D E D I C A T I O N

was witnessed; so also, by the evident example of his own most grievous fall, he taught—and ought to have taught—all the ages of the human race following after him, that there is no counsel against the Lord original: "Non esse consilium contra Dominum"; a reference to Proverbs 21:30: but rather that all the engines of an arrogant mind and the foundations of ambition, however immense, are nevertheless empty and insane, destined to perish by the same fate as their creator. For what more brilliant example of worldly vanity and weakness could be set before the eyes of posterity—to suppress the impulses of mad pride and to overturn the haughty thoughts of men—than a pride so insolent and vast, suppressed by so light a finger of GOD? Than a mass so enormous, so quickly and easily devastated?

It is that unhappy and ill-omened example of the most stolid arrogance that I here bring forth onto the stage; and would that I could so set it before the eyes of all, that they might see how tragic a catastrophe always closes the scene in this theater of ambition. May they perceive that no other conclusion coronidem; literally the curved flourish at the end of a book, meaning the final "finishing touch" can be expected for a work undertaken by impiety, than a heap and a tomb, which buries the author of such nefarious endeavors in the same ruin as the work itself.

I believe this can remain hidden from no one of discerning mind who considers deeply what I have attempted to place before their eyes here: namely, how great a harvest of calamities these Babylonian transgressors of insane mind—forced from heaven to desist from the further prosecution of their undertaken labor—have sown for all human posterity. Divided and scattered among themselves by the miraculous confusion of tongues, they became the most ill-fated founders of the migration of nations and peoples, and the shoots propagated throughout the whole world. For Nimrod original: "Nembrod", stirred by the gadfly of ambition among such a great multitude of mortals, and formidable in the giant-like habit of his body, trusting in the greatness of both his strength and his power, immediately repudiated the worship of his ancestral religion. Receding from the paternal precepts of Noah, the first monarch of the later world appointed by GOD, he became degenerate and refractory. While he attempted to claim the title of divine deification apotheoseos; the process of a human becoming a god with the most impious pride, spurning and trampling upon both divine and human laws, he was the first to [stain] the world with this wick-