A CURE FOR THE CHOLERA, • •• A B. C. S. Hie murui ahrneus esto, Nil conirira libi, iiulla pall««cereculp». PRINTED FOR THE \UTHOR, AT THE MISSION PRESS. — BOMBAY, 1826. A CURE FOR THE CHOLERA.. Hie murua ahencus cr(o Nil Comcire sibi, null;. i>al!escere culpa. I remember seemg 1 in the Gazette a receipt for le Cholera, admitted only in native practice, but reommended to the Society at large. As I cannot >oast of the slightest acquaintance with medicine, 1 uiy be considered an intruder, but I trust not an obcctionable one, as I come forward with no other [aim, than that of good will to all, and more so to those ho may be under alarm at the progress of this inxpressibly awful disease. To those who have quitted le rocky cliffs of their native land, the endearments f society, and the tenderer affections of that circle in hich they were born and bred, the change to a clime ike this can bring with it nothing to counterbalance o keen and lasting- a trial. And to be met, on our rst approach to the shores ofthe east, with the dings, that a scourge is on the-face of that part we re to inhabit, renders the pang of our separation nore overwhelming — we cannot say with the poet, Ccelum non animae mutant quee trans mare curmt M for the heart that once was light, and beat with 11 the elasticity of unclouded health and happiness, ms drunk in a bitter draught, which pours its deleterious poison through the whole system. If to amass ealth be our only end and aim, the picture of wretchdncss is then complete— For the invisible shaft, that 4644?^ 4 estroys so suddenly the vital principle, will fly by ight as nell as day ;— and in that silent hour of darkess, when cradled in a false and imaginary sleep of ecurity, to be awaked, as if by a thunder clap, with ie voice, " This night is thy soul required of thee," is s afflicting to the man, as it is harrowing to his concience — And I put it to your" daily observation, hether thousands have not been summoned in as my s < eriously awful a way ? Whether each individual who )eruses this, is not obnoxious to the same tremendous all ? Under what class of men can we number those, lcn, who obdurately and obstinately shut their eyes gainst this momentous truth, and fly in the very ice of that danger which they would give worlds to void ? ¦ If happiness be their object, can happiness dwell itfa fear? Who, without a hope, a certain hope of a blissful issue to such a messenger as death, ever laid Is head on his pillow, and, without an involuntary i udder, pondered a while on his state, should ! that instant be struck off from the land of the ing? An eternity of pain or pleasure is bere him: — he takes the final plunge without a spot iiid the surrounding gloom whereon to rest his eye, lknowing where he goes, companionless and alone, is not an ordinary topic, and one which can be ghtly passed over. It is one, in which the wretched happy existence of our eternity is bound up ; and if ; spend years in alleviating the weaknesses and series of this mortal frame — this perishing body — rely to give some thought to its nobler part, the soul, not unbecoming those who style themselves Lords creation, but whose more glorious ambition it is, to 5 reign as Kings and Princes, with him who has purchased so bright an abode for a rebellious race. I address not the scoffer and scorner, but I put it to the ense of those who believe such things to be, but earch them not, if it is consistent with the dignity, vcn the fallen dignity of human nature, to give so mch concern to the body, and so little to the soul? s that the most important, which passes away as a ladovv, and crumbles in the dust ; or that which irvives the wreck of mortality and its dismemberment from so corruptible a tenement, and is fitted for njoyments, which, " eye hath not seen, norear heard, or heart of man conceived ?" Oh, I beseech you to jive it attention, ere it is too late. For the sake of I our own immortal benelit, I entreat you not to mm the proffered reward. Would that I had the te- voice of a trumpet; louder and louder would I ten sound in your ears — " Awake, arise, eternal spirit ; shake off this withering sloth ; see to what you are an heir ; and quitting the ephemeral concerns of life, press forward to a better hope, a nobler end, a more abiding state of felicity, incorruptible in the heavens." It is an essential part of our freedom from pain nd gloom, to have the knowledge of our state of ecurity ; and as in matters of common life, so does lis hold good in concerns of a higher nature. The utant an uncertainty is mingled with our thoughts c loose peace of mmd r till the intruder is expelled, "hus we cannot have a more powerful stimulus or resisting doubts and fears, than the instinct Inch is implanted by nature, in our own breast, 'he intuitive perception, as it were, of the evil of ountenancing fear leads us to anticipate even its 6 approach with terror. The instance in which this principle is strongest, is that of death. Every generous and honest heart will confess the fact. The greatest coward, indeed, may die in a hardened state of stupidity and insensibility to the future. But unless we would shut our eyes against the light of reason and religion, we should find it a sublime employment to take heed to the comfort of the soul, which is to last through eternity. It betrays a pitiful littleness of mind to be careful for the less, and not the greater object of our love and attention — our bodies, and not our souls — this fleeting- existence, and not an immortal life ; to be asleep to all the realities of religion, — to stifle the repeated warnings of an awakening conscience — to float heedlessly and madly on a wreck down the rapid stream which is bearing us to the bosom of a fathomless ocean, and, without one cry for mercy or for help, to view the impending waves encircle our bead and close over our sinking form. Am I giving you an exaggerated representation of the gloom of such a state — or do not your own hearts echo to the truth of the assertion, " that as children fear the dark, so do men fear death ?"