Sin, then, that is, the refusal to follow after truth, beauty and goodness, and thus after God made known to the soul, had a very real connexion with the fall of that tower. But in this respect of sin its builders were no worse than other men 'who dwelt at Jerusalem.' All these men had come short of full devotion to God as they saw God, to the light they perceived, the truth they might attain, the beauty that summoned them and the goodness that should have been theirs. Not in this regard is the fall of the tower selective. Indeed there is nothing to show that it fell upon a single one of its builders, any more than that it selected the worst of the sinners. It may have caused to 'perish' a party of mere sight-seers.
Only through that solidarity of man which links 'the crimes of each to the sorrows of all' is the fault of the builders linked with the perishing of those eighteen. And again we have testimony against any selection of the bad from the good by the calamities of earth. Not even the retribution of the kind of badness which bad building is falls, by God's determination, upon the evil-doer, through instruments of the earth. They are far too rough, these things, too indiscriminating. They do not pierce to the joints and the marrow; they hit like a blind man's bludgeon.
Yet this they assuredly are not. As the personal punishment and forgiveness of God seek and find the sinner himself in the depths of his being and to the utmost of his activity, so these things, Towers of Siloam, Armageddons, plague and pestilence, search out our corporate sin and sinfulness, reach the community of sinners in their interaction. By pain and sorrow for all, they bring to light both the sins and the shortcomings of each. Our responsibility for Armageddon extends over the devastation it has wrought, as the responsibility of those builders of the tower made the deaths of the eighteen it killed their own work. In the community of life is community of crime and suffering and all their consequences. There is an identity one with another among men, which they cannot escape. They are one body even when they are not one spirit, and every member of the body may entail disaster on the rest, as he may bring redemption. If we could not hinder life we could not help it. And therefore that word of Christ which was no doubt primarily addressed to those men of Jerusalem whose sins were inviting doom, has other points of significance we need to note. 'Unless ye repent, ye shall all likewise perish.' All—the community; likewise—through aid from the calamities and catastrophes of that outer world of things and persons with which we are so closely bound, as well as from the snares and the beguiling, the temptations and betrayal, we make for ourselves in our misuse of it.