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He is the only being who can be properly said to exist. He possesses an absolute plenitude of being. All other existence is derived, precarious, and dependent. But God is the being who IS.

The name which God assumes to himself in the burning bush, is equally expressive of the perfection of his existence and the immutability of his nature, his attributes, his purposes, and his promises. I AM THAT I AM, literally, I WILL BE WHAT I WILL BE. Go thou, and say to the children of Is

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rael, I AM hath sent me unto you." Exod. iii.

From all that has been said, we learn the INCOMPREHENSIBILITY of the Supreme Being.

God is great, and we know him not. And it is our duty at all times, and upon all occasions, to think and speak of him with the profoundest veneration and reIt is at the same time a source of exquisite satisfaction, amidst the vicissitudes of human affairs, the lapse of years, the waste of time, and the ravages of death, to

verence.

reflect that the being who presides over and governs all still lives, that his attributes and purposes are immutable, and that nothing can defeat the accomplishment of his wise and benevolent purposes. His coun

sel shall stand.

SERMON XVIII.

THE FALL OF BABYLON, THE ACCOMPLISHMENT

OF PROPHECY.

ISAIAH, xiii. 19.

And Babylon, the glory of kingdoms, the beauty of the Chaldees' excellency, shall be as when God overthrew Sodom and Gomorrha,

OF

the prophecies which are scattered through the books of the Old Testament, and which attest the divine authority of the mosaic institute, the next in point of precision and importance to those which relate to the Messiah, and to the events which should happen to the Jewish nation, are prophecies which announce the capture and the utter destruction of Babylon: the correspondence of which predictions with the events announced by them, it is my present purpose briefly to illustrate, and to point out some useful inferences which may be deduced from them.

If the detail of the event had been contained in the book which records the prediction, or if the narrative had been drawn up for the express purpose of illustrating the accomplishment of the prophecy, by some historian of the Hebrew nation, there might have been some room to suspect collusion, some plausible pretext to say, that the historian has given a colour to his facts, in order to support the credit of the prophecy, or that possibly the prediction was forged after the event.

In the present case, this objection is wholly precluded. The denunciations of the Jewish prophets were delivered long before the event. Jeremiah prophesied seventy years, and Isaiah two hundred years before Babylon was besieged: and the catastrophe which these prophets foretel was, at the time when they uttered the oracles, in the highest degree unlooked for and improbable. The historian of the event is Herodotus, the most ancient of the Greek historians, who had himself visited the spot, and Xenophon, the disciple and biographer

of Socrates, the most eminent of the Athenian philosophers, and a great general, who was also the friend and ally of the younger Cyrus, and who possessed the best means of information. And it is highly probable that neither of these historians had either seen or heard of the Hebrew prophecies, or would have thought them in any degree worthy of the slightest attention, although in their respective histories they relate the accomplishment of them almost to their minutest detail.

I propose to give a succinct account of the city of Babylon to relate the history of its fall-to shew how completely and how literally the Jewish prophecies were fulfilled in this event-and to offer a few reflections upon the subject.

Babylon was the largest and the most magnificent city which ever existed. It was raised to its highest glory by Nebuchadnezzar, though its foundation was laid by one of his remote predecessors. From accounts transmitted by ancient historians, it appears to have occupied an immense

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