Consult the history of mankind since the fall, especially those faithful records given us in the inspired writings, and you will see one continued chain of successive dispensations, loudly declarative of the evil of sin. Why were the windows of heaven opened, and the fountains of the great deep broken up, to form that immense inundation of waters, that covered every part of the globe, and topped its highest hills; and, the little family in the ark only excepted, swept away all the inhabitants of the earth at a stroke? It was because “God saw, that the _wickedness_ of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.” Gen. vi. 5. Why was Sodom consumed by fire from heaven, and that sink of sin converted into a lake of the most putrid and pestilential quality? Why did the earth open, and swallow up Korah and his company? or a succession of plagues depopulate and deluge with blood the Land of Egypt? How came Israel to fall by thousands in the wilderness? and in great numbers to be carried away into an enemy’s country, and to wear the galling yoke of long, grievous, and reiterated captivities? What was the cause of their final dispersion? It was SIN that lay at the root of all these visitations. And the same evil that laid Babylon or Jerusalem in ashes, and annihilated the proudest empires of Greece and Rome, is to this day proclaiming its existence in the judgments that are abroad in the earth. If the pestilence walketh in darkness, or sickness destroyeth at noon-day; if war rages, or famine stalks through the land; if earthquakes make whole continents tremble, and spread devastation and death; it is SIN, that hath awakened these awful visitants of incensed justice, which will, all at once, be let loose upon a guilty world, in the great and terrible day of the Lord, to complete its ruin, and give one final demonstration of the malignity of sin, by the conflagration of heaven and earth.