Thou hast converted a garden of delicious fruits and blooming flowers into a gloomy forest of thorns and thistles. Thou hast transformed a world of life, joy and happiness into the abodes of wretchedness and misery, where sighing, groaning, tears and weeping are mingled in almost every cup. By thee the earth has been filled with violence and oppression; and man, moved by hatred, envy, avarice or ambition, has often embrued his hands in the blood of his fellow man, by which the fairest portions of the earth have been made desolate,--the abodes of domestic happiness turned to sorrow and loneliness,--the happy wife and tender offspring have become widows and orphans,--the bride has been left to mourn in irretrievable anguish, and the virgin to drop a silent tear over the ruined fragments of departed loveliness. By thee the world has been deluged with a flood of waters, and unnumbered millions swept at once from the stage of action and mingled in the common ruin, unwept and unlamented save by the tears of heaven, or by the eight solitary inhabitants of the ark who alone escaped to tell the news. By thy ravages empires have fallen to ruin, and cities become heaps. The fruitful plains of Shinar, and the splendid palaces of Babylon have been doomed to perpetual waste and and irretrievable desolation, never to be inhabited; not even as a temporary residence for the wandering Arab.(And the Arabian shall not pitch tent there. See Isaiah XIII, 20.) By thee the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, and the flourishing country about them, once extremely fertile, and watered as the garden of Eden, have been desolated by fire, and perhaps overwhelmed by a sea of stagnant waters. By thee the land of Edom, once a flourishing empire, possessing a productive and well cultivated soil, and every where adorned with flourishing villages, and splendid cities, has become desolate, without inhabitants; and the Lord has cast upon it the stones of emptiness, and the line of confusion. It has lain waste from generation to generation, as a haunt for wild beasts of the desert, a court for owls, and a place for the cormorant and bittern. On account of thee, the city of Jerusalem has long lain in ruins, the land of Judea is desolate, and their holy and beautiful house where their fathers praised Jehovah is burned with fire; while the Jews have long remained in exile among the nations, in fulfilment of that awful imprecation "his blood be upon us and our children." By thy power the once mighty empires of Greece and Rome have been shaken to the centre, and have fallen to rise no more; and before thy desolating blast, almost innumerable provinces lay in ruin. The waste deserts of burning sand--the sunken and stagnant lakes and miry swamps--the innumerable rockey barrens and mountainous steeps--the desolate and dreary wastes of the polar regions--these all present but so many monuments to thy memory--they speak in language not to be misunderstood, that sin has