[John Gifford Bellett], Belshazzar’s Feast in its Application to the Great Exhibition (1851)

The king sets up an image/and demands the worship of it on pain of the fiery furnace. The righteous refuse and suffer. It is indeed a mighty advance in all the apostate, reprobate principles of man. Efforts of a like kind the people may be familiar with; but they are commonplace in comparison with this. As prophets speak, touching advance in the ways of evil, this is indeed “adding drunkenness to thirst.” The reversing of the judgment of scattering at Babel is left for the kingdom of God at Jerusalem. Tongues were then cloven as they had been at Babel. But it was to re-unite what had been already severed. Isaiah anticipating, in the Spirit, the last days, warns the people of God against saying “a confederacy,” in common with the world around them. The lords at the feast tremble, when heaven traces its doom.