laid a snare for thee, and thou art taken, O Babylon; and thou art found, and also caught." "In their heat I will make their feasts, and I will make them drunken, that they may rejoice, and sleep a perpetual sleep, and not wake, saith the Lord." According to the prediction, "the city was taken in the night of a great annual festival, while the inhabitants were dancing, drinking, and revelling." "On passing without obstruction or hinderance into the city, the Persians, slaying some, putting others to flight, and joining with the revellers, as if slaughter had been merriment, hastened by the shortest way to the palace, and reached it before a messenger had told the king that his city was taken. The gates of the palace, which were strongly fortified, were shut; the guards before the gates were drinking beside a blazing light, when the Persians rushed on them furiously." The king, hearing the warlike tumult at the gates, ordered his attendants to see whence it arose. As soon as the gates were opened, the Persians sprang in, and the king and all about him were instantly cut down.

Not only the capture but the entire desolation of Babylon was foretold by the prophet. "How is the hammer of the whole earth cut asunder and broken; how is Babylon become a desolation among the nations!" "It shall no more be inhabited, neither shall it be dwelt in from generation to generation." "Babylon shall become heaps, a

The sea is come

dwelling-place for dragons." up upon Babylon. Her cities are a desolation, a dry land, and a wilderness, a land wherein no man dwelleth, neither doth any son of man pass thereby."

These predictions have been gradually fulfilled. Cyrus ordered the outer walls to be pulled down. The city rebelled against Darius, who took it after a siege of twenty months. He ordered three thousand of the principal men to be crucified, demolished the wall, and took away the gates. Xerxes seized the sacred treasures, and plundered or destroyed the idols of Babylon; thus fulfilling the prediction, "Her idols are confounded, her images are broken in pieces." The city was afterwards taken by Alexander the Great, who intended to make it the seat of his empire. But death put an end to all his projects. Seleucia was soon afterwards built in its neighborhood, and robbed Babylon not only of its inhabitants but of its name. Babylon soon became desolate. Both Strabo and Pliny say that in their time "the great city was become a great desert." Jerome, in the fourth century, says that the later kings of Persia kept wild beasts inclosed within its walls for hunting, and that all within the walls was desolate. In the sixteenth century there was not a house to be seen in Babylon." One traveller, towards the close of the last century, "passed over the site of

Babylon without being conscious of having traversed it."

How changed the scene since Nebuchadnezzar, looking down from the top of his palace on the magnificent city, exclaimed, "Is not this great Babylon, which I have built for the metropolis of my kingdom?" "After an active search of six days," a late traveller "could discover no appearance of the wall." The ruins of Babylon now "consist of mounds of earth, formed by the decomposition of buildings, channelled and furrowed by the weather; and the surface of these strewed with pieces of brick, bitumen, and pottery." "Those who stand on its site are sometimes at a loss to distinguish between the remains of a street or canal, or to tell where the crowds frequented, or where the water flowed." "Babylon is fallen, is fallen!"

Jeremiah predicted of Babylon, "The wild beasts of the desert with the wild beasts of the islands shall dwell there." We have seen that it was a place where wild beasts were shut up in the fourth century. "There are now many dens of wild beasts in various places." A traveller, not long since, saw "two or three majestic lions

on

the height of a ruin which is supposed to be the remains of the temple of Belus; and "the broad prints of their feet were left plain in the clayey soil." "The mound was full of large holes; we entered some of them, and found them strewn with

the carcasses and skeletons of animals recently killed. Our guide told us the ruins abounded in lions and other wild beasts."

Jeremiah predicted that on the overthrow of the Chaldean monarchy the Jews would be permitted to return to their own land, and that they would no more revolt from Jehovah to the service of idolgods. "In those days and in that time, saith the Lord, the children of Israel shall come, they and the children of Judah together, going and weeping; they shall go and seek the Lord their God. They shall ask the way to Zion with their faces thitherward, saying, Come, and let us join ourselves to the Lord in a perpetual covenant that shall not be forgotten."

This prediction was fulfilled when Cyrus, in the first year of his reign, gave the Jews liberty to return to their country, and rebuild their city and temple. Since that time they have never, as a people, fallen into idolatry, but have recognized Jehovah as the only true God.

CHAPTER XXVIII.

JEREMIAH'S DEALINGS WITH ZEDEKIAH

ZEDEKIAH was a weak as well as wicked prince. He was not without good impulses, but he wanted firmness and perseverance to carry them into execution. He sometimes had a feeble preference for the right, and with more upright counsellors might have made a respectable ruler; but he had not stability enough to resist the pressure of corrupt courtiers, prompting him to evil. He seemed occasionally to struggle between conscience and crime, between humanity and the permission of cruel deeds, between respect for the word of the Lord and the feigned words of the prophets, which were more congenial to his depraved propensities. Even when consulting Jeremiah, with an apparent intention to follow his advice, he was afraid the princes would get some intimation of the conference. He was manifestly king only in name, while the measures of his administration were shaped by others.

So long as Zedekiah continued his allegiance to Nebuchadnezzar, his kingdom enjoyed peace. Under the protection of that powerful monarch, he had little to fear from any foreign enemy. For a time he seems to have hearkened to the admonitions of Jeremiah, and notwithstanding the persua