At 4:53 p.m. EST Tuesday, Jan. 12, an earthquake measuring 7.0  (Richter) centered near Port-au-Prince, Haiti. It is the greatest natural disaster recorded in western hemisphere history. The last time a  news alert grabbed our attention in this alarming a manner was April 18,  1906, when 3000 people were buried alive in San Francisco under the  rubble of a 7.8 quake (Richter).

We shouldn't presume that 'The Big One' will always be out in  Indonesia, China, or Chile. Charlestonians got a seismic wake-up call  around bedtime (10 p.m.) on Tuesday, August 31, 1886. Sixty locals died  and thousands in fear of aftershocks camped out for weeks just as the  Haitians are doing now. Ours was thought to be a 7.1 (Richter). In 1930 Long Beach, California, rocked with a strong quake from the San Andreas  fault and 130 folks perished.

The death toll in Haiti exceeds the total deaths from both atomic bombs, Nagasaki and Hiroshima (166,000 estimated combined). That the citizens of Port-au-Prince were vibrant, engaged, laughing beings one  minute and stone dead the next.

A tragic earthquake in Haiti provokes theologians and philosophers to debate again the human condition with respect to fate and the hereafter. As we wrestle with aiding Haitian relief along with masses of Indonesian tsunami victims and African famine sufferers, it's obvious that a disproportionate amount of pain occurs in far-off parts of the globe.

The most shocking natural disaster to strike the Western World since Pompeii was the great Lisbon earthquake of 1755. That magnificent capital with its vital seaport was a global trade center. Yet, on All Saints Sunday, November 1, 1755, at 9:20 a.m. just as the faithful entered the city's churches, a terrible roar was heard. The earth jolted in three separate spasms that lasted a total of ten minutes.

Terrified worshipers ran out of Santa Maria Maior de Lisboa or Sé de Lisboa, the cathedral of the kings, only to have 500 year-old masonry tumble down on them from the great spires. Inside the worshipers who'd been on their knees were buried under the collapsing columns and plaster from the 150 foot ceiling. Across Lisbon, drunks and prostitutes fared better in the low-slung hovels of the east side.

For those who could leap across the rubble during the aftershocks, the safest haven appeared to be the great stone quays of the waterfront. Hundreds of panicked Lisbon citizens, in their Sunday clothes crowded into sailing ships and floated into the harbor. But another roar, this time from the sea, brought a tsunami wave that capsized the boats and crashed them into the quays. The horrors of that Sabbath in Lisbon appeared to one and all as the Divine's having rendered judgment on  their once-proud kingdom.

On a day that had dawned sunny, a cloud of darkness descended over  Lisbon that even lanterns could not penetrate. The eerie darkness was punctuated by the moans of the dying and the sobs of the grieving. The next day it was as if the sun forgot to rise. Fires that had been fanned by the wind of their own heat swept through the city and the surrounding villages burning alive the lame who could not flee.

In The Lisbon Earthquake T.D. Kendrick (1957) states: 'There was also a tremendous earthquake in North Africa in the area of Fez and Mequinez, where the destruction was catastrophic and there was a heavy loss of life; less severely it was felt as far away as Algiers on the African coast, and all over southwest Spain and Portugal from Coimbra to Seville

and Cádiz; outside that area it was felt at many other places in central and southern Spain from Madrid to Granada, Guadix, Málaga, and Gibraltar. It caused noticeable shocks in northern Spain, and in France certainly as far as Bordeaux, and probably farther north.'

The tsunami created a damaging surf across England and Ireland four hours later.

Mysteriously, the quake drained deep wells across Spain and North Africa. Five hours after the initial shock huge waves pounded Antigua, Martinique, and Barbados.

Ecclesiastes 1:4 states 'One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth for ever' (KJV). Kendrick maintains that after November 1, 1755, the devout of the western world wondered if Biblical truths could be valued any longer. The intellectuals all had a go at trying to rationalize the disaster in the context of humans becoming nothing more than specs of cosmic dust rather than beings created in the image of God.

Voltaire used the Lisbon quake as backdrop for Candide. Kant and Rousseau drew their own interpretations. Portugal's King Joseph I survived due to the fact that he'd attended a daybreak Mass, but he opted to live in an army campaign

tent the rest of his life rather than sleep in a brick and mortar dwelling.

The parallels between Port-au-Prince and Lisbon are interesting to note even though Haiti represents the poorest of cultures, and Lisbon, one of the world's magnificent cities. One-third of Lisbon's population (90,000 souls) perished in the ten-minute horror estimated to be 9 on the Richter scale. Another 10,000 died across the Mediterranean in Morocco.

Approximately 8 percent of Port au Prince's perished (150,000 souls).

The Patriarch of Lisbon, Bishop Manoel da Câmara, miraculously survived the collapse of the edifice in which he was saying mass. The body of Monsignor Joseph Serge Miot, the archbishop of Port-au-Prince, was found in the ruins of his office. For the Lisbonites the disaster fell on one of the Holiest Days of the church year, All Saints Day, a Catholic day of obligation. For the Haitians January 12 was and is remembered as the date (1799) that Toussaint became the commander of the anti-French  revolutionary army.

Immanuel Kant, the 18th century German philosopher, centered his 'Concept of the Sublime' around man's inability to rationalize the sudden, enormous destruction of one of the greatest cities in the world.

What a blow to the so-called 'Age of Reason.'

For moderns such as ourselves, the cataclysm in Haiti summons the ancient injunction from Deuteronomy ''In case some one of your brothers becomes poor among you in one of your cities, in your land that Jehovah your God is giving you, you must not harden your heart or be closefisted  toward your poor brother. That is why I am commanding you, saying, ‘You should generously open up your hand to your afflicted and poor brother in your land.' ' (Deut 15:7,8 and 11).

(Dr. Thomas B. Horton is a history teacher at Porter-Gaud School. He lives in the Old Village of Mount Pleasant.  Visit his Web site at www.historyslostmoments.com.)