glorious achievement!--_Joseph Parker, D.D._ FOOTNOTES: [1] Think not that any change in the form of government would cure that which is caused by the people's sin, or the common depravity of human nature. Some think they can contrive such forms of government as that the rulers shall be able to do no hurt; but either they will disable them to do good, or else their engine is but glass, and will fail or break when it comes to execution. Men that are themselves so bad and unhumbled as not to know how bad they are, and how bad mankind is, are still laying the blame upon the form of government when anything is amiss, and think by a change to find a cure. As if when an army is infected with the plague, or composed of cowards, the change of the general or form of government would prove a cure. But if a monarch be faulty, in an aristocracy you will have but many faulty governors for one, and in a democracy a multitude of tyrants.--_Baxter,_ 1615-1691. THE TWOFOLD EFFECT OF DIVINE JUDGMENTS. i. 27, 28. _Zion shall be redeemed with judgment, and her converts with righteousness: and the destruction of the transgressors and of the sinners shall be together, and they that forsake the Lord shall be consumed._ These verses are closely and vitally connected: it is a mistake to separate them, as in the Authorised Version. Their meaning would be conveyed to the English reader, if they were translated--_"Zion shall be redeemed with judgment, and her converts with righteousness; and thereby also the transgressors and sinners shall be destroyed, yea they that forsake the Lord shall be consumed."_[1] By judgment is meant the doom which in the preceding verses had been threatened against guilty Jerusalem (_e.g.,_ vers. 18): this "judgment" would be a manifestation of God's punitive righteousness, and the declaration is that the infliction of this "judgment" would have a twofold effect--it would redeem Zion and her converts, and it would destroy the transgressors and sinners.