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I. ONE OF THE CAUSES OF THE RUIN OF THIS BABYLON WAS HER EXTRAVAGANT LUXURY. The history of the world is full of solemn lessons concerning the enervating influence of luxury. It is scarcely too much to say that luxury was the chief destroyer of all the great empires of antiquity. But human nature is very slow to learn this lesson, though it has been written for us again and again in letters of blood and fire; and, in spite of all, we are constantly discovering a proneness to fall away into the ease-taking and self-pampering which ruined the great empires of ancient Babylon, of Media and Persia, of Greece and Rome. Self-indulgence prepares the heart to be the receptacle of all the errors of anti-Christ. Christ-like self-renunciation is a virtue which cannot grow in the soil of luxurious living. The immense sums which are spent in this country in merely tickling the palate with expensive and often injurious articles of food are simply appalling. A friend recently told me that one gentleman whom he had persuaded to sign the pledge told him that by so doing he had saved him £500 per year. What criminal waste! Yet there are many men in this country whose wine-bill far exceeds this.

II. IT IS TO THE TWO LAST ITEMS IN THIS EXTRAORDINARY INVENTORY THAT I WISH TO CALL YOUR ATTENTION, VIZ., SLAVES, AND SOULS OF MEN. As the margin informs us, the literal translation is "bodies and souls of men." In Greek literature the word "bodies" is often used to describe slaves when regarded as articles of merchandise, and that is why cur translators have rendered it "slaves." But inasmuch as it is here used in conjunction with the word "souls," it seems to me manifest that the apostle intended to employ it in its proper and ordinary sense, and to declare that the height of Babylon's sin is that she throws manhood, body and soul, into the common heap of merchandise in her market, and that she treats what God has redeemed with the most precious thing in the universe as a mere chattel to be bought and sold for money.

1. I very much fear, thanks to the cruel, heartless, atheistic political economy which this country learnt from Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, and company, that very much of our commerce is practically a traffic in the blood, and bones, and nerves, and souls of men. The idea that any relationship between one man and another can ever be reduced to one of cash-payment is to be for ever and utterly denounced. All commerce based upon such an idea carries within itself the germs of ruin and desolation. The only true relations between man and man, be they commercial, or political, or what else, are those which are cemented by love.

2. The drink traffic, the opium traffic, and whoremongering are other manifestations of this awful trade in the bodies and souls of men. Surely it is wrong that adultery which by almost all heathen nations has been treated as a criminal offence should in a Christian nation be regarded as only a civil misdemeanour, and it is a crying abomination that there should not be equal laws for men and women on these matters. Our complicity, however, in this traffic in womanhood is most horrible in relation to our Indian Army. It is awful to think that the name of Christ should be blasphemed among the heathen through the diabolical provision deliberately made by the officials of a Christian nation to ruin poor Hindoo women for the gratification of the lusts of our soldiers. We Christian citizens ought to use all the influence we possess to put the speediest possible end to such shameful wickedness. Then in the matter of opium we are engaged in traffic in the bodies and souls of men. Our relation to the trade in China ought to make every Briton bow down before God in shame and confusion of face. At this moment we as a nation are manufacturing this drug not in a form prepared for medicinal purposes, but in a form deliberately prepared for vicious indulgence. And w-hat is the plea for all this? Oh! revenue, revenue! We are told that we cannot govern India without money derived from this shameful manhood traffic. Are we Englishmen going for a moment to tolerate this shameless doctrine, "Let us do evil theft good may come"? In the ramie of righteousness, if we cannot govern India without blood-money, let us give up governing it. Whatever comes we must not commit the crime of destroying men for money. Nay, our work as Christians is not to make merchandise of men but to redeem them, both in their bodies and souls, to redeem them, if need be, by the surrender of ourselves to death. This is the norm of Christian ethics (1 John 3:16, R.V.). If the Church would do her Master's work she must arise and be the champion of the poor, the enemy of all sweating, the inexorable foe of all manhood traffic. She must minister to the bodies of men, visiting them in prison, feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, and nursing the sick. She must, above all, care for their souls by doing all in her power to ward them off from vice, and to lead them into a pure, noble, and beautiful life.

(G. A. Bennetts, B. A.)

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KJV: And cried when they saw the smoke of her burning, saying, What city is like unto this great city!

WEB: and cried out as they looked at the smoke of her burning, saying, 'What is like the great city?'