Perhaps it will be said, These are the natural conferences of moral good and evil.  They are so.  And these consequences are the effects of divine order; of the constitution which God hath established.  Hence the divine declaration by the prophet:  “At what instant I shall speak concerning a nation, and concerning a kingdom, to pluck up, and to pull down, and to destroy; if that nation against whom I have pronounced, turn from their evil, I will repent of the evil that I thought to do unto them.  And at what instant I shall speak concerning a nation, and concerning a kingdom, to build and to plant it; if it do evil in my fight, that it obey not my voice, then I will repent of the good wherewith I said, I would benefit them.” *

* Jeremiah xviii. 7-10.

This declaration is verified in the divine administration.  God often bears with nations and communities, even to long suffering; but if they continue to revolt, he fails not to punish their sin upon them.  When a community hath filled up the measure of its iniquity, judgment is executed upon it; not according to the moral character of those who then compose it, but according to its character considered as a nation which hath been tried God’s appointed time.

While a community is on trial its conduct is recorded; its acts of disobedience to the divine Sovereign are charged to the community, and when its probation ends, they are brought into the reckoning and punished upon it, unless repentance and reformation intervene and prevent it.  That “the sin of the Amorites was not full,” was assigned as a reason for deferring the settlement of Abram’s race in the land of Canaan.  God would not enter into judgment with them, till the measure of their guilt had reached a certain height; but the sins of every generation helped to swell the account, till they were ripe for ruin.  The Hebrews were then ordered to destroy them utterly—­“every thing that breathed.”  It was not the sins of only that generation which occasioned this sentence, but the sins of the nations.  Many individuals who had no personal guilt were included in the sentence, and destroyed by its execution.  The infants perished with the adults.  The divine judgments executed on other wicked communities, have been similar.  Sodom, and her daughters were each of them a petty kingdom; and when they had severally filled up the measure of their crimes, they all perished together, old and young.

If more examples are desired, look to the seed of Jacob.  That people had a long probation; but when they had filled up the measure of national guilt, their sins were brought to remembrance and punished upon them.  The ten tribes revolted from God, when they left the house of David and set Jeroboam on the throne.  For more than two centuries and an half God waited with them, and warned them of the evils which their sins would bring upon them; but they repented not.  When their iniquity was full, he gave their enemies power over them; “rooted them up out of the good land which he had given their fathers, and scattered them beyond the river.”