I have chosen a discreet and tasteful photo of a Stinkhorn Fungus (taken by Captain B of course) to head this blog. Their Latin name is Phallus Impudicus, and they are well named, so I had to be careful in my selection. This is a young one. Col assures me that they don't actually stink at this stage.
The reason for the choice is that Col and I watched a programme on Sunday afternoon about The Great Stink, which hit London in 1858 - less than a hundred years before I was born. The Thames had become a giant sewer, with all the city's waste being discharged into it, including sewage, waste from slaughterhouses, tanneries, etc. There had been warnings from a young doctor and a scientist that these were the conditions for a cholera outbreak. Although it was not well understood at the time that cholera - a fearsome disease - came from the polluted water getting into the water supply, not from the miasma, or stench itself.
The stench, I guess, was the warning, to be wary of the water. And at that time many of the poor who lived by the Thames were taking their water from the river - the river of sewage - as it was their only source! Then came a baking hot summer - the hottest on record, possibly. It went on for weeks and weeks.
In the steaming hot summer of 1858, the hideous stench of human excrement rising from the River Thames and seeping through the hallowed halls of the Houses of Parliament finally got too much for Britain’s politicians – those who had not already fled in fear of their lives to the countryside.
Clutching hankies to their noses and ready to abandon their newly built House for fresher air upstream, the lawmakers agreed urgent action was needed to purify London of the “evil odour” that was commonly believed to be the cause of disease and death.
https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/apr/04/story-cities-14-london-great-stink-river-thames-joseph-bazalgette-sewage-system
This of course led to the creation of the vast sewer system that serves London to this day.
Bazalgette's work ensured that sewage was no longer dumped onto the shores of the Thames and brought an end to the cholera outbreaks; his actions are thought to have saved more lives than the efforts of any other Victorian official. His sewer system operates into the 21st century, servicing a city that has grown to a population of over eight million. The historian Peter Ackroyd argues that Bazalgette should be considered a hero of London.
What an engineer he was! And thank God for him. But given we are hearing every day of sewage being dumped into our rivers, lakes and seas, it is hard not to wonder if The Great Stink and all the attendant medical dangers could return.
Shouldn't it be so clear by now that, as the Inspired Scriptures warn us, it does not belong to man who is walking even to direct his step?
Even our best, most sincere, efforts to put things right have only a limited success. It all comes back to our need for a perfect, and loving, worldwide government - the heavenly one - the Kingdom of God. It is the government whose coming we pray for when we say the Lord's Prayer.
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