About 2,500 years ago the kingdom of Babylon was strong, great, and prosperous. The king of this vast empire is known in history as Nebuchadnezzar. His reign had been marked with great victories over the surrounding nations. The mighty Empire of Assyria he had conquered; Egypt he had wasted and almost destroyed; Palestine he had reduced to strange and pitiable desolation, having carried the Jewish inhabitants captive into the region of Babylon. Among these captives we find Daniel, the prophet of Judah. In the second year of Nebuchadnezzar’s consolidated reign, as king over Babylon and Assyria, he dreamed a dream which gave him much anxiety of mind and troubled him very much. This dream he could not remember nor explain, save that it had left a terrible impression on his mind. The wise men were confounded, for they could neither declare the vision or its meaning. The king, in his rage, decreed them all to death. At this point appears Daniel, one of the captives of Judah. Moved of God, he presents himself before the king and makes known to him the vision and interpretation. The king had seen a great metallic image, excellent in brightness and terrible in form. It was a human figure of massive proportions, standing erect with outstretched arms, and of a mixed and strange composition. The head was of fine gold. The breast and arms were of silver. The belly and thighs of brass. The legs of iron, the feet part of iron and part of clay. While the king was gazing on this monstrous figure with intense interest, his attention was arrested by the appearance of a small stone—this stone was alone; there appeared no hands handling it or moving it. It was cut out of the mountain without hands. In this stone there appears to be a good deal of the supernatural. At once this little stone assaults the image, beginning at the feet. The battle is surely unequal; the battle continues, and during the struggle the stone actually grows; the image falls to pieces—the feet, thigh, breast, and head—and victory is with the stone. By the time the image is wholly destroyed the stone has become a mountain; or, as Daniel said to Nebuchadnezzar, “Thou sawest till that a stone was cut out without hands, which smote the image upon his feet that were of iron and clay, and brake them to pieces. Then was the iron, the clay, the brass, the silver, and the gold broken to pieces together, and became like the chaff of the Summer threshing-floors; and the wind carried them away, that no place was found for them; and the stone that smote the image became a great mountain and filled the whole earth.”