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The prophet evidently knew what was going on in the city. He had gone up and down the streets by night and by day, and had seen the sins and iniquities of the people. The great city of Jerusalem lay like a putrid sore, filled with all manner of pollution and corruption. The time had come for a warning. Hiding no detail of its iniquity, he catalogued before the sin-laden people the awful record of their sin, and launched against their filthiness and impenitence the sentence of the condemnation of God. It was no pleasant task. To sing in sweeter strains the adoration of God and the beauties of holiness had been a far more gladsome work — but to sing of holiness in such a city had been like singing of springs amid the sands of the arid desert. Moreover, the Word of God had commanded, again and again, "Cry aloud, spare not. lift up thy voice like a trumpet," etc. I suppose an over-cautious but easy-going city cried out against the prophet who left his harp to throttle sin. I suppose its wicked inhabitants had a great many sneers and scoffs for the preacher who ventured to look in upon their wickedness; but he heard God's Word and he did it; he called things by their right names, and shook above them the thunderstorm of Divine wrath and the penalties of the broken law. Sin must be assailed in the name of God. Its colours must he shown, clear of the prism tints by which it dazzles and deceives. Its wages, hidden too often behind the screens of shame and misery, must be brought to light, and men warned in the name of facts, in the name of experience, in the name of God, against the man traps of hell. I want to show you sin as it is and it always must be, and from its actual facts of awful misery I want to read a warning. The old legends ten of a dual life that walks the earth; how in the shades of night, when all else is slumber bound and still, another life comes out and fills the night with weird events. The elf folk, hidden all day in earth caves and crannies, now come out and fill the sleeping earth with a weird, unnatural life. The old legend has a sort of awful reality here in our darkened streets, for when the day is spent, and the life of business sinks to rest, and the great buildings darken into shadow, another life comes out and passes to and fro in the darkened streets and plies its concerns in the silent shadows. It is a life of sin and of shame. We pause a moment, and watch and listen. Now and then a belated passer-by hastens with hurried step, but it is almost noiseless — this night life on these silent streets. Here and there, there are figures standing within the shadows. A young man emerges from the building, where late accounts have kept him long after the hours of accustomed toil. A dozen steps, and he is accosted; there is a rustle and a voice, and then maybe a woman's laugh ringing out with strange echo in the darkness. They loiter along with slow step, and together are lost to our view, and the night covers up this silent trap of hell, whose snares are spread for unwary feet. A little further and we drive hurriedly across the glare, where the crowds flow along the great night arteries of the city — a motley crowd, vastly differing from the daylight throng. There are hundreds of young men, scores of young women, whose days are spent in shops and behind counters, and whose nights court ruin in the streets. The air is noisy and the lights are dazzling; here and yonder are those brilliantly lighted stairs that lead up into apparent gloom, for all the curtained windows show by their darkness. It is the old story: "The idle brain is the devil's workshop." The life that simply works to live, and that only six hours, if six hours will keep the body, courts the devil for his master. And yet, go out among the thousands of young men in this city tonight, and let us question them as to the object of life, and you may well wonder at the multitudes who only live to live. No thought of anything above the body, no glimpse of anything beyond the sky — an animal life, serving only appetite and seeking only pleasure. Oh, is that all of life? To spend the day in toil, the night in empty pleasure; our days for nothing, and our future in eternal poverty of soul. Oh, hear me preach the gospel of yourself, your better self; its possibilities, its powers, its future. Think what you may be, and then be it, by God's grace, and cheat the devil as you save your soul. I marked most of all in these streets the presence of death. They were full of dead men, of dead women, of corpses, walking, talking, jesting in loathsome death. Do you remember Valjean's dream in "Les Miserables"? How, conscious of his crime, he slept, and sleep revealed to him the death of sin. He dreamed he was at Romainville, a little garden park near Paris, full of flowers and music and pleasure. But as he in his dream comes to this domain of revelry, the flowers, and the trees, and the very sky, all are of the colour of ashes. Leaning against a wall he finds a man at the corner where two streets meet. "Why is all so still?" The man seems to hear not and makes no reply. In amazement Valjean wanders on through vacant rooms and courts and through the gardens, all the colour of ashes, and finds everywhere silence by the fountains, in the pavilions, everywhere these silent men and women, who have no answer to his questions. In horror he endeavours to fly from the ashen abode of terror, when, looking back, he finds all the inhabitants of the lifeless town suddenly clustering about him, and their ashen lips open, they cry to him, "Do you not know that you have been dead for a long time?" And with a cry Valjean wakens and feels his sin. So I saw in these ways of sin dead men all about me. Beneath that silken robe and sparkling necklace, loathsome death; behind that laugh and empty jest, a dead man; walking, talking, drinking, feasting, and yet dead. Dead in sin, helpless in habit's chains, snared in the man traps of hell.

(T. E. Green, D. D.)

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KJV: Seest thou not what they do in the cities of Judah and in the streets of Jerusalem?

WEB: Don't you see what they do in the cities of Judah and in the streets of Jerusalem?