* — Many whom I address have seen the amazing difference between those bending under the stroke of dissolution, with the peace of assured bliss awaiting their departure, and those doing the same who have lived without God in the world, and are only beginning to recover from their spiritual lethargy. The contrast is surely worth consideration. To laugh away the overwhelming impressions of the solemn scene in which we have accompanied a friend, as it were, to the confines of eternity, and delivered him. up to the mysterious * Bacon. 7 bscurity of the grave ; to return without emotion from hat inevitable portal which shuts alike on all, and rom which no one having entered can come forth, till eath and hell shall give up their inmates ; — f say to mother the feelings, excited on such an occasion, is lly indeed ; to disregard their manifold intimations, madness ; and to spurn their control, is an act of eep indignity, to him who has planted such tender ympathies in our breast. How many protestations have been made in an hour like this ! Some no doubt will think it beneath their manliness to trouble themselves about the matter; but the generality have experienced an undefined fear in which they dread to indulge, but cannot resist. If, then, watching the flight of a friend's spirit into eternity induces overwhelming gloom and distress, how far more appalling must be the actual flight to the being himself, when hovering on the brink of the awful precipice ? The earnest and long repeated calls of conscience then double their vigour, not to soothe, but to affright the sinner. His feeble nature, then impartial in its decisions, can offer no excuse for having rejected them ; and the fact that a mighty hand is upon him, hurrying him whither he would not go, with all the recollections of violated laws, and a life of worthless inactivity, sensual indulgence, and habitual crime, concentrating their long lost but too fatally reviving power, — like the scattered rays of the sun drawn through a focus into one irradiating and burning point, — and surging their malignant and bitter torments on his mind and conscience, gives to despair all its horror, and to death its victorious sting, when combined with the knowledge, that the exquisite sufferings of the state on which he enters 8 are endless, and that as'the body in which he rises at the second ad rent of an avenging Gon, is clothed with immortality, so its capacity of suffering- will bo inexpressibly greater, and the infliction incomprehensibly deeper. This is no new doctrine my friends, though it may never have been heard by you before. The body you now bear about, and which will mingle with the dust, or be scattered to the winds of heaven, by some mysterious and divine process, shall be col • lected together, limb to limb, joint to joint, and sinew to sinew, and shall spring from its dark abode an imperishable tenement, no longer bending beneath the extremes of pleasure or pain, but capable of sustaining these everlastingly, as either fitted, in this life, for the bright and glorious enjoyment of heaven, or the abounding misery ofhell. These are no fictitious tales or delusive fables. However cheerlessmay be the prospect of futurity to many, the blessed ascendency of a lofty hope over the temporary gloom of dissolution, is the privilege we are all entreated to accept. What ! will you quietly yield up your claim to so fair a prospect, because, while the majesty of heaven is thundering forth his irrevocable commandments, some puny mortal lifts up his faultering voice below, and dares assert that all you hear, and your reason and religion confirm to be true, is the wild and visionary fancy of an enthusiast? Will you pin your faith, your eternal interest, on the word of one or two individuals, without searching the fountain head ; the word which has been acknowledged by general consent, for nearly two thousand years, to be the revelation of an Almighty Providence ? Will you follow, without thought, the dark and dreary track of those, whose 9 yes and deaths have given the lie to their proessions, the Prince of whom,* on the verge of an ternal existence, exclaimed, "Galilean thou hast onquered !" And in what differs the open apostate om the mere nominal and thoughtless Christian ?—? — 'he former has the ingenuousness to disclose his 3inions ; the latter the disingenuousness to bear a ame, he shows no respect for, and the founder of hich he dishonours every day of his life. If we hear of a professed mineralogist, botanist, mechanic, or mathematician, and discover that he deals in empty sounds, we set him down as a vaunter, or something worse. If he adopt the name of any of those lights of science, and enlist under their banners, and designate himself a Newtonian, a Huttonian, a follower of Descartes or Pascal, and we find him betraying a palpable and gross ignorance on the very confines of an examination into their peculiar and separate principles and doctrines, we are apt to think that mental aberration has lead him to such folly, or that he must be the dupe of his own hypocrisy. If we know one, well informed on matters which he has made his principal study, upholding openly the dogmas of one man, and putting into practice those of another, we gather our estimate of his character and opinions from the latter and not the former. But there is no esoteric and exoteric doctrine in Christianity. We cannot please the Deity and serve the devil : nor is there any medium between God and Mammon. AYe must belong exclusively to the one, or the other. Ts this a harsh and unmerciful alternative? So will you think many to be, which are nevertheless im- * Julian. 