When the people of a nation come to regard the elements of wealth, literature, art, or even religion, as ends to be enjoyed rather than as means to make man, they have missed the purpose of creation, and wander amid the mazes of stupidity and blindness. As far as outward splendor and wealth were concerned, Babylon had no rival among the nations of ancient times. She was a vast and rich empire. She embraced the most fertile portion of the globe. She had a capital that eclipsed all others in magnificence. Her hanging gardens were the wonder of the world; but her people stood not upon their terraces to observe the stars, or to reach a higher civilization through the realization of the nobler ends of their being. These were used as places of revelry and sensual enjoyment. Thus the only work of art that made them famous was used to make them stupid and depraved. Of her wealth she made an end. Putting no estimate upon men, through the relations of whom her wealth was created, she found at last that among all her people she had produced no man amply endowed enough to give permanent mental setting to her civilization and her faith. Her heart throbs, whatever they were, got explained in no history, interpreted in no philosophy, and lived in no life. For knowledge of her, we are dependent upon her ruins, her pottery, her broken columns. Into oblivion has fallen all that bejeweled and pampered life that reveled in her palaces and amid her far-famed hanging gardens. Among none of her luxurious inhabitants did she develop a man to commit the keeping of her secrets and the record of her progress. Over her history has settled the stillness of the desert and the gloom of eternal night. On the other hand, how secure is the Greece, that flowered in her great men! It was in the two centuries between 500 and 300 B. C., when she emphasized men more than the things they created, that she produced the men who have been the teachers of the human race. She has been despoiled of her art treasures, her temples have fallen, her Parthenon is in ruins; but the two hundred years of her life, which she deposited in her great men, are immortal.