Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 39.djvu/77

Rh give the true and only key to the earliest partings of our race. They are true to the rise and progress of divided nations. The picture of manners which they present is not less faithful than the account they give of early habits and pursuits both in peace and war. Only the other day Mr. Flinders Petrie has told us how the spade has uncovered those impregnable walls of the Amorite cities which were reported to invading Israel by the spies of Moses. They are found to be more than twenty-eight feet thick at the base fit to support a superstructure of at least fifty feet in height. There will come, I suppose, our wonderful agnostic critic to point out that the record in Deuteronomy says that these cities were "walled up to heaven." But these walls of Lachish could never have reached the Pleiades. They could not have so much as touched the moon. Nay, it is certain that they could not have approached even the limits of our own atmosphere. Therefore the book of Deuteronomy is unhistorical, and Christian theology is founded on the "quicksands of fable"!

But the spade, as a true weapon of precision, has done more for us than this. It has revealed to our living sight, in the remains of Nineveh and of Babylon, all the mysterious imagery of the prophets, and all the literal historic truth of their tremendous denunciations. It has revealed in numberless inscriptions the shameless confession of that inordinate pride and cruelty which dictated the policy, and the desolating deeds, of the great military monarchies of the East. It has explained their fall and their own subsequent retributive desolation as foreseen in the magnificent visions of Nahuin and Zephaniah, of Ezekiel and Isaiah. Such hideous wickedness could not be allowed to last. Their doom indeed was written in the moral law; and one of these prophets expressly founds his predictions on his confidence in that law as the will of the "just Lord." "Every morning doth He bring his judgment to light; he faileth not." But when the chariots of Assyria were still issuing from the gates of Nineveh "the bloody city" it required a prophet's eye to read the sentence. When Nebuchadnezzar, or his latest successor, was still lounging in his palace richly colored and shining with enameled walls when the hanging gardens of Babylon were still in bloom it required some open vision to foresee the time when they should exist no more when for centuries the very site of them should be uncertain and when the mounds of their ruin should be given over to the owls and to the bats.

Then there is a higher sphere of prophecy into which we rise