The Albany Register

The Lesson Taught.

The late disaster in Chicago has developed the pleasing fact, that while our people are leaving no stone unturned in their untiring efforts to accumulate wealth and influence, they have not lost those nobler and more exalted traits of character, growing out of Christian benevolence and sympathy. The munificent sums being so promptly raised and sent to the suffering, fire-scourged inhabitants of that devoted city, from every quarter of the Union, indicate that the great National Heart bleeds in sympathy with the suffering, the poor, the distressed. The greed for gain, the strife for honors, the struggle after position and influence characterize us as a people; and though much of scollid selfishness is exhibited, and uncharitableness shown in the treatment of competitors in the race, yet the avenues of sympathy leading to the great American heart are still open to the flow of its christianizing influences. Such calamities as have lately befallen Chicago, and swept over the northern part of Wisconsin, as well as other sections of our country, are most terrible visitations upon the parties immediately concerned. They are greatly to be dreaded and deplored. The loss and suffering they create is most heart-rending. But without them the channels of public sympathy and benevolence would cease to flow. The heart of the nation would grow callous and cold. Wealth would close the avenues to every kind ly, humanizing emotion. An infidel recklessness, ignoring the claims of a Higher Power, and a common humanity and destiny, would freeze the public heart into an iceberg of selfishness. Calamities and misfortunes come to us as individuals to remind us of our origin, responsibility and destiny. They teach us our mortality and would have us prepare for a change. National calamities inculcate a like lesson of frailty and responsibility. The nation that forgets God shall perish, is the lesson that comes thundering down through the corridors of past ages from Babylon, and Ninevah, and Jerusalem, and is intended to bend the public knee in humble dependence and trust in that Higher Power for every mercy.