“And judgment is turned away backward, and justice standeth afar off: for truth is fallen in the street, and equity cannot enter. Yea, truth faileth; and he that departeth from evil maketh himself a prey: and the LORD saw it, and it displeased him that there was no judgment” (Isa 59:14-15).
A darker shade rests upon the cities of the plain. Imagination shivers as she ventures to pass, with the "two angels," to the house of Lot, through the streets of the doomed cities on the last evening of their: existence, and watches the bubbling fullness of a cup, in which licentiousness, murder, blasphemy, and unnatural lust, were the ingredients, and listens to the cry of the city's sin coming to its sharpest and shrillest pitch before the abused door of the patriarch.
A ye feel the horrors of the night infinitely worse than the terrors of the day, and are almost relieved, when after the brief mockery of brightness,"when the sun rose upon Sodom," the sky darkens, as, since the deluge, it never darkened before ; and there begin to be wafted down from above flakes of flame and masses of bitumen, and the guilty cities are lost to sight in the embrace of a storm of fire-snow, and over their smoking ruins rise the waters of the Dead Sea, and then the lustration is complete; and from one of the fairest pages in nature's book the foulest blot of man's defilement is in one morning, by the tongue of fire " from the Lord out of heaven," licked forever away.
George Gilfillan, The Bards of the Bible, New York: Harper & Bros., 1851
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