Our Day | Page 8

beauty of the Chaldees'
excellency, shall be as when God overthrew Sodom and Gomorrah. It
shall never be inhabited, neither shall it be dwelt in from generation to
generation: neither shall the Arabian pitch tent there; neither shall the
shepherds make their fold there. But wild beasts of the desert shall lie
there; and their houses shall be full of doleful creatures; and owls shall
dwell there, and satyrs shall dance there. And the wild beasts of the
islands shall cry in their desolate houses, and dragons in their pleasant

palaces: and her time is near to come, and her days shall not be
prolonged." Isa. 13:19-22.
Never could a more doleful future have been pictured for a city full of
splendor, the metropolis of the world. About one hundred and
seventy-five years after this word was written on the parchment scroll,
the Medes and Persians were at the gates of Babylon. Her time had
come, and Chaldea's rule was ended.
"Fallen is the golden city! in the dust, Spoiled of her crown, dismantled
of her state. She that hath made the Strength of Towers her trust, Weeps
by her dead, supremely desolate!
"She that beheld the nations at her gate Thronging in homage, shall be
called no more 'Lady of Kingdoms!'--Who shall mourn her fate? Her
guilt is full, her march of triumph o'er."
But still, under Medo-Persia, and later under the Greeks, the city itself
was populous and prosperous and beautiful. The skeptic of the time
may have pointed to it as evidence that here, at least, the Hebrew
prophet had missed the mark.
Apollonius, the sage of Tyana, who lived in the days of Nero and the
apostles, has left an account of Babylon as he saw it, as late as the first
century of our era. Still the Euphrates swept beneath its walls, dividing
the city into halves, with great palaces on either side. He says:
"The palaces are roofed with bronze, and a glitter goes off from them;
but the chambers of the women and of the men and the porticoes are
adorned partly with silver, and partly with golden tapestries or curtains,
and partly with solid gold in the form of pictures."
And of the king's judgment hall he reported:
"The roof had been carried up in the form of a dome, to resemble in a
manner the heavens, and that it was roofed with sapphire, a stone that is
very blue and like heaven to the eye; and there were images of the gods,
which they worship, fixed aloft, and looking like golden figures shining

out of the ether."--Philostratus, "Life of Apollonius," book 1, chap. 25.
Evidently Babylon was still "the land of graven images," and the
desolation foretold by the prophet had not yet befallen its palaces. But
that prophetic word, written eight hundred years before, was still upon
the scroll of the Book, the sure Word of God, who sees the end from
the beginning.
[Illustration: EGYPT'S GLORY DEPARTED
"The idols of Egypt shall be moved." Isa. 19:1.]
The view given us by Apollonius is perhaps the last glimpse we have of
Babylon's passing glory. Even then for centuries the walls had been a
quarry from which stones were drawn for Babylon's rival, Seleucia, on
the Tigris. And Strabo, the Greek geographer, who also wrote in the
first century, had described Babylon as "in great part deserted," adding,
"No one would hesitate to apply to it what one of the comic writers said
of Megalopolitæ, in Arcadia, 'The great city is a great
desert.'"--"Geography," book 16, chap. 1.
Already pagan writers had begun to describe its condition in the terms
of the prophecy uttered so long before. And now what is its state? The
doom foretold has fallen heavy upon the city, upon its palaces, and
"upon the graven images of Babylon." For a century and more,
travelers' accounts have frequently borne witness to the exact fulfilment
of the prophecy in the remarkable desolations of that city, once mistress
of the world.
"Babylon shall become heaps," said the prophecy, "and owls shall
dwell there." This is what Mr. Layard, the English archeologist, found
on his visit in 1845:
"Shapeless heaps of rubbish cover for many an acre the face of the
land.... On all sides, fragments of glass, marble, pottery, and inscribed
brick are mingled with that peculiar nitrous and blanched soil, which,
bred from the remains of ancient habitations, checks or destroys

vegetation, and renders the site of Babylon a naked and a hideous waste.
Owls [which are of a large gray kind, and often found in flocks of
nearly a hundred] start from the scanty thickets, and the foul jackal
skulks through the furrows."--"Discoveries Among the Ruins of
Nineveh and Babylon," chap. 21, p. 413.
The prophecy said, "Neither shall the Arabian