IV.

THE JEW, HIS RUIN AND RESTORATION.

THE prophecies in the Gospels relating to the Jews are signs in every century of this dispensation. But the hopes that begin to bud from every branch of this withered fig-tree are indications of its returning vitality, and of our arrival at the eve of a new dispensation. We have said something about the recent movement among the Jews in the first Lecture. Let us retrace their ruin, so soon to end in their restoration. Jesus said, eighteen hundred years ago, "And they shall fall by the edge of the sword, and shall be led away captive into all nations and Jerusalem shall be trodden down of the Gentiles, until the times of the Gentiles be fulfilled." Luke xxi. 24.

There is here stated the prophecy of the utter dispersion, degradation, and protracted suffering of the Jew, in all the nations and countries of the earth. There is also predicted no less clearly what has been actually fulfilled, the entire desolation of their illustrious capital, the overthrow of their holy temple, and so far the removal of that central column, the glory and rallying-place of the Jew, to which, with unfaltering fidelity, he still looks from every land, and along every age of the world.

Let us study the prediction of the utter downfall of the illustrious capital, its sacred temple, and all the glory of that place that was once the joy of the whole earth. The destruction of Jerusalem took place, as predicted in the sacred page, and recorded in the annals of the Jewish historian, eighteen hundred years ago. Titus, the Roman general, pitched his camp amid the ruins of the temple, on the very spot where the mercy-seat and the ark, and the glory and the cherubim were, in the year of our Lord 70; and of all the worshippers that were wont to congregate under the roof of that magnificent fane, Josephus states that there were left on its site, in his days, a handful of old and venerable rabbis, who wept, and prayed, and kissed the very stones and ruins of their loved and now lost temple. In the year of our Lord 138, by order of the Roman emperor Adrian, there was set up, in order to insult the Jews, a marble hog, the unclean animal always thought by the Gentiles most obnoxious to the Jews; and in order effectually to disperse the Jews, as if he undertook to fulfil the prophecy, and leave them not the least discernible trace of the site of their city, he ordered it to be again ploughed up, and another city to be built upon its ruins called by another name. For a great many years the very name Jerusalem was not applied to the town that stood upon the ruins of the ancient city and royal home of David. It is even doubtful at this moment if the walls and houses in Jerusalem contain, in a single instance, a solitary

fragment of the ancient walls and houses of Salem. The only remains that we can trace, as probably a part of its ancient glory, are the deep foundations of a temple, near where a Christian sanctuary is built, consisting of huge stones of enormous dimensions buried in the débris; the corners of which are literally worn and wasted by the lips of the rabbis, that come on pilgrimage to Jerusalem and still kiss the stones of their ancient temple. In their deepest degradation "her people take pleasure in her stones; her very dust to them is dear." The mosque of Omar was subsequently erected by the Mahometans, on what they supposed the site of the ancient temple: and during the Crusades, when the nations that denied a living Christ rushed to rescue the tomb of a dead Christ, the streets of Jerusalem were literally deluged with blood; and since that day the hoofs of the Arab's steed, the Mameluke cavalry, and the bare feet of the Greek and Roman monk have continued to tread the streets of Jerusalem, and to desecrate the dust of Abraham and Sarah beneath the oaks of Mamre; and the bones of Joseph resting in the hopes of a sure and a certain resurrection. And whilst all these insults have been inflicted on Jerusalem for a very long course of years, the Jew has not been suffered to live in it: in his own city the Jew is now literally the stranger. All religions-Greek, Roman, and Mahometan-have united for eighteen hundred years in keeping the Jew out of Jerusalem, as predicted in the prophets; and the Jews at

this day present the spectacle of a people without a home-a nation without a country. It has only been during the last thirty years (and here is the budding of the fig-tree) that any number of Jews have been allowed to live in Jerusalem, and to begin to find homes and raise houses in the midst of it, and to walk again the streets consecrated by the feet of illustrious pilgrims, and to breathe the air that Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and the world's grey fathers breathed many thousand years before.

Not only has their capital been thus destroyed, but in every country to which the Jew has been driven, he continues a sufferer. In Switzerland, the land of freedom, and of mountain and of glen, the Jew has drunk the bitter cup of sorrow. In Russia he is treated as a serf; and when the autocrat wants to augment his army, or to indulge his taste, it is the wretched but rich Jews that must pay the price and bear the penalty of it. In Spain he is hunted like a wild beast. In Italy, and chiefly in Rome, he is driven into a horrid den called the ghetto: the only respite that he enjoyed was when the Roman republic was in force; and naturally he longs and waits for that day when the ecclesiastical despotism that now crushes him shall be broken into fragments, and Israel shall again be free, and Christians have liberty to worship God, with none to make them afraid. The Jew reads the 28th chapter of Deuteronomy in his synagogues, and feels too keenly that every curse predicted against

him in that chapter has been literally executed. No sign is so eloquent as the Jew on our streets.

I turn from the capital and its inhabitants to the country itself to Palestine. What is its state now? Once it was a land that overflowed with milk and with honey; its gardens rising in successive tiers into every zone and climate. On the mountain ranges of Lebanon grew the fruits of every country, and of every latitude of the globe. It was once the most fertile and prolific of all lands, as it is still the most beautifully situated. But since the fall of Jerusalem what has been its state? The earthquake has its home in Palestine; the very sea -the Mediterranean-ebbs from its shores, as if it felt weary with touching them. Its cities are become tombs; its population is drying up; the Arab plunderer roams in every valley; its once beautiful trees and tiers of gardens have been washed by the rains till the bare rock is all that remains; the eagle screams amid its solitary recesses, and the owl hoots in its wild and desolate parts. Palestine is at this moment an illustration and specimen of a land that God Almighty has cursed, a desert attesting the truth of God's word, yet pregnant with a glorious Eden. Chateaubriand, the celebrated French traveller, and not at all disposed towards the view that we take of the destiny of the Jews and the hopes of Jerusalem, thus speaks of

"This portion of the country is so shockingly barren, that it does not even possess the semblance