Nevertheless, it is often from such destructive models, that the rules and maxims of the education generally bestowed on the children of the great are borrowed; and it is these ravagers of nations, these scourges of mankind, they propose to make them resemble. By inspiring them with the sentiments of a boundless ambition, and the love of false glory, they become (to borrow an expression from Scripture) “young lions; they learn to catch the prey, and devour men—to lay waste cities, to turn lands and their fatness into desolation by the noise of their roaring.”(32) And when this young lion is grown up, God tells us, that the noise of his exploits, and the renown of his victories, are nothing but a frightful roaring, which fills all places with terror and desolation. The examples I have hitherto mentioned, extracted from the history of the Egyptians, Assyrians, Babylonians, and Persians, prove sufficiently the supreme power exercised by God over all empires; and the relation he has thought fit to establish between the rest of the nations of the earth and his own peculiar people. The same truth appears as conspicuously under the kings of Syria and Egypt, successors of Alexander the Great: between whose history, and that of the Jews under the Maccabees, every body knows the close connection. To these incidents I cannot forbear adding another, which though universally known, is not therefore the less remarkable; I mean the taking of Jerusalem by Titus. When he had entered that city, and viewed all the fortifications of it, this prince, though a heathen, owned the all-powerful arm of the God of Israel; and, in a rapture of admiration, cried out, “It is manifest that the Almighty has fought for us, and has driven the Jews from those towers; since neither the utmost human force, nor that of all the engines in the world, could have effected it.”(33) Besides the visible and sensible connection of sacred and profane history, there is another more secret and more distinct relation with respect to the Messiah, for whose coming the Almighty, whose work was ever present to his sight, prepared mankind from far, even by the state of ignorance and dissoluteness in which he suffered them to be immersed during four thousand years. It was to make mankind sensible of the necessity of our having a Mediator, that God permitted the nations to walk after their own ways; while neither the light of reason, nor the dictates of philosophy, could dispel the clouds of error, or reform their depraved inclinations.