o, and the buried palaces of Assyria, unite to
attest this awful doom.

But what reason has the skeptic to believe that this invariable law of
nature shall ever be repealed, and this inevitable progress of all
things to perdition be arrested? Why may not men be as selfish, and
filthy, and grasping, and murderous in the other world, as they are in
this? Why may not the course of nature be as fatal to the sinner's
prosperity there as it is here? Why may not the progress of the proud
empires and spheres of futurity be such as the skeptic declares the
progress of the past to have been, so invariably toward dissolution and
death, that it shall need no inspiration to predict its course downward,
downward, ever downward, to endless perdition? Stand forward, skeptic,
and point the world to an instance in which an ungodly nation has
stemmed this all-destroying torrent of ruin; or acknowledge that all you
can promise the nations of the world to come, from your experience of
the invariable laws of nature, is _perdition, endless perdition_.

2. It is manifest, however, that this destruction of nations and
desolation of empires must have had a beginning some time or other.
Nations could not perish before they had grown, nor empires be destroyed
till they had accumulated; and during all this period of their growth
and vigor the experience of mankind would never lead them to predict
their ruin. The sagacious observer, beholding Babylon, Nineveh,
Damascus, and Tyre, growing and flourishing during a period of a
thousand years past, could have had no reason from such an experience to
expect anything else than a thousand years of prosperity to come.
Especially impossible is it for human sagacity, enlightened by
experience, to predict _unexampled_ desolations, destructions such as
the world had never witnessed.

_Now the predictions of the Bible are predictions of unexampled
desolations, and unparalleled ruin of empires._ The desolation of any
extensive region of the earth, or the overthrow of any great nation, was
an event absolutely unknown to the world when the prophets of the Bible
began to utter their predictions; unless the skeptic will allow the
truth of the Bible record of the prediction and execution of the
deluge, and the destruction of Sodom. War and conquest had indeed caused
some provinces to change masters; one nation had made marauding
invasions on others, and carried off cattle and slaves; but the result
of the greatest