And was it not so with Babylon—the beauty of the Chaldees’ excellency—which God in his anger made as Sodom and Gomorrah—a solitary waste for owls to dwell therein, and dragons to cry in her pleasant palaces? And if Tyre, once the emporium of commerce, whose “merchants were princes,” and whose “traffickers were the honourable of the earth”—if she has now become a rock on which the fisherman dries his nets;—if the desolate caves and dwellings of Petra, like the eagle’s eyrie “in the sides of the rock,” tell of what Edom once was in the day of her glory and pride;—if the republics of Greece have long since perished under the fierce barbarism of their Moslem invaders;—if Carthage, despite the valour of her sons and the consummate skill of her accomplished chief, fell, trodden to the dust beneath the iron hoof of her victorious rival, Rome;—and if the colossal empire of Rome itself, then the mistress of the world, has crumbled into fragments, bequeathing to the genius of history such ample materials for the wondrous story of her “Decline and Fall;”—if Attila and Alaric were the scourges of God to hasten her downfall;—if, later still, France and Spain and the republics of Italy have been the scene of frightful convulsions and bloody wars, surely these impressive lessons were written on the page of the world’s annals to teach us the solemn truth, that God punishes guilty _nations as such_ for the violation of his laws—that “verily there is a God who judgeth in the earth.” II. If it be true, in a general sense, that the violation of the laws of God brings wrath upon a people, we have abundant evidence to show that the _violation of the law of the Sabbath_, _in an especial and emphatic manner_, _provokes the Divine judgments_. It was one of the crowning acts of Israel’s wickedness and apostasy that she had ceased to honour the day of God; and one of the causes of the Babylonish captivity was indicated in the awful charge, “My Sabbaths have they greatly polluted.” And so you find that when God assigns the period of Israel’s bondage in a strange land, by a strong figure He represents the very soil of Canaan as outraged by their past profanation of his holy day, and declares that the land should have her Sabbaths—(that was when the people should be carried away captive to Babylon)—“as long as it lieth desolate, and ye be in your enemies’ land, then shall the land rest and enjoy her Sabbaths, because ye did not rest in your Sabbaths when ye dwelt upon it.” And how awful was the warning addressed to rebellious Israel by the mouth of Jeremiah: “But if ye will not hearken unto me to hallow the Sabbath day, and not to bear a burden, even entering in at the gates of Jerusalem on the Sabbath-day, then will I kindle a fire in the gates thereof, and it shall devour the palaces of Jerusalem, and it shall not be quenched!” Is all this, I ask, an inexplicable mystery? Has it no instruction for us?—no