interpreters have taken this view of their design. We cannot imagine that all they intended was to secure themselves a name with posterity. Nor could that have prevented their dispersion. They did not say, Let us do this before we are dispersed; but, Let us do it lest we be dis persed. No doubt they sought to make themselves such a name as might prevent their division into a number of distinct nations; and that could only be prevented by the establishment of an authority to which all might continue in perfect subjection, however they might be multiplied and spread abroad. It was their division which was feared, not their multiplication and diffusion. The latter must have been considered by them as a thing which nothing could prevent, if the natural increase of men continued for any length of time.

That such was their design may be proved from the proper meaning of the scriptural phrases, "to gather together nations," and "to disperse them." By the former is meant, the establishment of a great empire; and by the latter, its overthrow. The same thing may also be proved by the proper force of the term name, as used'in Scripture. That denotes a dignity and authority, claiming the confidence and submission of mankind. Hence the Hebrew Doctors often call God simply, Own THE NAME; as it is He alone who merits to be the supreme object of human confidence, and whom all are bound to submit to as their Maker, Lord, and Judge. This style was proudly affected by Gregory the Seventh, when he said that there is only one name in the world, meaning the Pope.

We may all have had occasion to mark this strange perverseness in men of strong minds, when they have been induced to take upon them the defence of religion against innovations. They are ever ready to follow their own counsel; and a pliable hypocrisy is always at hand, to second their schemes. When human indolence shrinks from the holy toil requisite to gain subjects to the kingdom of God in a legitimate way, and to defend it by proper weapons, the cross is an object of dread, and men would have the city of God built up and protected by means of wealth and secular power, which act upon the cupidity and fear of such as imagine the kingdom of heaven to be little more than a mere name and external profession. Then pride, the worst of all counsellors, makes them to wish to have their own wisdom in admiration among their fellows. But neither pride, nor the love of the world, nor the fear of man, nor hypocrisy, are the foundations of the kingdom of God; they are the support of that of the beast, the mother of barlots and abominations, the great Antichrist.

Such perversity was manifested in the rash act of the builders of ancient Babel and its lofty citadel; and if they had been suffered to proceed, the evils we have enumerated, and others of the same class, would have exposed the truth and authority of God to the most imminent hazard among mankind. Their presumption merited the check which it received by the interposition of the just judgment of heaven. God confounded their language, and scattered them over the face of the whole earth. Thus the very evil came

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upon them which they were desirous of preventing. The monument of their folly was branded with the name of Confusion; and their punishment was extended to all future generations.

Still it may be justly questioned whether this was not rather the remedy than the punishment of their crime. If we do consider it as the latter, we cannot deny that it was the former also. In the unity of their language, it is true, they possessed a great advantage, of which they were deprived by its confusion. But, to deprive them of that which they were so ready to abuse, was only like wresting a sword out of the hand of a maniac. Yet God left not himself without witness, as ever disposed to do good to men; and by the introduction of so many different languages, he has taught us that his kingdom does not depend so much on the confession of the tongue, as on the affection of the heart. Hence it has come to pass that, while we hear from all other animals respectively, the same sounds,—a -as the lowing of the ox, the barking of the dog, the melody of the nightingale,—there is such a confusion of tongues among men, that they scarcely appear to be of the same species. Pliny says, that " a foreigner hardly seems to us to be a man;" and Augustine observes, that "there is often more agreement between a man and a dog, than there is between one man and another." When the builders of Babel were thus rendered incapable of understanding each other, they would be obliged to desist from their common purpose, and to separate into distinct tribes and nations. After such a proof of the divine displeasure against their attempt to preserve a uniformity of government and religion, by means of one common language, had been given them in the confusion of that language, it might have been expected that they would thenceforth have endeavoured to serve him in that unity of heart which he prefers before all merely verbal agreement. Too great an anxiety to preserve such an agreement, in the present state of human nature, may lead to a common denial of the truth of God, and a tyrannical resistance of every attempt afterwards made to restore his true worship in the world. But men are naturally so blind to the manifestations of his out-stretched arm, that it is probable there were at that time very few who, like pious Heber, became properly sensible of the design of this divine interposition. He, as a memorial of the event, and to show his own judgment of it, called his son, who was born about that time, by a name which signifies division. Many, no doubt, would be inclined to persist in their rash enterprise the chief of them appears to have been Nimrod. He became a mighty hunter before the Lord. He was a hunter of men, as well as of beasts; and contrived to entangle in the toils of his Babylonish empire many of the tribes who had been separated and dispersed by the confusion of tongues. He was probably a man void of the true fear of God; and yet he might pretend great zeal for the honour of the divine name, and make the preservation of the unity of religion a pretext to cover his own ambitious views.

