems to have become a ferocious madman, and to have been implicated in the worst crimes of the Communists. He cherished a wild desire of revenge against this Jean Lebeau, to whom he attributed all his calamities, and by whom, he said, his brother had been shot in the sortie of December. "Here comes the strange part of the story.
Vain and gloomy ideas have absorbed his attention: he consents to groan under fanatical tyranny to writhe under political inflictions to live in error to languish in misfortune in the hope, when he shall be no more, of being one day happier; in the firm confidence, that after he has disappeared, his calamities, his patience, will conduct him to a never-ending felicity: he has believed himself submitted to cruel priests, who are willing to make him purchase his future welfare at the expence of every thing most dear to his peace, most valuable to his existence here below: they have pictured heaven as irritated against him, as disposed to appease itself by punishing him eternally, for any efforts he should make to withdraw himself from, their power.
Be merciful unto me, O God, be merciful unto me: for my soul trusteth in thee: yea, in the shadow of thy wings will I make my refuge, until these calamities be overpast. I will cry unto God most high; unto God that performeth all things for me. He shall send from heaven, and save me from the reproach of him that would swallow me up. Selah. God shall send forth his mercy and his truth.
Never did his stupendous activity find more constant employment; never did he show a higher courage than in the midst of all these calamities of which he seemed to feel the weighty responsibility.
God, who often makes calamities subservient to His will, permitted this very affliction to be the cause of the conversion of many of the natives, who might have otherwise died in their errors; for part of the country being ruined by the grasshoppers that year in which we arrived at Abyssinia, many, who were forced to leave their habitations, and seek the necessaries of life in other places, came to that part of the land where some of our missionaries were preaching, and laid hold on that mercy which God seemed to have appointed for others.
When the small calamities of a household occur, it is Wilhelm's philosophy that shows us how to meet them. Wilhelm was a sergeant in the German Army for five years. Now he is an American citizen, owning his own home, rearing his children to a liberty his own childhood never knew. But, save for the accident of emigration, Wilhelm would to-day be in the German Army.
Even men that are perfectly heedful, that are honest, and brave and endued with prowess, are seen to pay their adorations to men intoxicated with the pride of affluence and with even alcoholic stimulants. Some men are seen whose calamities disappear before even these are marked or noticed by them. Others there are who are seen to possess no wealth but who are free from misery of every kind.
The more he reflected and took counsel of his friends, the greater loomed the difficulties of the attempt and the more appalling the calamities his passage of that river would bring upon the Roman world. But when at last with the cry, "The die is cast!" he plunged into the river, there was an end for him to mental dissension, a freedom to plan and execute, an expansion of courage and power.
No. 30, he writes: 'Among the calamities of war may be justly numbered the diminution of the love of truth by the falsehoods which interest dictates, and credulity encourages. See ante, p. 9. See post, March 21, 1783.
Word Of The Day