The sin and the curse never left the generations, who in turn succeeded those impious builders. Pride and godlessness infested the city, and prepared it for doom, as soon as it again gathered strength to rise to heaven. The early nomads had watched Babylon's fall from afar; but when their descendants were carried as captives within her in the time of her second glory,[110] they found that the besetting sin, which had once reared its head so fatally high, infected the city to her very heart. We need not again go over the extent and glory of Nebuchadrezzar's architecture, or the greatness of the traffic, from the Levant to India, which his policy had concentrated upon his own wharves and markets.[111] It was stupendous. But neither walls nor wealth make a city, and no observant man, with the Hebrew's faith and conscience, could have lived those fifty years in the centre of Babylon, and especially after Nebuchadrezzar had passed away, without perceiving, that her life was destitute of every principle which ensured union or promised progress. Babylon was but a medley of peoples, without common traditions or a public conscience, and incapable of acting together. Many of her inhabitants had been brought to her, like the Jews, against their own will, and were ever turning from those glorious battlements they were forced to build in their disgust, to scan the horizon for the advent of a deliverer. And many others, who moved in freedom through her busy streets, and shared her riches and her joys, were also foreigners, and bound to her only so long as she ministered to their pleasure or their profit. Her king was an usurper, who had insulted her native gods; her priesthood was against him. And although his army, sheltered by the fortifications of Nebuchadrezzar, had repulsed Cyrus upon the Persian's first invasion from the north, conspiracies were now so rife among his oppressed and insulted subjects, that, on Cyrus' second invasion, Babylon opened her impregnable gates and suffered herself to be taken without a blow. Nor, even if the city's religion had been better served by the king, could it in the long run have availed for her salvation. For, in spite of the science with which it was connected,--and this "wisdom of the Chaldeans" was contemptible in neither its methods nor its results,--the Babylonian religion was not one to inspire either the common people with those moral principles, which form the true stability of states, or their rulers with a reasonable and consistent policy. Babylon's religion was broken up into a multitude of wearisome and distracting details, whose absurd solemnities, especially when administered by a priesthood hostile to the executive, must have hampered every adventure of war, and rendered futile many opportunities of victory. In fact, Babylon, for all her glory, could not but be short-lived. There was no moral reason why she should endure. The masses, who contributed to her building, were slaves who hated her; the crowds, who fed her business, would stay with her only so long as she was profitable to themselves; her rulers and her priests had quarrelled; her religion was a burden, not an inspiration. Yet she sat proud, and felt herself secure.
It is just these features, which our prophet describes in ch. xlvii., in verses more notable for their moral insight and indignation, than for their beauty as a work of literature. He is certain of Babylon's immediate fall from power and luxury into slavery and dishonour (vv. 1-3). He speaks of her cruelty to her captives (ver. 6), of her haughtiness and her secure pride (vv. 7, 8). He touches twice upon her atheistic self-sufficiency, her "autotheism,"--"_I am, and there is none beside me_," words which only God can truly use, but words which man's ignorant, proud self is ever ready to repeat (vv. 8-10). He speaks of the wearisomeness and futility of her religious magic (vv. 10-14). And he closes with a vivid touch, that dissolves the reality of that merely commercial grandeur on which she prides herself. Like every association that arises only from the pecuniary profit of its members, Babylon shall surely break up, and none of those, who sought her for their selfish ends, shall wait to help her one moment after she has ceased to be profitable to them.