NE; God hath numbered thy kingdom, and finished it. 27.
TEKEL; Thou art weighed in the balances, and art found wanting. 28.
PERES; Thy kingdom is divided, and given to the Medes and Persians.
29. Then commanded Belshazzar, and they clothed Daniel with
scarlet, and put a chain of gold about his neck, and made a
proclamation concerning him, that he should be the third ruler in
the kingdom. 30. In that night was Belshazzar the king of the
Chaldeans slain. 31. And Darius the Median took the kingdom, being
about threescore and two years old.'--DANIEL v. 17-31.

Belshazzar is now conceded to have been a historical personage, the son
of the last monarch of Babylon, and the other name in the narrative
which has been treated as erroneous--namely, Darius--has not been found
to be mentioned elsewhere, but is not thereby proved to be a blunder.
For why should it not be possible for Scripture to preserve a name that
secular history has not yet been ascertained to record, and why must it
always be assumed that, if Scripture and cuneiform or other documents
differ, it is Scripture that must go to the wall?

We do not deal with the grim picture of the drunken orgy, turned into
abject terror as 'the fingers of a man's hand' came forth out of empty
air, and in the full blaze of 'the candlestick' wrote the illegible
signs. There is something blood-curdling in the visibility of but a
part of the hand and its busy writing. Whose was the body, and where was
it? No wonder if the riotous mirth was frozen into awe, and the wine
lost flavour. Nor need we do more than note the craven-hearted flattery
addressed to Daniel by the king, who apparently had never heard of him
till the queen spoke of him just before. We have to deal with the
indictment, the sentence, and the execution.

I. The indictment. Daniel's tone is noticeably stern. He has no
reverential preface, no softening of his message. His words are as if
cut with steel on the rock. He brushes aside the promises of vulgar
decorations and honours with undisguised contempt, and goes straight to
his work of rousing a torpid conscience.

Babylon was the embodiment and type of the godless world-power, and
Belshazzar was the incarnation of the spirit which made Babylon. So
Daniel's indictment gathers together the main forms of sin, which cleave
to every godless national or individual life. And he begins with that
feather-brained frivolity which will lear