and to afford us a glimpse into that complicated and admirable, but sometimes recondite machinery, by which the moral discipline of the world is conducted.

THIRTEENTH WEEK-SUNDAY.

CONFUSION OF TONGUES.

"GOD is not the author of confusion but of peace." So do the holy oracles affirm. Any one who has fixed his mind on the ordering of the seasons; the diurnal and nocturnal succession; the invisible but unvarying law, "which hath placed the sand for the bound of the sea, by a perpetual decree that it cannot pass it; and, though the waves thereof toss themselves, yet can they not prevail; though they roar, yet can they not pass over it,"-any such person must own that the God of Nature is the God of order.

Again, who that has marked the regularity with which the fertile earth gives forth her returns to the husbandman; how the hand of the diligent maketh rich; how the habits of the temperate and abstemious procure sanity of the bodily and mental constitution,-but must own that the God of Providence smiles benignly on the observance of order in his creatures.

Or, should we study the minute directions condescendingly given to the children of Abraham, when they had escaped from the misrule and severities of Egypt, and knew not how to arrange their journeyings in the wilderness; should we mark the rules by which they struck and carried the tents, and how each tribe had its locality fixed in the order of march; and how each had its camp, and distinguishing standard attached to it, with the ensign of his father's house; and how the station of the Levites was round about the tabernacle of the testimony; and how their time to march, or to convene, either in whole con

gregations, or only in a council of the princes, was guided by the varied signals of two silver trumpets;-should we study these things, will not irrefragable proof be furnished, that the God of Revelation is the God of order?

On looking abroad through creation, however, we are arrested by many tokens of confusion: we see hills, which might have been covered with smiling flocks, broken into unproductive precipices; streams, which might have irrigated many a meadow, foaming along in limited and rocky channels; nations, which might have been united in one extended continent, cut up and dissevered by many a league of ocean; limbs, formed with evident design to sustain frames which are rendered helpless without them, distorted and withered; delicate organs, constituted to convey the delights of sound and vision, rendered tuneless and sightless; and-O still deeper profundity of frustrated purpose and averted design!-affections, calculated to sweeten and alleviate; souls capable of deep emotion and noble enjoyment; perverted into the very gall and wormwood of the cup of life, degrading him who owns them, and dishonoring the God they are capable of glorifying.

The student of revelation, and the student of his own heart, will alike readily admit, that much of this confusion is not accidental, is not the result of mistake or misrule, but the necessary and irreversible result of man's moral departure from conformity to the image and will of the God of order; a state of things bound fast in the laws of the Holy One, whose mind and will terminate in the most beautiful consistency and correctness; and, therefore, whose mind and will cannot be contravened, without producing a confusion from which all the perpetrators of that contravention must suffer, though it can in no wise touch or approach unto Him who inhabiteth the praises of eternity.

Amongst the confusions which are most prominent, and which to the learned, or to the expanded mind, are most incommodious, is the diversity of speech which the nations of our world experience. Let the native travel but to the summit of his mountain, or cross some rill which,

in its insignificance, forms no barrier to intercourse, and he shall find the dwellers on the other side as barbarians to him. Each possesses the curious and ingenious structure, which constitutes the complex organs of speech; each experiences the wants which would render communication a great convenience; each inherits the social temperament, which would spring forth into converse ;— but, with all these appliances, they can hold no intercourse. Their tongues are diverse, and from that springs a sentiment of distrust and suspicion, often productive of enmity. Let the man of research seek to profit by the wisdom of other ages; open to him libraries rich in the lore of ancient philosophers, he encounters a barrier which sends him back to his horn-book; and, instead of attaining the knowledge after which he pants, he must defer his thirst for a year, it may be, or a far more extended portion of his brief span, and resume his lexicon, and grammar, and schoolboy habits. Let the Christian philanthropist overcome his love of ease, break the ties of home and country, sever himself from the communion of the church, and traverse oceans to reach a land where he purposes to proclaim, that the kingdom of Heaven is come;—his zeal is restrained, his hopes are deferred, the object of his mission is forced into the back-ground, while his powers are all applied to the tedious process of acquiring an unknown tongue. When at last he would emerge from behind this formidable and discouraging obstacle, and tell of the Saviour on whom his own hopes are set, he does not proclaim with freedom and courage the acceptable year of the Lord. No; his message is delivered in the dubious lispings of childhood; peradventure his imperfect acquisition leads him to utter that which he meaneth not; and, almost certainly, he exposes himself to the ridicule of those whom he would gladly teach.

