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Prophets and Kings
command, added splendor to the scene. Beautiful women with their
enchantments were among the guests in attendance at the royal ban-
quet. Men of genius and education were there. Princes and statesmen
drank wine like water and reveled under its maddening influence.
With reason dethroned through shameless intoxication, and with
lower impulses and passions now in the ascendancy, the king him-
self took the lead in the riotous orgy. As the feast progressed, he
“commanded to bring the golden and silver vessels which ... Neb-
uchadnezzar had taken out of the temple which was in Jerusalem; that
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the king, and his princes, his wives, and his concubines, might drink
therein.” The king would prove that nothing was too sacred for his
hands to handle. “They brought the golden vessels; ... and the king,
and his princes, his wives, and his concubines, drank in them. They
drank wine, and praised the gods of gold, and of silver, of brass, of
iron, of wood, and of stone.”
Little did Belshazzar think that there was a heavenly Witness to
his idolatrous revelry; that a divine Watcher, unrecognized, looked
upon the scene of profanation, heard the sacrilegious mirth, beheld the
idolatry. But soon the uninvited Guest made His presence felt. When
the revelry was at its height a bloodless hand came forth and traced
upon the walls of the palace characters that gleamed like fire—words
which, though unknown to the vast throng, were a portent of doom to
the now conscience-stricken king and his guests.
Hushed was the boisterous mirth, while men and women, seized
with nameless terror, watched the hand slowly tracing the mysterious
characters. Before them passed, as in panoramic view, the deeds of
their evil lives; they seemed to be arraigned before the judgment bar
of the eternal God, whose power they had just defied. Where but a few
moments before had been hilarity and blasphemous witticism, were
pallid faces and cries of fear. When God makes men fear, they cannot
hide the intensity of their terror.
Belshazzar was the most terrified of them all. He it was who
above all others had been responsible for the rebellion against God
which that night had reached its height in the Babylonian realm. In
the presence of the unseen Watcher, the representative of Him whose
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power had been challenged and whose name had been blasphemed, the
king was paralyzed with fear. Conscience was awakened. “The joints
of his loins were loosed, and his knees smote one against another.”