12 10 perious truths. So is death, life, and pain — You cannot avert or avoid them. And so are a thousand injunctions which admit of no excuse and nochange. My object in setting before you the awful terror "death, the tremendous judgments of God, and the >olluting influence of sin and unbelief, is to call your ttention to these very facts as passing now before our eyes in this country — and to suggest the only ode of controlling the fear of dissolution, of turning le wrath of an offended Maker into mercy, and of übduing the hateful energies of corruption and de>ravity within us. KWhy is itthat the loveliness and purity of a perct character, considered abstractedly, are the cause wonder and admiration— and yet the least approach o a holy disposition, the subject of ridicule, when een in others, and but too often the origin of shame hen contemplated in ourselves ? Or why do we ncourage the progress of him who labours in some >ranch of science, and the more he unravels of its ifliculties, the more we laud him, though he be aborbed in that study alone ? We blame not the keeness of political feeling, nor the difference of opinion n the occurrences of the day, the conduct of men, or he productions of genius ; we blame not the unabaed ardour of those who waste life and fortune in the |:quirement of some single department of knowledge ; st the moment a man pays but a moderate regard to c more essential moralities of the law of God, and eks todirect his faultering steps by some better way, an that which the mere light of reason glimmers feey upon, the whole artillery of ridicule is opened upon m; and obloquy, contempt, and envy do their most to obstruct the path he has chosen to journey 11 in. In, the higher walks of life,, this is mournfully observable : where, in such hostility as this, is the liberality of feeling, so vauntingly held to be the prevailing virtue of the day ? Read the Bible, the oldest and best authenticated history of man, and the only volume which bears the stamp of inspiration on its pages, and you become that insupportably horrible being, "A new light." But dip into Herodotus, Livy, Gibbon, or Robertson, and you then are engaged in a rational, sensible work. This is extraordinary. In these books I learn nought of the creation of this world I am moving in ; how this mysterious abode of man was produced, and fixed in that eternal " Sphere whose centre is every where, and whose circumference is no where"* — who first spread a carpet over the chaotic mass, and breathed vitality into every tender herb and shrub that sprung to its surface ;—-who; — - who linked the impalpable soul to a material tenement, and by whose viewless but controlling hand the •tfee- convicting 1 powers of goad and evil rise or fall ; — vho wrought out that stupendous plan of redemption, vhich required the spotless purity of a spiritual being o complete, as it did the mighty and majestic energy fan omniscient God to contrive it; who will finally lear this globe and its inhabitants from every parti- tie of the pollution that has stained so fair a frame, nd who will reinstate both it and them in their primeval beauty and brightness. No, I learn all this only n the Bible— that is the lever by which the tremendous mass of moral iniquity, a world of sin, must be moved ; and no sublimer power than that which is jeld forth to us in its contents, can be applied for effecting so noble a change — and each individual of * rascal. 12 our race can specially and sensibly partake of this privilege, if he will but deign to receive the blessing, as it is offered to him. Since in the operations of nature we behold so much stability, and so much unchangeableness— since we observe that those bright and silent rulers of the night unabatingly perform their vast revolutions, that the orb of day glows unceasingly through the varying seasons of the year, that the mighty deep obeys some invisible hand, and is bound round this solid globe by a mysterious law, which never fails ; that the earth we tread on has been rolling for ages without one deviation from its appointed track; that we ourselves, live, and breathe, and move, by certain fixed principles, the very cessation of the influence of the least of which would destroy the vital power within us; in short, since we observe that all nature proves by a demonstration as clear as light, that God is immutable in his works, we are necessarily led to infer that he is also immutable in his word. Since, from our own experience and that of past ages, we put so much faith on this immutability in the system of na 'urc, as to provide against the coming changes of the ytar, and different divisions of day and night; and, in order to satisfy the wants of the body, sow the seed and plant the shrubs which we know to have never changed their qualities ; since we trust to the fixed laws of science, and bear our lives and properties over the foaming deep, and find we have never failed in our reasonable expectations ; since we see so much regularity and consistency in all those laws which govern the material world, and by which our temporal condition is so deeply affected ; is it not folly to suppose, that the same inivariableness is not adhered to by the 13 Almighty in all those laws which he has appointed for the government of the spiritual world, and by which the condition of our souls shall be unalterably fixed ? Since we actually exercise our faith on the regularity of the laws of nature, and meet, by prudent labour and care, the wants which every change in season brings, why do we not exercise the same faith on the declarations of God, in reference to the more momentous concerns of an everlasting life, and prepare to meet those greater and sublimer changes, which death and eternity must introduce ? AVhat, then, does this incomprehensible and gloomy