Sir, - In your issue of March 24th, your "Thinking Anew" correspondent, G.F., referred to Rev R.C. Ryle, a vicar in Norfolk and later Bishop of Liverpool, who preached that the 1865 epidemic of foot-and-mouth disease was "the finger of God". He listed some of the sins which he believed had provoked divine anger.
This is no surprise. Seventeen years earlier it was widely preached, though presumably not by those who were themselves hungry, that the Irish Famine was the hand of God laid on a sinful people. The Protestant Watchman of Dublin went a little further. It wrote to the prime minister, Lord John Russell, in May 1848, telling him that his government's relief schemes were no more than a concession to Popery and a discouragement to Protestantism.
The letter said he should get his priorities right and acknowledge that six million of the people of Ireland were chained to a system that excluded them from a true knowledge of the true God and made them superstitious and idolatrous (see The Famine Decade, by John Gillen.)
Fast forward to 2001 AD: The Outer Isles Presbytery of the Free Presbyterian Church of Scotland has stated that the visits to the Pope by the Queen and the Moderator of the Church of Scotland are responsible for the current outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease - and for the recent floods and train crashes. A Rev Mcleod has written to Her Majesty, telling her that her loyal subjects in the Western Isles are grieved to see her "clad in black, paying her respects to the person identified in the Westminster Confession as the `man of sin and son of perdition'."
How does one reconcile the concept of a retributive God with that of an all-forgiving, ever-loving Father? It would appear that there are still those who strongly believe in the former. Me, I'll leave it to the veterinary scientists to determine the causes and cures of foot-and-mouth disease. - Yours, etc.,
John Sharkey, Rathfarnham, Dublin 14.