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 too Strong for them: they chose the wages of unrighteousness, and incurred the guilt of sacrilege.

But admitting the guilt of our forefathers, which can hardly be seriously questioned except through ignorance, let us consider the more practical question, whether we have reason to hope that that guilt is buried with them, or whether it stands recorded against our country, in the book of God's remembrance? Surely the answer which Scripture enables us to make does not flatter us with the expectation of impunity. The destruction of Amalek by Saul was more than four hundred years later than the national sin which it avenged. The seventy years of the captivity of Judah was measured out to answer to the sabbaths which the people had profaned in their land. They went on long in their sin, and thought that God had forgotten it; but while He kept silence. He remembered both His command and their breach of it. The length of time was no bar to His judgment. And the words of our Lord imply, that the accumulated vengeance of the Most High, against the murderers of all the martyred prophets, from righteous Abel downwards, was poured forth upon the guilty city and nation of the Jews, by the sword of Titus. Certain it is, therefore,