The tradition and infection, which have made the name of Babylon as abhorred in Scripture as Satan's own, are represented as the tradition and infection of pride,--the pride, which, in the audacity of youth, proposes to attempt to be equal with God: _Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top_ may touch _heaven, and let us make us a name_; the pride, which, amid the success and wealth of later years, forgets that there is a God at all: _Thou sayest in thine heart, I am, and there is none beside me_. Babylon is the Atheist of the Old Testament, as she is the Antichrist of the New. That a city should have been originally conceived by Israel as the arch-enemy of God is due to historical causes, as intelligible as those which led, in later days, to the reverse conception of a city as God's stronghold, and the refuge of the weak and the wandering. God's earliest people were shepherds, plain men dwelling in tents,--desert nomads, who were never tempted to rear permanent structures of their own except as altars and shrines, but marched and rested, waked and slept, between God's bare earth and God's high heaven; whose spirits were chastened and refined by the hunger and clear air of the desert, and who walked their wide world without jostling or stunting one another. With the dear habits of those early times, the truths of the Bible are therefore, even after Israel has settled in towns, spelt to the end in the images of shepherd life. The Lord is the Shepherd, and men are the sheep of His pasture. He is a Rock and a Strong Tower, such as rise here and there in the desert's wildness for guidance or defence.[108] He is rivers of water in a dry place, and the shadow of a great rock in a weary land. And man's peace is to lie beside still waters, and his glory is, not to have built cities, but to have all these things put under his feet--sheep and oxen and the beasts of the field, the fowls of the air and the fish of the sea.