e terrible Assyrian conquerors defeating their enemies,
torturing and slaughtering their prisoners, swimming rivers, beating
down castles, sweeping on from land to land like a devouring fire,
while over their heads fly fierce spirits who protect and prosper
their cruelties, and eagles who trail in their claws the entrails of
the slain. The very expression of their faces is frightful for its
fierceness; the countenances of a 'bitter and hasty nation,' as the
Prophet calls them, whose feet were swift to shed blood. And as for
the art of war, and their power of taking walled towns like
Jerusalem, you may see them in these pictures battering down and
undermining forts and castles, with instruments so well made and
powerful, that all other nations who came after them, for more than
two thousand years, seem to have been content to copy from them, and
hardly to have improved on the old Assyrian engines.

Such, and so terrible, they came up against Jerusalem: to attempt
to fight them would have been useless madness; and Hezekiah had but
one means of escaping from them, and that was to cast himself and
his people upon the boundless mercy, and faithfulness, and power of
God.

And Hezekiah had his answer by Isaiah the prophet: and more than an
answer. The Lord took the matter into His own hand, and showed
Sennacherib which was the stronger, his soldiers and horses and
engines, or the Lord God; and so that terrible Assyrian army came
utterly to nought, and vanished off the face of the earth.

Now, my friends, has this noble history no lesson in it for us? God
forbid! It has a lesson which ought to come nearer to our hearts
than to the hearts of any nation: for though we or our forefathers
have never been, for nearly three hundred years, in such utter need
and danger as Jerusalem was, yet be sure that we might have been so,
again and again, had it not been for the mercy of the same God who
delivered Jerusalem from the Assyrians. It is now three hundred
years ago that the Lord delivered this country from as terrible an
invader as Sennacherib himself; when He three times scattered by
storms the fleets of the King of Spain, which were coming to lay
waste this land with fire and sword: and since then no foreign foe
has set foot on English soil, and we almost alone, of all the
nations of Europe, have been preserved from those horrors of war,
even to speak of which is dreadful! Oh, my friends! we know not
half God's goodnes