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admiration of God's works, and that in the highest and holiest manner, both seeing GoD in them, and wondering at His power and love. This must aid in the cultivation of that power of the mind which above all others gives it an elevated tone. To the highest order of characters these objects themselves are softening and chastening, and the tracing them back to their great cause enhances their beauty and deepens their impressions.

There are many and important practical questions which arise out of this view of my subject; such as the correction of many errors that might be fatal to the growth of truth, and the assertion of many truths too much forgotten and neglected by men around us. It is, for instance, doubtless a truth, that there is no absolute necessity for human wisdom towards the attainment of personal religion, and that many a man may reach an eminent degree of holiness who is, to use the common parlance of the poor, 'no scholar;' but while this is so, it is a still more fatal error to imagine that the fact of the absence of human knowledge or the dulness of human intellect predisposes or fits a man for the attainment of heavenly wisdom, or the cultiva

tion of the virtues of the Gospel. The latter error led into the dangerous errors of the Puritan school, and considerably strengthened the inclination to hold Church authority in contempt, when contrasted with individual holiness and desire to do right. While, on the other hand, the counter-opinion has sometimes led men to despise and pass by those witnesses of the Spirit which so constantly are borne by the poor and the lowly of this world; thereby ignoring one of the peculiar features of the Gospel itself, that to the poor the Gospel is preached, that the most illiterate of men were the first recipients of Christianity, and the first propagators of truth to the world ; and that it is not to the wise, or the prudent, or the powerful of this world that the truths of the Gospel, or the mysteries of Christianity are of necessity made known.

LXIX.

NEBUCHADNEZZAR.

PRIDE.

DANIEL IV. 37.

"Now I NEBUCHADNEZZAR PRAISE AND EXTOL AND HONOUR THE KING OF HEAVEN, ALL WHOSE WORKS ARE TRUTH, AND HIS WAYS JUDGMENT: AND THOSE THAT WALK IN PRIDE HE IS ABLE TO ABASE."

1. THERE is a grandeur and at the same time an awe cast around the history of Nebuchadnezzar which draws out the reverential attention of childhood and the careful investigation of those who are interested in watching the course of human character and motive. His terrible invasion of the Holy Land; the way in which the ALMIGHTY seemed to go before and to follow him; the voice of prophecy, which proclaimed his advent from time to time; his evident fulfilment of God's own designs with regard to His sinful people, and the remarkable pride of his disposition meeting with so signal a punishment from heaven; all alike invest him

VOL. III.

with an importance which forbids us to pass him by in the study of the characters of the Old Testament.

It will be well however, before I go into the consideration of his personal character, to see what his position historically is. Sennacherib had embodied in his empire the Babylonians, Medes, and Armenians, besides his own people, and many other tributary states. When he had received his signal punishment from God, in the reign of Hezekiah, the kingdom, in its various portions, revolted from the sway of Esarhaddon, his son; so that this latter prince, occupied the first years of his reign in re-establishing the broken frame of the empire. He finally lost the Medes, but having recovered the Babylonians, he sent them, as a punishment, into the waste cities of Samaria. haddon then ravaged Judea, and took Manasseh, the son of Hezekiah, prisoner, sending him a captive into Babylonia. He is thought by many to have been Sardanapalus; it was his descendant, after one generation, who was the Nebuchadnezzar of Holy Scripture. This Nebuchadnezzar made an expedition against the Medes, and, to do this, summoned all the tributary provinces. The Western pro

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