It is presumed that Nebuchadnezzar erected this garden before his mind
became affected. The tower of Belus, supposed by historians with a good
memory to have been 600 feet high, as there is still a red chalk mark in
the sky where the top came, was a great thing in its way. I am glad I was
not contiguous to it when it fell, and also that I had omitted being born
prior to that time.
“When we turn from this picture of the past,” says the historian,
Rawlinson, referring to the beauties of Babylon, “to contemplate the
present condition of these localities, we are at first struck with
astonishment at the small traces which remain of so vast and wonderful a
metropolis. The broad walls of Babylon are utterly broken down. God has
swept it with the besom of destruction.”
One cannot help wondering why the use of the besom should have been
abandoned. As we gaze upon the former site of Babylon we are forced to
admit that the new besom sweeps clean. On its old site no crumbling arches
or broken columns are found to indicate her former beauty. Here and there
huge heaps of debris alone indicate that here Godless wealth and wicked,
selfish, indolent, enervating, ephemeral pomp, rose and defied the supreme
laws to which the bloated, selfish millionaire and the hard-handed, hungry
laborer alike must bow, and they are dust to-day.
Babylon has fallen. I do not say this in a sensational way or to
depreciate the value of real estate there, but from actual observation,
and after a full investigation, I assent without fear of successful
contradiction, that Babylon has seen her best days. Her boomlet is busted,
and, to use a political phrase, her oriental hide is on the Chaldean
fence.
Such is life. We enter upon it reluctantly; we wade through it doubtfully,
and die at last timidly. How we Americans do blow about what we can do
before breakfast, and, yet, even in our own brief history, how we have
demonstrated what a little thing the common two-legged man is. He rises up
rapidly to acquire much wealth, and if he delays about going to Canada he
goes to Sing Sing, and we forget about him. There are lots of modern
Babylonians in New York City to-day, and if it were my business I would
call their attention to it. The assertion that gold will procure all
things has been so common and so popular that too many consider first the
bank account, and after that honor, home, religion, humanity and common
decency. Even some of the churches have fallen into the notion that first
comes the tall church, then the debt and mortgage, the ice cream sociable
and the kingdom of Heaven. Cash and Christianity go hand in hand
sometimes, but Christianity ought not to confer respectability on anybody
who comes into the church to purchase it.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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