word, " Faith" at last mean ? The entire reliance you put on the discoveries of science induce you to avail yourselves of the benefitoi them, and you shew your belief, or faith, in them, by launching on the ocean and sailing to this or that distant part of the globe ; and if you will not credit these discoveries, you cannot share the advantages to which they lead. Thus your works, or the effects of your belief, as seen in your conduct, arc made the test by which jour faith is known. You cannot have the advantages resulting from faith, unless you act upon it. In the instance above supposed, yon admit the certainty of the laws of navigation in your own mind, and then you carry that admission into effect, by surrendering- yourself to the guidance of the master at the helm, and the Captain of the ship. Just so it is with the " Faith" that the Bible tells you must alone save you. " The substance," (or realizing) " of tilings hoped for, the evidence," (or confidence) "of things unseen," -as the apostle beautifully defines it. It is an operating principle — and to have it, you must fully believe what the word of God contains ; and if yon do, you will assuredly act up, or strive to 14 ct up, to the precepts it inculcates. And you cannot onsistently believe one part and omit the belief of nother — you cannot believe in any, if you follow no njunction or commandment therein. Whatever belief ou pretend to, is a dead, worthless and unoperating aith. But to believe the Bible truly, is to believe, lat " all were born in sin" — that a change is necesar — " unless a man be born of water and of the pirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of heaven" — that us change cannot be effected without an acknovvedgement of the Divinity of Christ, of the effectual >ower of his death to reconcile us to God, and of that econciliation being brought about by no work or merit four own, but by his unassisted and unparticipated ufferings, and his fulfilment of the inilexible deands of the law; and that this stupendous instance f love, was altogether free and undeserved by us. f you believe these fundamental articles of religion, ou will of necessity see, that " Fornication, and all uncleanness, and covetousness, should not be once named among you, as becometh saintc ; neither filthiness, nor foolish talking, nor jesting 1 , which are not convenient : but rather giving of thanks. For this ye know, that no whoremonger, nor unclean person, nor covetous man, who is an idolater, hath any inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and of God." Here is the sum and substance of our faith. r ou who profess to believe in the Bible as the re elation of the divine will, yet have not given evidence "the slightest change in your former mode of life, annot in your present state have part or lot with lose who haye — you cannot share the profits and d vantages of the merciful offer of the gospel, as you ill not abide by the requisitions joined to it. 15 I Thus you have the choice of life and death before v, Will you hesitate ? Of the state you now live —say, did you ever feel any real repose or quiet it ? But in following purity and holiness of life, you 3 promised peace here and peace hereafter. Th* rpetuity of the blessing ought to astonish and rivet c attention of any man of sense — not rest from la- Dur for a year or two — or it may be fifty — but eternal st. Is it not worth while enduring pain, trouble, id trial, to secure to yourselves so glorious a portion? day, an hour, may put it beyond your reach ; and eath may be now at your door — when yon consider mt at every pulsation of your blood, about nine souls nan average are summoned away from this tem>orary scene of things, you have no reason to think lat among the many thousands who depart daily, ou will not soon be numbered. Steer then, without clay, to the only haven where the weary voyager of ife can be secure from every danger. As you show aith in the minor incidents of life, show a nobler aith in the incomparably grander realities of religion. Ihe course you are pursuing is not viewed by careless (res. The angels above, the powers of light and dark-2ss are witnesses ; and will be either against or /or ou ; for every single act of impurity and iniquity, larity and benevolence, done in secret, which it may 3 no mortal beholds, is known to the agents of the inisible world. The Bible is given you to speed you n your way, and though the allurements of sense, the lusive dreams of ambition, and the fretful workings of assion, clog and interrupt you in your course ; set oar affections on things above ; let fear and gratitude c the ruling motives to hurry you on ; rely on the divine id in all trials and temptations, till you reach that 16 river which all must pass ; and, as on the wandering race of Israel the cloudy pillar gave light, while it threw; A worse thin Egyptian darkness on the host of Pharaoh, so the reconciled countenance of the Almighty will irradiate the path of the believer, and make him feel the hour of death, to be the hour of great and abounding joy, while it will be for ever averted from the erroneous and finally impenitent disciple of unbelief, and the deluded votary of pleasure, who must take their departure into the invisible world amidst the overwhelming gloom of horror and despair. This I give as the only cure I can conceive for so pernicious a disease as the Cholera : a constant preparation and readiness to meet it in whatever shape it comes — knowing however it may end, all will be well with us, who look on the Almighty as supreme director — who says himself that he willeth not the death of a sinner, but that all should turn and live ; and who is unceasingly offering us the easy and honourable terms, which our destructive pride as frequently refuses, of salvation through Christ alone, and by his merits alone.