I. The indictment. Daniel's tone is noticeably stern. He has no
reverential preface, no softening of his message. His words are as if
cut with steel on the rock. He brushes aside the promises of vulgar
decorations and honours with undisguised contempt, and goes straight to
his work of rousing a torpid conscience.

Babylon was the embodiment and type of the godless world-power, and
Belshazzar was the incarnation of the spirit which made Babylon. So
Daniel's indictment gathers together the main forms of sin, which cleave
to every godless national or individual life. And he begins with that
feather-brained frivolity which will learn nothing by example.
Nebuchadnezzar's fate might have taught his successors what came of
God-forgetting arrogance, and attributing success to oneself; and his
restoration might have been an object-lesson to teach that devout
recognition of the Most High as sovereign was the beginning of a king's
prosperity and sanity. But Belshazzar knew all this, and ignored it all.
Was he singular in that? Is not the world full of instances of the ruin
that attends godlessness, which yet do not check one godless man in his
career? The wrecks lie thick on the shore, but their broken sides and
gaunt skeletons are not warnings sufficient to keep a thousand other
ships from steering right on to the shoals. Of these godless lives it
is true, 'This their way is their folly; yet their posterity approve
their sayings,' and their doings, and say and do them over again.
Incapacity to learn by example is a mark of godless lives.

Further, Belshazzar 'lifted up' himself 'against the Lord of heaven,'
and 'glorified not Him in whose hand was his breath and whose were all
his ways.' The very essence of all sin is that assertion of self as
Lord, as sufficient, as the director of one's path. To make myself my
centre, to depend on myself, to enthrone my own will as sovereign, is to