It is nothing strange that with words of Eternal Wisdom this should be so, and in respect of them my assertion cannot need a proof. I will, notwithstanding, adduce as a first confirmation of it a scriptural proverb, one which fell from the Lord’s lips in his last prophecies about Jerusalem: _Wheresoever the carcase is, there will the eagles be gathered together_; (Matt. xxiv. 28;) and which probably He had taken up from Job. (xxxix. 30.) Who would venture to say that he had exhausted the meaning of this wonderful saying? For is it not properly inexhaustible? All history is a comment on these words. Wherever there is a Church or a people abandoned by the spirit of life, and so a carcase, tainting the atmosphere of God’s moral world, around it assemble the ministers and messengers of Divine justice, “the eagles,” (or vultures more strictly, for the true eagle does not feed on aught but what itself has slain,) the scavengers of God’s moral world; scenting out as by a mysterious instinct the prey from afar, and charged to remove presently the offence out of the way. This proverb, for the saying has passed upon the lips of men, and thus has become such, is being fulfilled evermore. The wicked Canaanites were the carcase, when the children of Israel entered into their land, the commissioned eagles that should remove them out of sight. At a later day the Jews were themselves the carcase, and the Romans the eagles; and when in the progress of decay, the Roman empire had quite lost the spirit of life, and those virtues of the family and the nation which had deservedly made it great, the northern tribes, the eagles now, came down upon it, to tear it limb from limb, and make room for a new creation that should grow up in its stead. Again, the Persian empire was the carcase; Alexander and his Macedonian hosts, the eagles that by unerring instinct gathered round it to complete its doom. The Greek Church in the seventh century was too nearly a carcase to escape the destiny of such, and the armies of Islam scented their prey, and divided it among them. In modern times Poland was, I fear, such a carcase; and this one may affirm without in the least extenuating their guilt who partitioned it; for it might have been just for it to suffer, what yet it was most unrighteous for others to inflict. Nay, where do you not find an illustration of this proverb, from such instances on the largest scale as these, down to that of the silly and profligate heir, surrounded by sharpers and black-legs, and preyed on by these? Everywhere it is true that _Wheresoever the carcase is, there will the eagles be gathered together_. [Sidenote: Extremes meet.] [Sidenote: Too far East is West.]