Truly had the people been one, and had they possessed all one language, "nothing would have been restrained from them that they had imagined to do." But fallen man was not worthy to have such a gift confided to him. He proved this by trying the impious project of raising himself a name, whose foundation was laid in his pride,

instead of exalting the name of his God and Redeemer, the foundation of whose kingdom is laid in man's humility. He forsook the true God, and set up self as his idol, and sought to raise a tower to heaven, which should be as a uniting altar, lest his quickly multiplying race should be scattered. O sublime and simple power of the God whom he had forsaken! No earthquake shook the foundation of their tower; no tornado hurled it from its place; no pestilence destroyed the haughty workmen; but "He confounded their language, that they might not understand one another's speech." The zealous, the ambitious, the worldly-wise, were suddenly reduced to a state of helplessness, tending to the ridiculous. Their unity of purpose was lost; their orderly plan was brought to confusion, and they left off building the city ;-therefore was the place called Babel, "because the Lord did there confound the language of all the earth, and from thence did the Lord scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth." Thus was man's power of combination in mischief checked, but thus also was his power of good diminished.

Fourteen centuries rolled away, when again, on the same spot, did a proud monarch endeavor to counteract the consequences of that early judgement, by commanding all people, nations, and languages, to fall down and worship the golden image he had set up. And many were there of the temper of the men of Babel, ready to unite in a vainglorious project. But in vain did all the people, the nations, and the languages fall down at the appointed and clamorous signal, that they might thus exalt, not the golden image, but him who set it up; in vain, because certain Jews, of the sons of the captives, regarded not the king and his graven god. The triumph of the lordling was incomplete so long as three men in his wide dominion dared to worship according to their conscience. How often has the cause of truth appeared, in this perverted world, in a minority as feeble, and how continually does the confusion which sin has wrought, exhibit itself in the transient elevation and injurious triumphing of the wicked. Even in Babylon, then, there were found three

men of one country, willing to peril life for the glory of the living God; three of the family of Israel, who had so far emerged from the obscurity of a state of bondage, as to be counted worthy of subjugation in this matter. They calmly replied to the threats of the despot, "If it be so, our God whom we serve, is able to deliver us from the burning fiery furnace, and He will deliver us out of thine hand, O king! But if not, be it known unto thee, O king! that we will not serve thy gods, nor worship the golden image which thou hast set up. Then was Nebuchadnezzar full of fury, and the form of his visage was changed." Hast thou forgotten, O king, the tradition attached to thy city of old? hast thou no dread of Him who scattered thy predecessors, even the original builders of thy Babel? Wilt thou dare to lay hands on the worshippers of Him, who confounded their language of old? But the angel of his presence saved them ;" and the persecutor of the three whose meek courage had not forsaken them even in the fire, was made the first to invite them forth of his ingeniously constructed furnace, confessing them to be the servants of the Most High God.

Thus did three men who trusted in God, and changed the king's word, and yielded their bodies that they might not serve nor worship any God except their own, the Eternal and Unchangeable, rebuke the pride of their powerful conqueror, and frustrate his project of uniting once more in one evil object, those whose diversity of language had long estranged them from each other.

M. G. L. D.

THIRTEENTH WEEK-MONDAY.

HUMAN LANGUAGE.

ONE of the most remarkable and important of human acquirements, is the use of articulate sounds, without which no very extensive intercourse could have been carried on between man and man, and the progressive