“Fortunate Englishmen! Enviable day labourers in the noblest vocation that can engage the immortal faculties of man! What glory shall surpass that of the enterprising, painstaking, and heroic men, who shall have restored to us, after the lapse of thousands of years, the history and actual stoney presence of the world renowned Nineveh, and enabled us to read with our own eyes, as if it were our mother tongue, the language suspended on the lips of men for ages, though written to record events in which the prophets of Almighty God took a living interest!” Such is the enthusiastic expression of the admiration of the writer in The London Times at the discovery of the ideas represented in the hitherto for ages unreadable arrow-headed characters of the pre-Macedonian Assyrian tongue! The discovery was indeed a remarkable result of industry, patience, and ingenuity; and a feat which few men are capable of. But the idea of this deciphering of forgotten characters being “the noblest vocation that can engage the immortal faculties of man,” are great words expressive of a very small affair. “Immortal faculties” are at present possessed by no man; and will hereafter be only by those of Adam’s race who shall be accounted worthy of the Age to Come, and of equality with the angels. According to the writer before us, their “noblest vocation” will be the restoring to their contemporaries the knowledge of the foolishness uttered in the long forgotten languages originally spoken, or “suspended on the lips of men,” when, in building old Babel’s tower, they asked for brick and they gave them bituminous cement. Accustomed as is the student of prophecy to contemplate the great things hereafter to be manifested through Christ and his Saints, how very insignificant do the “noble vocations” which excite the admiration of the world’s scribes appear to him! Though Mr. Layard has well performed the work of unearthing the idolatrous remains of Assyria; and Major Rawlinson that of reading the inscriptions upon the slabs and obelisks, they would both have performed a nobler and more commendable enterprise, if they had taught their admirers how to read aright those more interesting and wonderful records in the Bible, which relate to the future manifestation of the Assyrian empire in more than the extent of its dominion under the dynasties of Sennacherib and Nebuchadnezzar. The people of this age are mere children, notwithstanding all the discoveries of which they boast. Their minds are spell bound by trifles; the truly great they can neither grasp nor comprehend. How noble will that vocation be—grandly magnificent—the discharge of that divine mission in which the nations shall be brought to confess the ignorance of their leaders and their own foolishness; and from one end of earth to the other to reflect as from a mirror the wisdom and knowledge of God, implanted in their hearts by Christ and his brethren, the conquerors and regenerators of the world. Here is a labour, this is a work indeed.

EDITOR.

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