since regarding the decline
and fall of empires, it has gathered the best part of its sagacity from
the prophecies.

The degradation of the seed of Ham, and the colonization of Asia by the
descendants of Japhet, were however undeniably predicted by Noah long
before any examples or experiences of such things had occurred.
Centuries after the degradation of Canaan had been predicted, his
descendants were powerful, prosperous, and colonizing the shores of the
world. But God foresaw, and compelled their ancestor to foretell, the
corruption of the blood which would reduce his descendants to be
servants of servants to their brethren; and now the ruins of their
cities, and of the people descended from Canaan, are proverbial alike in
the libraries and slave markets of the world.

But on the other hand, the colonization of the world by the descendants
of Japhet was as particularly predicted by Noah as the degradation of
the Canaanites; and this can not be called a prediction of destruction,
but rather of great prosperity: "God shall enlarge Japhet." Every
emigrant ship which discharges its cargo at New York, and every new
prairie farm in America, and every sheep ranch in Australia, and every
new cattle kraal in South Africa fulfills the prediction: "He shall
dwell in the tents of Shem." The various Greek, Roman, English, and
Russian Empires of Asia attest the truth. From the Volga to the Amour,
and from Hong Kong to Singapore, and from the Ganges to the Indus,
Japhet to-day dwells in the tents of Shem.

3. The prophecies of the Bible are not vague general denunciations of
natural decline and extinction to all the nations of the world, which,
if they were merely the exposition of a universal _natural_ law of
national death, they would be; nor yet the application of any such
natural and inevitable law to some particular nation, denouncing its
destruction, without any specification of time, manner, instrument, or
cause of its infliction. They are all the applications of _moral
law_--sentences pronounced on account of national wickedness. In every
case the prophecy charges the crimes, and specifies the punishment,
selected by the Judge of all the earth. The nations selected as examples
of divine justice are as various as their sentences are different;
covering a space as long as from Eastport to San Francisco, and climes
as various as those between Canada and Cuba; peopled by men of every
shade of color and degree of capacity, fr