PROFESSOR HUXLEY OX THE WAR-PATH. 67 



give the true and only key to the earliest partings of our race. 

 They are true to the rise and progress of divided nations. The 

 picture of manners which they present is not less faithful than 

 the account they give of early habits and pursuits "both in peace 

 and war. Only the other day Mr. Flinders Petrie * has told us 

 how the spade has uncovered those impregnable walls of the 

 Amorite cities which were reported to invading Israel by the spies 

 of Moses. They are found to be more than twenty-eight feet thick 

 at the base fit to support a superstructure of at least fifty feet in 

 height. There will come, I suppose, our wonderful agnostic critic 

 to point out that the record in Deuteronomy says that these cities 

 were " walled up to heaven." f But these walls of Lachish could 

 never have reached the Pleiades. They could not have so much 

 as touched the moon. Nay, it is certain that they could not have 

 approached even the limits of our own atmosphere. Therefore 

 the book of Deuteronomy is unhistorical, and Christian theology 

 is founded on the " quicksands of fable " ! 



But the spade, as a true weapon of precision, has done more 

 for us than this. It has revealed to our living sight, in the re- 

 mains of Nineveh and of Babylon, all the mysterious imagery of 

 the prophets, and all the literal historic truth of their tremen- 

 dous denunciations. It has revealed in numberless inscriptions J 

 the shameless confession of that inordinate pride and cruelty 

 which dictated the policy, and the desolating deeds, of the great 

 military monarchies of the East. It has explained their fall and 

 their own subsequent retributive desolation as foreseen in the 

 magnificent visions of Nahuin and Zephaniah, of Ezekiel and 

 Isaiah. Such hideous wickedness could not be allowed to last. 

 Their doom indeed was written in the moral law ; and one of 

 these prophets expressly founds his predictions on his confidence 

 in that law as the will of the " just Lord." " Every morning doth 

 He bring his judgment to light ; he faileth not." * But when 

 the chariots of Assyria were still issuing from the gates of Nin- 

 eveh " the bloody city " it required a prophet's eye to read the 

 sentence. "When Nebuchadnezzar, or his latest successor, was still 

 lounging in his palace richly colored and shining with enameled 

 walls when the hanging gardens of Babylon were still in bloom 

 it required some open vision to foresee the time when they 

 should exist no more when for centuries the very site of them 

 should be uncertain and when the mounds of their ruin should 

 be given over to the owls and to the bats. 



Then there is a higher sphere of prophecy into which we rise 



* In connection with the Palestine Exploration Fund. f Deuteronomy, i, 28. 

 \ Assyrian Discoveries, by George Smith, pp. 256-282, and passim. 



* Zephaniah, iii, 5. 



