LUKE xvi. 2.
“Give an account of thy stewardship.”
AT no time in England’s history has she been called to humble herself
before God under more harrowing circumstances than the present. We have
not to deplore the discomfiture of our armies, or the hardships of our
soldiers,—not the privations on the heights of Sebastopol, or the deadly
conflicts of Balaklava and the Redan,—events which are, more or less, to
be expected in a soldier’s life; but we are now summoned to prayer by the
cries of tortured infants, by the unutterable agonies of heartbroken
mothers, of daughters, sisters, and wives, who have been called to endure
outrages and witness scenes in comparison of which it would have been a
light matter to have been torn limb from limb by the tigers of the
jungle. Satan appears to have been let loose in India, in all his deadly
and corrupt ferocity. There has been a kind of filling up of God’s four
sore judgments. Famine, pestilence, and war had already followed each
other in quick succession; but we thought we were free from noisome
beasts. But now we have something incomparably worse let loose on our
fellow-countrymen to fill the fair plains of India with wailing,
lamentation, and woe.
But it is not needful to recapitulate these tales of horror. I am
persuaded that I need not stand here to excite your sympathy for the
sufferers. You have felt that already, and I trust that many an earnest
cry has long ere this gone up from your homes for India. If not, just
think on the little garrison at Lucknow, hemmed in by rebel thousands,
with provisions every day diminishing, with the massacre of Cawnpore
before their eyes, and with the horrid murderer at the head of the
blockading force thirsting for their blood, and eager, if ever he can
gain the power, to re-enact the same barbarities on themselves. Think
what those women must endure, as the little stores are doled out day
after day; and they know that, unless they are relieved, they have no
prospect but the foulest massacre; and every heart must acknowledge that
the time is come, if it be not already past, for the universal cry of
wrestling prayer, and most earnest pleading with God on their behalf.
But this is a day for humiliation as well as prayer, and national
judgments are so intimately connected with national sins, that the
nation’s prayer should clearly be accompanied by the nation’s
humiliation. It behoves us, therefore, to consider what ground there is
for such humiliation, and what sins there are to call forth our
repentance and confession. But we need not in this inquiry occupy time
by the consideration of those sins which are more especially connected
with home, for the finger of God points to India. It is there that the
blow has fallen, and there that we must look for this sin. It is clearly
on Indian matters that God now has a controversy with his people, and
therefore our conduct with reference to India should be the subject of
especial enquiry. Let us, then, examine, in the first place, England’s
stewardship; and afterwards, England’s account of that stewardship.
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