Ghost. That man may come into the possession of this, the Bible was given. Every revelation which God has granted to man is a link in a great chain, which is designed to connect this world with heaven. The Bible may be studied, understood, and admired, and yet fail to accomplish its work. We may investigate its evidence, bow to its divine authority, and practise some of its external principles; but unless we allow the promised Spirit of God to control our affections, and yield to its requirements, its promised blessings we cannot enjoy,—its threatened punishments must be our portion.

Let us not delude ourselves with the vain notion that God takes no note of our actions. The sun shone pleasantly the last day upon the plain.” It was a beautiful spot, extended between the mountains. The transparent Jordan wound through it, and it seemed the garden of the earth. Rich vegetation covered it, and it was thronged with a population abounding in wealth. But among them all, save the stranger Lot, not a pious person dwelt! With God's character they were not unacquainted, but to his commands they had no regard: no law of God they acknowledged to be binding; he was not in their thoughts. Their wants all supplied,

they surrendered themselves to luxury and unbridled license. They were warned, but they received their warnings with mockery and hatred. Their cup at last was full. .

They believed in God at last, but, alas, it was too late! Aroused from their last slumber in the body, or surprised in the midst of their guilty orgies, the heavens glared upon them, and the earth was on fire beneath their feet; forked lightnings gleamed above them, and, amid falling cinders, and with loud shrieks, scarcely drowned by the awful thunder, they hurried out of their crumbling habitations but to be buried in a sea of molten flame; while the waters of the river rolled upon them, and their smoke rose as from a furnace, and the Dead Sea, as their winding-sheet, now rolls, and has for ages rolled, to cover their remains till the last great day.

Evidence of this expression of the wrath of God still is seen branded on the very earth, so clear and palpable that never has a visitor gazed upon the shores of the Dead Sea without perceiving it, and none but the foolhardy and insane can gainsay it. This evidence we have briefly presented: let it be pondered well, and let the lessons it is designed to teach sink deep

into the heart. Let God's superintendence be acknowledged, let his hatred of sin be appreciated, and let the awful miniature picture of the final day thus presented serve to afford you a glimpse of the terrors which will seize the unrighteous when the heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat; the earth also, and the works that are therein, shall be burned up; and doubt not, as the apostle Peter has said, that if God spared not the old world, but saved Noah, the eighth person, a preacher of righteousness, bringing in a flood upon the world of the ungodly; and turning the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah into ashes, condemned them with an overthrow, making them an ensample unto those that after should live ungodly; and delivered just Lot, vexed with the filthy conversation of the wicked;

.. the Lord knoweth how to deliver the godly out of temptations, and to reserve the unjust unto the day of judgment to be punished.”

CHAPTER VIII.

BIBLICAL REFERENCES TO EGYPT, CONFIRMED BY MODERN

RESEARCHES

On the banks of the mysterious Nile, at the juncture of Africa, the land of darkness, with Asia, the first home of man, lies Egypt, often, though erroneously, called “the cradle of civilization:” a land famous for its agriculture, its architecture, its mechanical arts, its philosophy, its refinement, and religion, long before Greece and Rome were known. The mechanical instruments of this people, their careful division of labour and various employments, their accomplishment in music, painting, and sculpture; their populousness, and order, and law, and refinement, are perhaps, in the aggregate, not surpassed by the most cultivated people of modern times. They had even their written and pictorial language, their authors and careful historians. But successive deluges of war swept over them. Their wealth constantly excited the lust, and courted the rapacity of conquerors, whose only principle of action was, might makes right. They were subdued and overrun, at the intervals of centuries, by the Ethiopians, their nearest neighbours; by the Babylonians, under Nebuchadnezzar; by the Persians, under Cambyses; by Alexander, the Macedonian; by the Romans, under Octavius Cæsar; and in modern times by the Arabs and by the Turks. Thus its old institutions, its arts and sciences, its language, oral and written, have been obliterated, and its history for a long time forgotten; so that two centuries ago Egypt was like an antiquated picture covered with smoke and dust, or like an ancient parchment, the production of some famous author of the oldest date, but written over and over again by inferior modern scribes. Egypt was “the

( basest of kingdoms,” and its former splendour unappreciated and almost entirely forgotten. Still there remained dim, and uncertain, and contradictory references to it in Greek and Roman writings; still there existed on its ancient site a people called Copts, who seem to speak a corrupt dialect of its ancient language; still could be seen the statue of Memnon, which, it was said, once uttered musical sounds at the rising of the sun,--and the concealed place in it, and the machinery by which the artful priest used