THE BOAST OF THE "GRASSHOPPER."
AMONG the sad things connected with San Francisco's disaster is the defiant spirit in which the determination to rebuild is expressed. It may be courageous and enterprising to begin building before the embers are cool, but to assume that man is above the power of nature's forces, and can defy the earthquake and the flames is sheer presumption. One capitalist declares that "San Francisco came into existence at the command of commercial and industrial forces, potencies which earthquake and fire can not move or destroy. Cities merely measure the potency of the commercial and industrial forces which create them. . . . The elements may destroy buildings, but they can not destroy the primal causes at whose command cities came into being." But neither commercial nor industrial force is invincible. One wonders if the aforesaid capitalist ever read of Tyre, of Babylon, of Nineveh, and other world centers of commerce and industry. Tyre was the great commercial mart of the world; but what is she to-day? what has she been for centuries? The boasting capitalist of San Francisco says that city's "position on the commercial map of the world is indestructible by fire or earthquake;" but there are other forces that may alter these. The merchants of Tyre thought their position on the commercial map of the world was invincible, but the God of heaven, whose law was defied by her corruptions, found a way to change the map. The Lord foretold the ultimate permanent fall of that proud city: "When thy wares went forth out of the seas, thou fillest many people; thou didst enrich the kings of the earth with the multitude of thy riches and of thy merchandise. In the time when thou shalt be broken by the seas in the depths of the waters thy merchandise and all thy company in the midst of thee shall fall." All this prophecy has been history for many centuries, but it has been "written for our learning" (Rom. 15:4), "for our admonition, upon whom the ends of the world are come" (1 Cor. 10:11). But, regardless of the lesson and its admonition, men continue to regard their positions invincible and themselves able to rear buildings that the forces of the Almighty can not throw down.15 And the mighty One whose powers are so flippantly ignored, and whose Word is so lightly regarded, "is He that sitteth upon the circle of the earth, and the inhabitants thereof are as grasshoppers; that stretcheth out the heavens as a curtain, and spreadeth them out as a tent to dwell in; that bringeth the princes to nothing; He maketh the judges of the earth as vanity."