their golden scepter.

Misguided giants--look out for them! In the middle and the latter part
of the last century no doubt there were thousands of men in Paris and
Edinburgh and London who hated God and blasphemed the name of the
Almighty; but they did but little mischief--they were small men,
insignificant men. Yet there were giants in those days.

Who can calculate the soul-havoc of a Rousseau, going on with a very
enthusiasm of iniquity, with fiery imagination seizing upon all the
impulsive natures of his day? or David Hume, who employed his life as
a spider employs its summer, in spinning out silken webs to trap the
unwary? or Voltaire, the most learned man of his day, marshaling a
great host of skeptics, and leading them out in the dark land of
infidelity? or Gibbon, who showed an uncontrollable grudge against
religion in his history of one of the most fascinating periods of the
world's existence--the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire--a book in
which, with all the splendors of his genius, he magnified the errors
of Christian disciples, while, with a sparseness of notice that never
can be forgiven, he treated of the Christian heroes of whom the world
was not worthy?

Oh, men of stout physical health, men of great mental stature, men of
high social position, men of great power of any sort, I want you to
understand your power, and I want you to know that that power devoted
to God will be a crown on earth, to you typical of a crown in heaven;
but misguided, bedraggled in sin, administrative of evil, God will
thunder against you with His condemnation in the day when millionaire
and pauper, master and slave, king and subject, shall stand side by
side in the judgment, and money-bags, and judicial ermine, and royal