Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: LECTURE III. THE BESIEGED CITY. Isaiah i. 8. . . . as a besieged city. The comparison of the prophet may now perhaps, more than ever before, be understood by us; because we have' before our very eyes a city actually in a state of siege. Every newspaper we take up, from week to week and even from day to day, gives us fresh intelligence of what is now doing in the Crimea, where two of the most powerful nations of the earth, each making a great profession of christianity, are laying siege to a city belonging to another powerful nation, professing the same religion. The newspapers picture with tolerable vividness before us the condition of the besiegers; but thay leave it pretty much to our imagination to judge of men's state inside the besieged city. Let us endeavour somewhat to supply this deficiency; and aid in completing the picture of what the "christian" nations have been doing to their "christian" enemy. First then, the christian allies, professing to fight in support of the Mahomedan despotism, having declared war, (i. e. having declared to all persons living on Russian soil, or with Russian blood in their veins wherever found on the high seas, their intention to do them all the injury they chose, up to the limits of their power, and having assumed the right to do so in consequence of the declaration, landed an immense army on shores thousands of miles away from home. They do so for the express purpose of "taking," i. e. seizing, (as the highway robber seizes, pointing his pistol to your head, and exclaiming 'Your money or your life !') a town built at the expense of another nation, inhabited by another people, and in which not one stone or timber or store can, even by sophistry, be called ours by right. In their way up to this town, the allies encounter the armi...