The divided nations in general gradually departed from the institutions of their ancestors; suffered the remembrance of the true God and his doings to be wholly obliterated; and at last became so brutish as to "change the glory of the uncorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man, and to birds, and four-footed beasts, and creeping things." Thus men wandered about like lost sheep; and the sons of God were scattered abroad over the face of the whole earth, only to be gathered together again through the blood of "the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world." The Son of God, the good Shepherd, gave his life for the sheep. He died, not for one nation only, but that he might "gather together in one the children of God that were scattered abroad." Till the time appointed for the offering of that great sacrifice, God interposed the confusion of tongues as a barrier to the designs formed by Satan against mankind. He thus prevented the great deceiver from so uniting the subjects of his kingdom, as either totally to subvert that of God, or to make a terrible resistance to its establishment and progress. The discord of the nations, rendered unintelligible to each other by an innumerable variety of languages, prevented their association in one vast empire of wickedness, and tended much to keep the Jewish people from mingling with the apostate nations.

But though such obstacles were thrown in his way, Satan still continued to aim at the accomplishment of his evil purpose. As he had stirred up Nimrod, so he was ever labouring to stir up the rulers of other great empires to attempt the formation of one universal system of impiety and superstition, which might be handed down unaltered to the latest generations. Hence the persecutions carried on by the Babylonians, Persians, and Grecians against those who retained the true knowledge and worship of God. Divine Providence, however, always frustrated the designs of the enemy, and preserved a seed to serve him and maintain the honours of his name in the world. We all know what tremendous efforts were made by Antiochus Epiphanes to place the heathen Jove in the temple of Jehovah. But, though he long harassed the feeble Jews by the most cruel and destructive persecutions, and brought against them the most powerful armies, he also utterly failed in his wicked attempt, and died under the most manifest indications of the displeasure of God.

When the Romans, who were so strenuous in support of their own altars, and ready to overthrow those of all other nations, began to despair of being able to bring those whom they had conquered, or otherwise brought under their power, to submit to their superstitions, they pursued another course, and conferred the right of citizenship on the gods of those nations; that it might, at least, appear as if no form of religion existed except by their sovereign will and pleasure. That they might thus seem to have established one religion for the whole empire, they excluded none from the number of their divinities but the

God of Israel.

The apotheosis of Jesus Christ was alone refused by the Roman Senate. The devil is most appropriately represented by a great red dragon, or serpent, with seven heads and ten horns and seven crowns upon his heads, as he was embodied in that politic as well as powerful empire, and actuated it throughout the whole of its extent, when the worshippers of that dragon dared to boast, according to the language of Pliny, of that "elect people, who by the will of the gods had made heaven itself more illustrious, gathered together the dispersed empires, softened their religious rites, drawn into friendly intercourse the discordant and savage tongues of so many nations, and given humanity to man,-in a word, had made one the country of all people." Soon another beast, under the Christian name, occupied the seat of the dragon, and thus was seen the consummation of the great Babylon, which thrust the nations into the court of the temple, waged war against the saints and overcame them, and set the lawless one, the mystic Nimrod, in the place of God, and gave him power over every tribe, and tongue, and nation. We are also told in the sacred oracles that Satan should go forth in the last days, to deceive the nations that are in the four quarters of the earth, and to gather them together to the battle of the great God Almighty. Thus we see how it has ever been the ambition of the great enemy of God and man to extend and unite his dark kingdom: and, as he has been perpetually frustrated by the confusion of tongues and consequent discordancy of the nations, he has attempted to bring men of every tongue to sound the same note of seduction and rebellion against God. But the glory of God has shone forth in all its native purity amidst all Satan's efforts to obscure it. God gathers his elect from among all nations and tongues by his Christ. He needs not the weapons of carnal warfare, nor the alluring eloquence of a common language, in order to subdue and conciliate the nations. He can baffle all the arts of Satan, triumph over all his triumphs, conquer even by his victories, and turn his gathering together of the nations to the advantage of his own kingdom.

