a history of the decline
and fall of nations.

1. Now, if this be true, it is an awful truth for the Infidel, for _it
sweeps away the last vestige of a foundation of his hope for eternity_.
The only reason any unbeliever in Revelation could ever give, or that
modern Rationalists do give, for their hope of a happy eternity, is the
analogy of nature--the alleged constant progress of all things toward
perfection in this world. It is an awkward truth that individually we
must die, and the worms crawl over us; but then the wretched fate of the
individual was to be compensated by the glorious progress of the race
onward and ever onward and upward; from the fungus to the frog, and from
the frog to the monkey, from the monkey to the man, from the noble
savage wild in woods, to the pastoral tribe, thence to the empire and
the federal republic, and finally to the reign of individual and
passional attraction, and union with the sum of all the intelligences of
the universe, through a constant progress toward infinite perfection.

But, alas! it seems it was a false analogy, an ill-observed fact, a
delusion; the course of nature is all the other way. The tendency of all
perishing things is not to perfection, but to perdition; and it needs no
inspiration to tell that man's loftiest towers, and strongest cities,
and proudest empires will come to ruin; or that the most polished,
powerful, and populous nations of antiquity will dwindle down into
Turks, Moors, and Egyptians. Here is a fact of awful omen. Death reigns
in this world of ours; death moral, social, political, and physical, has
ever trampled upon man, proud man, learned man, civilized man, over all
the plans of man, over every man, and over every association of men,
even the largest, the widest, the mightiest. And now the Infidel, having
taken away our hope of help from heaven, comes with the serpent's hiss,
and fiendish sneer, to taunt the perishing world with this miserable
truism--that the tendency of everything on earth is to perdition, and
that it needs no inspiration to tell it. Truly it does not. Were that
all the prophets of God had to tell us--as it is all the prophets of
Infidelity can prophecy--we had as little need for the one as for the
other. Earthquake and hurricane, volcano and valley flood, autumn frosts
and winter blasts, fever, consumption, war, and pestilence, the
grave-yard and the charnel-house, the Parthenon and the Pyramids, the
silent cities of Colorad