5.  For her sins have reached unto heaven, and God hath
    remembered her iniquities.

    6.  Reward her even as she rewarded yon, and double unto her
    double according to her works:  in the cup which she hath filled
    fill to her double.

    7.  How much she hath glorified herself, and lived deliciously,
    so much torment and sorrow give her:  for she saith in her heart,
    I sit a queen, and am no widow, and shall see no sorrow.

    8.  Therefore shall her plagues come in one day, death, and
    mourning, and famine; and she shall be utterly burned with fire: 
    for strong is the Lord God who judgeth her.

Here we have a number of important truths brought before us—­first, that God had a people in Babylon who up to this time were free from her contaminations; second, that they received a positive call from heaven to “come out”; third, that all who refused to obey the heavenly command would become partakers of her sins and receive of her plagues; fourth, that those who came out were to pour the strongest judgments upon Babylon—­“reward her even as she rewarded you, and double unto her double according to her works:  in the cup which she hath filled, fill to her double.”  It is evident that the “torment and sorrow” which God’s people give Babylon after their departure is not a temporal retaliation—­for they never indulge in such, and the Word of God forbids it—­but is altogether of a spiritual nature; hence the fierce judgment they inflict is executing the Word of truth, which brings to light all the wickedness and abominations contained therein.  “Death, and mourning, and famine” only remain.  This symbolizes that all spiritual life has departed, while famine and mourning are left.  That such is the actual fact is shown by the following lamentation of the late Bishop R.S.  Foster concerning his own sect, the Methodist Episcopal: 

“The ball, the theatre, nude and lewd art, social luxuries, with all their loose moralities, are making inroads into the sacred enclosure of the church; and as a satisfaction for all this worldliness, Christians are making a great deal of Lent and Easter and Good Friday, and church ornamentations.  It is the old trick of Satan.  The Jewish church struck on that rock; the Romish church was wrecked on the same; and the Protestant church is fast reaching the same doom.

“Our great dangers as we see them, are assimilation to the world, neglect of the poor, substitution of the form for the fact of godliness, abandonment of discipline, a hireling ministry, an impure gospel, which summed up is a fashionable church.  That Methodists should be liable to such an outcome, and that there should be signs of it in a hundred years from the ‘sail-loft,’ seems almost the miracle of history; but who that looks about him to-day can fail to see the fact?