f Babylon stood at the parting of the way, at the
head of the two ways, to use divination: he shook the arrows
to and fro, he consulted the teraphim, he looked in the
liver."

And Isaiah calls upon the city of Babylon--

"Stand now with thine enchantments, and with the multitude of
thy sorceries, wherein thou hast laboured from thy youth; if
so thou shalt be able to profit, if so be thou mayest prevail.
Thou art wearied in the multitude of thy counsels: let now the
astrologers, the stargazers, the monthly prognosticators stand
up, and save thee from these things that shall come upon
thee."

Isaiah knew the Lord to be He that "frustrateth the tokens of the liars
and maketh diviners mad." And the word of the Lord to Israel through
Jeremiah was--

"Thus saith the Lord. Learn not the way of the heathen, and be
not dismayed at the signs of heaven; for the heathen are
dismayed at them."

It is to our shame that even to-day, in spite of all our enlightenment
and scientific advances, astrology still has a hold upon multitudes.
Astrological almanacs and treatises are sold by the tens of thousands,
and astrological superstitions are still current. "The star of the god
Chiun" is not indeed openly worshipped; but Saturn is still looked upon
as the planet bringing such diseases as "toothache, agues, and all that
proceeds from cold, consumption, the spleen particularly, and the bones,
rheumatic gouts, jaundice, dropsy, and all complaints arising from fear,
apoplexies, etc."; and charms made of Saturn's metal, lead, are still
worn upon Saturn's finger, in the belief that these will ward off the
threatened evil; a tradition of the time when by so doing the wearers
would have proclaimed themselves votaries of the god, and therefore
under his protection.

Astrology is inevitably linked with heathenism, and both shut up spirit
and mind against the knowledge of God Himself, which is religion; and
against the knowledge of His works, which is science. And though a man
may be religious without being scientific, or scientific without being
religious, religion and science alike both rest on one and the same
basis--the belief in "One God, Maker of heaven and earth."

That belief was the reason why Israel of old, so far as it was faithful
to it, was free from the superstitions of astrology.

"It is no small honour for this nation to have been wise
enough to see