My summer’s day in lusty May
Is darked before the noon.”
GREAT BABYLON BUILT: A BUILDER’S BOAST.
Daniel iv. 29-33.
Walking in the palace of his kingdom of Babylon—that Babylon of which the foundations, indeed, had been laid ages ago, but which he had so enlarged and adorned as to make it one of the world’s wonders—Nebuchadnezzar the king, elate with pride at the pomp of architectural results, flushed with the triumph of enterprises so costly, and achievements so manifest to the eye, gave utterance, in complacent soliloquy perhaps, to the exultant sense of being a master builder indeed, and of seeing his power reflected in so gorgeous a form. The king spake and said, “Is not this great Babylon, that I have built for the house of the kingdom, by the might of my power, and for the honour of my majesty?”
While the word was in the king’s mouth, there fell a voice from heaven, saying, “O king Nebuchadnezzar, to thee it is spoken: The kingdom is departed from thee.” And the sequel we know. How that same hour was the thing fulfilled upon Nebuchadnezzar, and he was driven from men, and did eat grass as oxen, and his body was wet with the dew of heaven, till his hairs were grown like eagles’ feathers, and his nails like birds’ claws,—is it not written in the book of the prophecies of Daniel, whose name was Belteshazzar, and whom the king made ruler over the whole province of that same Babylon the Great?
The royal builder’s boast was on the instant reproved by a degradation literally brutal in its extremity. While the word of complacent self-glorification was in the king’s mouth, the sentence of bestial doom went forth against him. Just when he was resting on his laurels, a taint overtook them. Just when he rejoiced in asserting himself a king of kings, commenced the working of a curse which levelled him with grazing flocks and herds.
The lesson is for all time, and for all sorts and conditions of men. Verifications of it—varying, of course, in kind, and still more in degree—are rife in records historical and biographical, and in the unrecorded experiences, the moving accidents, of everyday life. Just when a man is apt to set up his rest, the fiat goes forth against him which shatters to its base the structure he has reared. The house he has just finished building tumbles to pieces like a house of cards. The castle in whose defences, at last completed, he felt so secure, dislimns like a castle in the air.
“... The engineer