Babylon that could fall, and that Jerusalem was the possessor of a
charmed, immortal life.

This strong city, the order of human society which God has appointed,
and which exists, though it be hidden in the heavens, will be manifested
one day when, like the fair vision of the goddess rising from amidst the
ocean's foam, and shedding peace and beauty over the charmed waves,
there will emerge from all the wild confusion and tossing billows of the
sea of the peoples the fair form of the 'Bride, the Lamb's wife.' There
shall be an apocalypse of the city, and whether the old words which
catch up the spirit of my text, and speak of that Holy City as
'descending from heaven' upon earth, at the close of the history of the
world, are to be taken, as perhaps they are, as expressive of the truth
that a renewed earth is to be the dwelling of the ransomed or no, this
at least is clear, that the city shall be revealed, and when Babylon is
swept away, Zion shall stand.

To this city--existent, immortal, and waiting to be revealed--you and I
may belong to-day. 'We _have_ a strong city.' You may lay hold of life
either by the side of it which is transient and trivial and
contemptible, or by the side of it which goes down through all the
mutable and is rooted in eternity. As in some seaweed, far out in the
depths of the ocean, the tiny frond that floats upon the billow goes
down and down and down, by filaments that bind it to the basal rock, so
the most insignificant act of our fleeting days has a hold upon
eternity, and life in all its moments may be knit to the permanent. We
may unite our lives with the surface of time or with the centre of
eternity. Though we dwell in tabernacles, we may still be 'come to Mount
Zion,' and all life be awful, noble, solemn, religions, because it is
all connected with the unseen city across the seas. It is for us to