military operation of which we have any record, at the
commencement of the prophetic era--the conquest of Palestine by the
Israelites--so far from desolating the region, or exterminating the
people, had been merely to increase its productiveness, and to drive its
former occupants to new settlements, where at that era they were fully
able to cope with their former conquerors. Whatever the experience of
thirty centuries may have since taught the nations concerning the
certainty of the connection between national crime and national ruin, a
long-suffering God had not then given any such signal examples of it, as
those of which he gave warning by the prophets.

The course of the nations and cities founded after the deluge had been
regularly onward and prosperous, and they were just rising to the
maturity of their power and splendor when Jonah, Micah, Hosea, and
Isaiah, began to pronounce their sentences. They denounced desolation
and solitude against nations more populous than this continent, one of
whose cities enumerated more citizens than some of our proud
commonwealths, and displayed buildings, a sight of whose crumbling ruins
is deemed sufficient recompense for the perils of a journey of six
thousand miles. The hundred churches of Cincinnati could all have been
conveniently arranged in the basement of the temple of Belus; on the
first floor our hundred thousand non-church-going citizens might have
assembled to listen to a lecture on spiritualism from some eloquent
Chaldean soothsayer; and the remaining seven stories would have still
been open for the accommodation of the natives of the original Queen
City. Every product of earth was trafficked in the markets of Tyre; a
single Jewish house imported annually more gold than all the banks of
this continent possess; and the whole coinage of the United States since
1793 would want a hundred millions of dollars of the value of the golden
furniture of a single temple in Babylon. In fact, in the suburbs of
Babylon or Nineveh, Washington or Cincinnati would have been
insignificant villages; and the stone-fronted brick palaces of Broadway
and the Fifth Avenue would make passable stables and haylofts for the
mansions of Thebes or Petra.

So far, therefore, from being the teaching of experience, there was
nothing more utterly unexampled and unparalleled than the complete
desolation of any nation at the time the prophets of Israel predicted
such things. If the world has grown wiser