spared. But God had otherwise decreed, and a soldier, impelled, as he declared, by an irresistible impulse, applied a brand to the sacred edifice, and so literally was Christ's prophecy fulfilled that not a stone upon a stone was left. With one fell blow the Jewish Temple, the Jewish city, and the Jewish nation were utterly and forever crushed. And why? Because they knew not the time of their visitation, because they knew not God. " Amen, I say to you," says Christ, "if any man deny Me before men on earth, I will deny him before My Father who is in heaven."
But Rome, you say, knew not the one true God, and resisted Christianity to the death, and yet behold her, God's chosen agent and the mistress of the world! Ah, Brethren, to be chosen by God for the accomplishment of His designs is not always proof of God's favor or God's love. Amid the ruins of the Roman forum stands the arch of Titus, bearing on its sculptured sides the emblems of his eastern victories, but Rome, oh, where is Rome? All her pomp of yesterday is to-day one with Ninive and Tyre. Judge of the nations, spare us yet, lest we forget - lest we forget! How little reckoned they whose genius erected that glorious arch, or whose hands outlined its graceful symmetry, that they therein embodied a lasting monumental proof of God's supremacy, of Christ's divinity, and of the evanescence of purely earthly glory! The Rome of Titus and Vespasian lies to-day beneath the feet of Christian Rome, because she acknowledged not the God of her
