show that, as Assyria was the hired razor against Judea, and Cyrus the
hired razor against Babylon, and the Huns the hired razor against the
Goths, there are now many razors that the Lord could hire if, because
of our national sins, He should undertake to shave us. In 1870,
Germany was the razor with which the Lord shaved France. England is
the razor with which very shortly the Lord will 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.