est of her ultimate security. Britain and France, like clouds, may spread over the Euphrates, and try to prevent the evaporation of its waters; but all in vain. The ruthless Czar has his stern mission, and we our duty under all circumstances. The echoes of victory by the fleets of the ambitious Autocrat, and the cruel destruction of the Turkish, are now resounding through Europe. This gradual decay of the Crescent, after the period predicted under the Sixth Vial, which commenced in 1820, when the great river Euphrates began to be dried up, is assuredly taking place. Its final destruction may be looked for every day, as it has been since 1850; and now Russia, like a gigantic vulture poised in mid-heaven on outstretched wings, waits for the moment to descend and to destroy. Peace or war equally exhausts Turkey. Help her (and it is duty to aid the oppressed), and you may soften her fall, but you will not avert her decay. The time for blotting out Mahometan Turkey from the map is at our doors. The "sure word of prophecy" is stronger than the combined fleets of England and France, should they try, what they do not, to prevent the waning of the Crescent. We watch at this moment for the issue; and I confess, while I dread and deprecate, and justify every effort to obstruct the cruel ascendency of the Russian, I long to see the expiring throes of an empire that has long oppressed the free and crushed the good; to hear the last boom of Mahometan cannon; and to see the wide-spread lands around Constantinople, so beautiful and so fertile, emerge from the deluge of Mahometan superstition, and not Russia, but protestant Christianity ascendant as the result, and thereby the way prepared for the march of the kings of the East to their beloved Palestine, the land of their fathers, their destiny, and their race. Having seen that in all probability we must now be near that epoch, let me notice, in the next place, that as soon as the Crescent wanes, and the great river Euphrates, the recognised symbol of the Turkish power, evaporates, we may expect to see a preparation for the return of the kings of the East; that is, an awakening take place among the Jews, previous to their emerging from the lands of their captivity, and their moving homewards to Jerusalem,- an exodus more majestic than that from Egypt, to take possession of the country that is theirs, though kept from them by the kings, and rulers, and princes of the earth. Here every sign is most striking. In all directions the Jews are awakening to a sense of nationality. They have newspapers-I read one of them every weekconducted with great talent and power-schoolspower-influence. They begin to stand out as they never did before. They were always insulated, but it was rather as broken and fragmental units; now they begin to be insulated in their nationality, or as a nation, and to consolidate their power and make ready for their mission. I may state, from their own newspaper, that they are organising plans for repossessing Palestine. Many of them have gone out as farmers and agriculturists; and in this Jewish newspaper I read the reports of the agriculturist Jews in Palestine, addressed to their brethren at home, just as you might read the account of the spies of old, when they told the children of the desert of the riches and the glories of the promised land. In America, funds are at this moment being raised, and near a million dollars secured, for building the Temple of Jerusalem; the dry bones in ten thousand valleys give tokens of returning life; the springs of Palestine have suddenly become full of fresh and refreshing water; every branch of the fig-tree buds; and more Jews have been converted, according to Tholuck, during the last eighteen years, than during the previous eighteen hundred; and there are more Jews at this moment in Jerusalem than there have been during the last seventeen centuries. A deeper interest, too, is now felt in the spiritual welfare of the Jews than ever was felt before; and the various societies for their conversion, not fifty years old, have been blessed with great and growing success, and are now the most prosperous of any. In the case of the Church of England I believe it is so, and in the Jewish mission of the Church of Scotland I know that it is the fact. And what is one of the great political questions of the day? Whether the Jews shall be admitted to legislative as well as municipal power. Whether it be a duty to admit them, or the reverse, this is not the place to examine; but their seeking and our discussing it is a sign of the times, a proof of their national development, a symptom of their disquiet, a forelight of future results. I know the meaning of this. It is the Jew, a weary, wandering exile, seeking a rest for the sole of his foot; and when he has obtained a political place in the Constitution of England, as probably he will, he will still find that he has no rest, and his heart will yearn still, till his feet shall tread the consecrated streets in which Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and the world's grey fathers, walked, and worshipped our God and their God. And it is very singular, I may observe, that the quarrel between Russia and Turkey took its origin about things in Jerusalem,-about shrines and altars,-about the sacred shrines where stupid monks, that have crucified afresh a living Christ, are fighting and quarrelling about the tomb of a dead Christ. The Jew feels he is not at home. He seeks a seat in the House of Commons, as Noah's dove sought a rest before the waters were dried up. His rest is in Palestine. In the "Hebrew Observer," a newspaper conducted by Jews, and very hostile to Christianity, I found, a few weeks ago, a poem in which a Jew apparently applies to Mahometanism and to his own race the very phrases employed in our Apocalypse, and forms the same inferences respecting the speedy restoration of the Jews which I have been endeavouring to gather, on ground he refuses to tread.* "REDEMPTION DRAWETH NIGH. "Lift up your heads, ye pilgrim bands- Which sweeps across the desert sands,— "Lift up your heads! The Crescent wanes Beneath whose beam Oppression reigns,- "Lift up your heads! Euphrates' stream Redemption draweth nigh! "Lift up your heads, ye Eastern Kings! Who bore you erst on eagles' wings, "Lift up your heads! The nations quake, See how their ancient pillars shake, * I have reason to believe, from subsequent and recent information, that these lines, though accepted by the Jewish newspaper, have a Gentile origin. |