the cavern.”  With trembling voice Darius calls out, “Daniel!” No answer, for the prophet is yet in profound slumber.  But a lion, more easily awakened, advances, and, with hot breath blown through the crevice, seems angrily to demand the cause of this interruption, and then another wild beast lifts his mane from under Daniel’s head, and the prophet, waking up, comes forth to report himself all unhurt and well.

But our text stands us at Daniel’s window, open toward Jerusalem.  Why in that direction open?  Jerusalem was his native land, and all the pomp of his Babylonish successes could not make him forget it.  He came there from Jerusalem at eighteen years of age, and he never visited it, though he lived to be eighty-five years.  Yet, when he wanted to arouse the deepest emotions and grandest aspirations of his heart, he had his window open toward his native Jerusalem.  There are many of you to-day who understand that without any exposition.  This is getting to be a nation of foreigners.  They have come into all occupations and professions.  They sit in all churches.  It may be twenty years ago since you got your naturalization papers, and you may be thoroughly Americanized, but you can’t forget the land of your birth, and your warmest sympathies go out toward it.  Your windows are open toward Jerusalem.  Your father and mother are buried there.  It may have been a very humble home in which you were born, but your memory often plays around it, and you hope some day to go and see it—­the hill, the tree, the brook, the house, the place so sacred, the door from which you started off with parental blessing to make your own way in the world; and God only knows how sometimes you have longed to see the familiar places of your childhood, and how in awful crises of life you would like to have caught a glimpse of the old, wrinkled face that bent over you as you lay on the gentle lap twenty or forty or fifty years ago.  You may have on this side of the sea risen in fortune, and, like Daniel, have become great, and may have come into prosperities which you never could have reached if you had stayed there, and you may have many windows to your house—­bay-windows, and sky-light-windows, and windows of conservatory, and windows on all sides—­but you have at least one window open toward Jerusalem.

When the foreign steamer comes to the wharf, you see the long line of sailors, with shouldered mail-bags, coming down the planks, carrying as many letters as you might suppose would be enough for a year’s correspondence, and this repeated again and again during the week.  Multitudes of them are letters from home, and at all the post-offices of the land people will go to the window and anxiously ask for them, hundreds of thousands of persons finding that window of foreign mails the open window toward Jerusalem.  Messages that say:  “When are you coming home to see us?  Brother has gone into the army.  Sister is dead.  Father and mother are getting very feeble.  We are having a great struggle to get on here.  Would you advise us to come to you, or will you come to us?  All join in love, and hope to meet you, if not in this world, then in a better.  Good-bye.”