Thus, when the great dragon, who is justly called the devil and Satan, had so far gathered the nations together, as to cause his Roman worshippers to flatter themselves that they had made the world one people and city, when he had even mingled the Jews with the Gentiles, and made the land of Immanuel itself a province of that vast mundane empire, and might thus be said to have drawn down a part of the stars of heaven with his tail, and to have cast them to the earth,when the whole world was at peace under Augustus, and the surrounding Princes appeared to hold their several possessions in perfect security, -the Son of God came in the flesh, and the dragon stood ready to devour him as soon as he should be born: but he was raised to heaven and the throne of his kingdom by what men might have deemed his utter ruin; and then the Spirit of God, sent by him, and through the merit of his death, came down, to confound the harmony and disturb VOL. XIV. Third Series. MARCH, 1835. N

the peace which the devil had contrived to introduce among men opposed to the holy and merciful designs of Heaven. Then Satan was bound, and the true Prince of peace appeared, to destroy the work of the devil, and to establish the kingdom of "righteousness, and peace, and joy in the Holy Ghost." The mountains were made low, and the valleys were exalted, and the Redeemer walked through the world as an unobstructed plain. The imaginary triumph of the dragon was the true triumph of God. The vast empire of pagan Rome might have had no other object in view in its erection than to make way for the more speedy progress of the Gospel, which went forth like the lightning. By the subjugation and dispersion of the Jews, the kingdom of God seemed to be totally overthrown; but even that event only served to bring the oracles of the Prophets, which are one of the chief pillars of the Gospel, under the notice and into the hands of the Gentiles. Thus Satan was found to have thrust the sword into his own heart.

Nor did God deem it enough to have thus turned the engines of the devil against him; but, that he might suddenly spoil him of all his armour, and show that the strength of his own kingdom does not depend on the use of one common language, or on the wisdom of man, but on that Spirit, who collects not the churches into the form of a secular and visible kingdom, but unites heaven and earth by bringing God into the hearts of men, he came down on the Apostles, accompanied by the audible and visible signs of a mighty rushing wind, and cloven tongues of fire, which sat on the heads of each of them, when they were filled with his holy inspiration, and they began to speak with tongues, as he gave them

utterance.

A fire was seen and a voice heard on the giving of the law; but they were so terrible that the people trembled, and deprecated such manifestations of the presence of God. On the introduction of the kingdom of grace and peace, though the sound of the rushing wind, which shook the place of their assembly, might startle them for a moment, the presence of the Spirit soon became manifest under the form of living flames, which shed a lovely light around the brows of the faithful, while he filled their hearts with knowledge and holy joy. What they uttered in all the various languages of the devout men assembled at Jerusalem "from every nation under heaven," was so benignant as to prove that the Spirit was sent by him who came not to kill, but to give life; not to terrify, but to console. He thus gave his disciples the tongue of the learned, that they might speak a word in season to him that was weary,—a word which such men did not dread, but longed to hear again. Thus differently from the giving of the law, violated by, and therefore terrible to, men, was the glorious Gospel of the blessed God ushered into the world, and at once proclaimed to men of all nations.

The ancient Seers foretold this glorious event in strains worthy of such infinite mercy. They sweetly sung beforehand of the gathering together of the nations to the great Reconciler; and showed that what