The books, especially of Isaiah, Jeremiah, Nahum and Ezekiel, contain some interesting material upon the cultus of Babylonia. It is, however, the darker features that the prophets delight to draw, and the picture they present to us does not in all points resemble the one we find in the palaces of the kings. The animus displayed toward the enemy is far removed from the precept which enjoins that he shall be loved. The fourteenth chapter of Isaiah is a standing witness to the correctness of this observation. It is a magnificent paean of prophetic feeling, but it is necessary to observe that the fate of Nabonidus, the last king of Babylon, was not so wretched as here described. When Cyrus conquered the city he made Nabonidus governor. It may, however, be that this perfervid and vengeful utterance of irrepressible joy related originally to Sargon II., king of Assyria, conqueror of Samaria, who, as his successor Sennacherib tells us "was not buried in his house," and that after the fall of Babylon the latter name was interpolated. At all events this king, unlike "the kings of the nations," did not "sleep in his own house" (vss. 18-19), and the introductory verses are obviously late. Optimistic and pessimistic patriots who writhed under the domination of a foreign power, religious zealots conscious of their possession of a purer and practically religious faith, it is little wonder they portrayed only the harsher features of their spoilers and conquerors. The apocalyptic book of Daniel, so long interpreted as a sober recital of historic events, is distinctly and admittedly at variance on some points with the monumental records of Nebuchadnezzar, Nabonidus, and Cyrus. It would, however, be an unjustifiable inference were any one to conclude from the foregoing that the records of the Old Testament had all, or in great measure, been relegated to the hazy region of myth and fiction by the revelations of the contemporary records of the monuments. The historical presentation of events from the age of Saul onwards have on the whole received welcome corroboration. The inscriptions on stone and clay have confirmed the story of the parchment rolls, completing, amending, elucidating it and always enabling us to interpret it more accurately.