East, and their backs to the visible Shekina in the holy place. The system of corruption, delusion, and bondage, by which the great Adversary commenced his second experiment of lordship over his party, and of renewed and perpetual hostility towards the righteous, and treason, rebellion, impiety, and insult towards Jehovah their Elohe, required not only to be such as would gratify their depraved hearts and grovelling passions, so as to insure success to his craft and subtlety, but to be contrived, adopted, and put in practice so as to unite, combine, and govern them, as soon as possible after the repeopling of the earth commenced. That it was in fact contrived, adopted, and practised prior to the dispersion, is proved by the resumption and practice of it by the dispersed tribes and nations both in the Eastern and Western hemispheres: and that the nature, object, doctrines, rites, bearings, and ends of it, were originally well understood, and matter of common intelligence and notoriety, is proved by the close resemblance of the system, as established in other quarters of the world, to the model metropolitan establishment in Babylon. This original tower or temple--which there is no reasonable ground to doubt continued near two thousand years, till Xerxes pillaged and destroyed it, together with the structures around it which had been added by Nebuchadnezzar--was six hundred feet square at the base, and six hundred feet in height, its cubic contents far exceeding those of the largest of the pyramids. It was devoted to the worship of the god of their idolatry, the intelligence to whom they ascribed the works of creation and providence, under the names Bel, Baal, Beelzebub, and other designations of Satan; and also to astronomical observations, which appear to have led to the appropriation, subsequently, of the moon to Astarte, consort of Baal and Queen of heaven, the prototype--not in respect to her moral character, which was wholly opposite, but to her mediating office--of the deified Mary of the Papists; and of the planets and stars, to subordinate auxiliary mediating demons of different species.