This world is not the rock beneath our feet which it seems to be; it is no better than those green, but treacherous, soft, and bottomless bogs, which swallow up unwary travellers. We talk of terra firma as if there could be such a thing as solid earth; never was adjective more thoroughly misused, for the world passeth away and the fashion thereof. Every now and then, in order to enforce this distasteful truth upon us, the God of providence gives the world, in some way or other, a warning shake. The Lord has only to lay one finger upon the world, and the mountains are carried into the midst of the sea, while the waters of the ocean roar and are troubled until the mountains shake with the swelling thereof. The most solid fabrics of human skill and industry are dissolved at the voice of the Most High; though they appear to possess the firmness of earth and claim the sublimity of heaven, yet one divine word shakes earth and heaven in a moment. Looking back through history, you will observe many periods of very tremendous shakings, the records of which are indelibly engraved upon human memory. An empire has been piled up by conquest, and cemented by policy and power; monarchs of gigantic mind have been sustained by armies of indomitable valour, and great dynasties have been established whose reign promised to be as enduring as the sun. but God has shaken, and the diadem has fallen, and the kingdom become desolate.

“A Lesson from the Great Panic,” MTP 12:690 (1866)