Chaldeans slain. 31.  And Darius the Median took the kingdom, being about threescore and two years old.’—­DANIEL v. 17-31.

Belshazzar is now conceded to have been a historical personage, the son of the last monarch of Babylon, and the other name in the narrative which has been treated as erroneous—­namely, Darius—­has not been found to be mentioned elsewhere, but is not thereby proved to be a blunder.  For why should it not be possible for Scripture to preserve a name that secular history has not yet been ascertained to record, and why must it always be assumed that, if Scripture and cuneiform or other documents differ, it is Scripture that must go to the wall?

We do not deal with the grim picture of the drunken orgy, turned into abject terror as ‘the fingers of a man’s hand’ came forth out of empty air, and in the full blaze of ‘the candlestick’ wrote the illegible signs.  There is something blood-curdling in the visibility of but a part of the hand and its busy writing.  Whose was the body, and where was it?  No wonder if the riotous mirth was frozen into awe, and the wine lost flavour.  Nor need we do more than note the craven-hearted flattery addressed to Daniel by the king, who apparently had never heard of him till the queen spoke of him just before.  We have to deal with the indictment, the sentence, and the execution.

I. The indictment.  Daniel’s tone is noticeably stern.  He has no reverential preface, no softening of his message.  His words are as if cut with steel on the rock.  He brushes aside the promises of vulgar decorations and honours with undisguised contempt, and goes straight to his work of rousing a torpid conscience.

Babylon was the embodiment and type of the godless world-power, and Belshazzar was the incarnation of the spirit which made Babylon.  So Daniel’s indictment gathers together the main forms of sin, which cleave to every godless national or individual life.  And he begins with that feather-brained frivolity which will learn nothing by example.  Nebuchadnezzar’s fate might have taught his successors what came of God-forgetting arrogance, and attributing success to oneself; and his restoration might have been an object-lesson to teach that devout recognition of the Most High as sovereign was the beginning of a king’s prosperity and sanity.  But Belshazzar knew all this, and ignored it all.  Was he singular in that?  Is not the world full of instances of the ruin that attends godlessness, which yet do not check one godless man in his career?  The wrecks lie thick on the shore, but their broken sides and gaunt skeletons are not warnings sufficient to keep a thousand other ships from steering right on to the shoals.  Of these godless lives it is true, ’This their way is their folly; yet their posterity approve their sayings,’ and their doings, and say and do them over again.  Incapacity to learn by example is a mark of godless lives.