ll shave Russia. But
nations are to repent in a day. May a speedy and world-wide coming to
God hinder, on both sides the sea, all national calamity. But do not
let us, as a nation, either by unrighteous law at Washington, or bad
lives among ourselves, defy the Almighty.

One would think that our national symbol of the eagle might sometimes
suggest another eagle, that which ancient Rome carried. In the talons
of that eagle were clutched at one time Britain, France, Spain, Italy,
Dalmatia, Rhactia, Noricum, Pannonia, Moesia, Dacia, Thrace,
Macedonia, Greece, Asia Minor, Syria, Phoenicia, Palestine, Egypt, and
all Northern Africa, and all the islands of the Mediterranean, indeed,
all the world that was worth having, an hundred and twenty millions of
people under the wings of that one eagle. Where is she now? Ask
Gibbon, the historian, in his prose poem, the "Decline and Fall of the
Roman Empire." Ask her gigantic ruins straggling their sadness through
the ages, the screech owl at windows out of which world-wide
conquerors looked. Ask the day of judgment when her crowned
debauchees, Commodus and Pertinax, and Caligula and Diocletian, shall
answer for their infamy? As men and as nations let us repent, and have
our trust in a pardoning God, rather than depend on former successes
for immunity! Out of thirteen greatest battles of the world, Napoleon
had lost but one before Waterloo. Pride and destruction often ride in
the same saddle.

But notice once more, and more than all in my text, that God is so
kind and loving, that when it is necessary for Him to cut, He has to
go to others for the sharp-edged weapon. "In the same day shall the
Lord shave with a razor that is hired." God is love. God is pity. God
is help. God is shelter. God is rescue. There are no sharp edges about
Him, no thrusting points, no instruments of laceration. If you want
balm for wounds, He has that. If you want salve for divine eyesight,
He has that. But if there is sharp and cutting work to do which
requires a razor, that He hires. God has nothing about Him that hurts,
save when dire necessity demands, and then He has to go clear off to
some one else to get the instrument.

This divine geniality will be no novelty to those who have pondered
the Calvarean massacre, where God submerged Himself in human tears,
and crimsoned Himself from punctured arteries, and let the terrestrial
and infernal worlds maul Him until the chandeliers of the sky had to
be turn