irrepressible Eastern question lies here. The solution waits for the appointed day, a day very near.

In the Times of May, 1867, we read:-"The Eastern question can neither be put off nor called forth. It is already open. It only remains to be examined whether it is right for Great Britain to allow the Eastern question to take its course by revolutions, with the more or less direct intervention of all the Continental Powers, and without her participation. On the one hand, Great Britain cannot wish that Turkey should be mistress in the East, yet by her silence she grants Turkey an army. On the other hand, Great Britain has incurred enormous sacrifices to save Turkey from Russian invasion, yet she allows Russia to place herself at the head of all the Christians in the East, and to lead in her rear all the European Powers.

"Four centuries have rolled over the sluggish Eastern empire without bringing much enlightenment or progress. Forty-six years have hardly passed since Greece first struggled into individual existence, and we can prove her comparative progress. To hope that Turkey will suppress the revolution and pacify the Christians is impossible. To believe in her civilization when she persecutes Christianity is equally impossible to Christian minds. Would it not be wiser to consider Greece as Turkey's natural heir-to remember that on all occasions she has put her trust in England, that she unanimously elected one of our princes to be her king, and

that her present king is the brother of our future queen, elected almost at the dictate of England?

"If, on the other hand, we believe in the regeneration of Turkey, is it not wiser still to advise her to do what Great Britain has so lately done herself— to follow in Candia, and, if necessary, even in Thessaly and Epirus, the example that Great Britain gave by the cession of the Ionian Islands? This timely advice would save Turkey from the universal disapprobation of all the European Powers. It would guarantee to her the remainder of her territory.

"This arrangement would settle all the Constantinople difficulties; it would pacify Greece by giving her her natural boundaries, and the natural means of living; lastly and chiefly, it would be a barrier against Russia. Moral interests, material interests, political interests, actual and future interests, require British intervention. Non-intervention is a wise and just principle as long as the internal disorder of a state does not threaten the interests of another. British intervention can only be of two kinds-to send a squadron and an army to uphold the Sultan against the Christians, or to advise Turkey to cede the provinces she can no longer govern without a perpetual conflict, compromising alike the peace of the East and the equilibrium of Europe. It is evidently the duty of civilized nations to step in, to put an end to bloodshed caused by the political anomaly by which a Mahomedan Govern

ment is permitted to rule over a portion of Christendom.

"If this question affects the great European family in general, it doubly affects England, from the fact of her being an Eastern as well as a European power. England is bound for her own interest to secure a strong government in the Mediterranean. Under the actual political disadvantages, neither Turkey nor Greece can offer these conditions. England is bound to support the one or the other, or to lose all power of initiative in the Eastern question.

"Let us laugh as much as we like at the 'grande idée,' or at any notion of Greek regeneration; let us avoid entering at present into the question whether Turkey is to be dislodged or not from Europe to populate Asia; but let us admit that Greece, such as she is, is an impossibility. Such as she is Europe has made her. Europe is responsible for her agitations or aggressions. Her existence has been acknowledged. She must live, and until the means of living are given to her she must strive for existence with the arms with which Nature has furnished her. The question before us can be summed up in these few words

'The Moslem or the Christian,

The Crescent or the Cross.'"'

The Times of July 2, 1867, thus illustrates the drying up of Euphrates or that waning of the crescent which constitutes the preparation for the return of the Jews:-"He decreed the sale of the vakoufs,

which had been long unproductive and ruinous, and by thus acting against the religious corporations effected a revolution which was not without danger; and, by recognizing the right of foreigners to possess property, did one of the boldest acts, perhaps, ever accomplished by a Mussulman sovereign.

"The Moniteur, in its complimentary article on this visit to Paris, attaches considerable importance to the fact of the Sultan so far disregarding the religious traditions by which the Commanders of the Faithful were debarred from planting their foot on any soil but the orthodox one, thus 'overthrowing the last barrier which separated the Mussulman world from European civilization;' says that European civilization set in from 'the day when Sultan Selim accepted the books and instruments sent him by the Emperor Napoleon I.'"

The acute writer fixes his attention on Greece. The detachment of Candia is merely another stage in the drying up of the Euphrates, another step toward the emergence of Palestine, the exodus and entrance of the Jew, the fulfilment of prophecy, the nearing consummation of the age.

Few can read their strange history without recognizing in them the standing miracle of all time; the inexplicable phenomena of Providence, unless beheld in the only light which casts its splendour on the past, and its brightening glory on the future, the sure word of prophecy. The Jews are found in every capital on earth; least at home in their own; having

property everywhere, except in that land which is theirs by title-deeds, in comparison of which those of England's proudest nobles are but of yesterday. When one looks at them on our streets, one cannot help seeing even on their faces an air of melancholy, as if it were the shadow of some great ancestral crime, which eighteen hundred years of suffering have failed to wash off. They speak all tongues; they are found on the banks of the Thames, the Danube, the Rhine, the Tiber, the Mississippi, the Missouri, the Ganges -everywhere and nowhere at home; they are what the poet has called them, "the race of the weary foot," as if running from themselves to get rid of the recollection of some deed of blood that has stained their hands, and left its ceaseless heritage of disquiet upon the hearts of even the most benevolent of them.

But their fortunes are in reversion. They shall in their own land "look on him they have pierced and mourn," and their acceptance of the crucified as a nation will be followed by the departure of the long eclipse, and Judah's sun shall no more go down.

St Paul says, "All Israel shall be saved, as it is written, There shall come out of Zion the Deliverer, and shall turn away ungodliness from Jacob, for this is my covenant unto them."

A spiritual conversion to God does not exhaust this prophecy. What is God's covenant? In Genesis xv. we learn what it is, "The Lord made a covenant with Abram, saying, Unto thy seed have I given this