Divine interposition had baffled the attempt of the Babylonian sovereign "to make himself a name." But the attempt was too congenial to human cupidity to have remained long untried by some other of the daring spirits of mankind. A new African or European Nimrod might have raised a new centre of empire, and the freedom of the world might have required a new miracle. War in all ages is the supreme scourge of society; and if, in all the established strength of kingdoms in our day, it shakes them to their foundations; with what ruinous and irrecoverable wreck might it not have crushed the little fluctuating tenancies of the infant world? But there was another element of hazard in the constitution of the first ages, and one which rendered it of the highest providential importance to draw within the narrowest possible limits all the means of war. The life of man was still of almost ante-diluvian length; the life of the Patriarch Reu, the contemporary of Nimrod, was 239 years. What devastation might not be within the hands of a conqueror wasting the world for two hundred years? Mahomet was but ten years at the head of armies in those ten he swept Arabia, Syria, and shook the Greek empire, from its topmost stone. Tamerlane, within five-and thirty years, ravaged from the Volga to the Persian Gulf, and from the Ganges to the Mediterranean. What limit could have been placed to the empire of the fiery Arab, with two hundred years

of life before him? Or of the great king of Samarcand, already master of Tartary, Persia, and India, and waiting only for the conquest of China, to turn his face westward, and roll the tide of war over Europe? Or, what would have been the fate of Europe, and of all nations, if that extraordinary man of our own day, who, in a career of ten years', drove his chariot wheels again and again over the armed neck of the Continent; had two hundred years of life before him, with the original, enthusiastic millions of the Revolution, untired by age, and unthinned by time, to fight his battles? The world might have been loaded with a weight of chains that must cripple and bow it down, until it had lost all power of restoration. The heart of man might have been worn away by the hopeless length of the struggle; slavery might have become the natural attitude of mankind; the earth might have been covered with an eruption of fire and blood, sufficient to burn out the living principle, and leave it encumbered with a solid weight of sterility and ruin, through which no future labour of mankind could pierce to the moral soil.

No difference of languages could prevent invasion; but, of all the obstacles to permanent possession, that difference is the most intractable. It is a perpetual principle of alienation, the most stubborn remembrancer of old ties, and the most inve

terate repellent of new, to be found in all the impulses of man. The miracle completely effected its purposes, immediate and final. It suppressed all projects of universal empire. Of Nimrod, thenceforth, nothing more is known, than that he left his dominions to a dynasty, which soon lost Assyria, and sank for a thousand years; at the end of that period it was suffered to emerge under Ninus the Second, was enlarged by Semiramis, and raised to the first rank by Nebuchadnezzar. But it was no longer within the faculties of any Oriental throne to possess universal dominion; the universal language, which once might have made a highway for its armies over the earth, was at an end; a thousand years of separate tongues had dissevered the habits of mankind. For many ages the principle of clanship prevailed, and resisted the principle of empire. Conquest had no power to combine materials whose nature was repulsion; the East was covered with petty chieftainries; Joshua found twenty kings in the small province of Palestine; the sway of the " "golden head" of Eastern empire was dangerous no more; and, after the first sweep of conquest, the limit of its speech was nearly the limit of its power'.

'Few things are more remarkable than the rapid decay of the great empires. Of the early Assyrian, nominally of 1200 years' duration, we know little, but that it lingered on, scarcely bearing the texture of an empire, wasted by profligate governors and provincial rebellions; the history of an empire of savages.

The Babylonian, raised to supremacy by Nebuchadnezzar, scarcely survived himself; the Persian continued but two centuries and a half; the Macedonian perished with its founder. The Roman was a memorable exception; but its first 300 years were limited to an Italian province, and its last 200 were years of decay. Yet there was also a sufficient and peculiar reason for the continuance and extent of its dominion: in the direct instrumentality of the Republic in bringing the earth under a general similitude of government; and of the Empire, in keeping it under a general control; and both, for the express service of Christianity.

CHAPTER XXII.

THE CONFUSION OF TONGUES.

THE miracle of Babel receives the fullest human confirmation from its existing results it is the only satisfactory mode of accounting for the diversities of language. There are probably upwards of two hundred distinct dialects or languages in the earth. The principle of all is the same-the relation of the noun to the verb, of the thing to the action; yet the discrepancies are so various, so wide, so intricate, and yet so systematic, as to imply an influence totally beyond the mere rude anomalies produced by time : this was the work of the "Confusion." The subsequent "Dispersion" offers the only rational account of the universality of the change.

The great division of the earth had taken place but about half a century before. At that time "the whole earth was of one speech." Those diversities. are not to be explained by novelty of objects, changes of clime, or general incidents in the condition of remote tribes: for such causes could not alter the construction. There is nothing of which nations