Christian name, Christians should renounce the Christian faith. But obedience to this dictate of folly and infatuation would be fatal to ourselves, and useless to them. It is by representing to them the infinite dignity of Him, whom with wicked hands they crucified, that they can be brought, in the language of a prophet of their own, to look upon Him whom they pierced, and to mourn for Him.

"The judgments," says Basnage," which God has exercised upon this people are terrible, extending to the men, to the religion, and to the very land in which they dwelt. The ceremonies essential to their religion can no more be observed. The ritual law, which cast a splendour on the national worship, and struck the Pagans so much that they sent their presents and their victims to Jerusalem, is absolutely fallen, for they have no temple, no altar, no sacrifices. Their land itself seems to lie under a never-ceasing curse. Pagans, Christians, and Mohammedans, in a word, almost all nations have by turns seized and held Jerusalem. To the Jew only hath God refused the possession of this small tract of ground, so supremely necessary for him, since he ought to worship on this mountain. A Jewish writer hath affirmed, that it is long since any Jew has been seen settled near Jerusalem. Scarcely can they purchase their six feet of land for a burying-place. In all this there is no exaggeration. I am only pointing out known facts, and far from having the least design to raise an odium against the nation, from its miseries, I conclude that it ought to be looked upon as one of those prodigies which we admire, without comprehending, since in spite of evils so durable, and a patience so long exercised, it is preserved by a particular providence. The Jew ought to be weary of expecting a

Messiah, who so unkindly disappoints his vain hopes; and the Christian ought to have his attention and his regard excited towards men, whom God has preserved for so great a length of time, under calamities which would have been the total ruin of any other people."

From the present uncultivated state of the land of Canaan, which, in many places, presents to the traveller the prospect of rugged and naked rocks, mountains and precipices, Voltaire and other deistical writers, have attempted to give the lie to the description of that country given by God himself, as flowing with milk and honey. That the country of Canaan richly supplied the wants of a numerous population, for many years, is a fact as certain as any other in the history of any nation whatsoever. That the soil was in general fertile, not only Josephus, but Tacitus also, and several other pagan writers bear witness. Tacitus observes, in his fifth book, "that rain seldom falls in it, but that the soil is fruitful; that the fruits of Italy abound in it, and besides the fruits of the latter, the balsam and the palm trees." Modern travellers, while they allow its present condition to be neglected, do justice to the fertility of its soil. Dr. Shaw observes, that "were it as well peopled and cultivated as in former times, it would still be more fruitful than the very best part of the coast of Syria, and Phoenicia." That the country of the Jews should, under the tyranny and sluggishness of the Turks, languish, and exhibit signs of its sympathy with the condition of its former inhabitants, is nothing wonderful. But in accounting for its former fruitfulness, and its present apparent nakedness and sterility, though the industry and care of its former, and the indolence and sloth of its present possessors, are not to be excluded, much less is the particular blessing of God in

the one, and his curse in the other state, to be removed from our sight. From what a country is, under the par, ticular malediction of Heaven, no argument can be brought to show what it was, under the blessing of an extraordi nary Providence; and under such a Providence, the sacred history of the Jews tells us that their nation was originally placed. Had infidels given themselves the trouble to consult, either the prophecy of Moses, in Levit. xxvi. 33; or that of Jeremiah, in the xii. 10, 11, of his book, they would have found that the present state of that country is precisely what He, who knew the end from the beginning, had declared that it should be, during the desolation of Israel.

Though the prophecies of Moses constitute an illustrious, they only form a small part of the predictions of the Old Testament. There are many others which exhibit, by their complete fulfilment, a demonstration that its prophets were men of God, and their prophecies, the words of God. Of these prophecies, our narrow limits will permit us only to point out three. Let any man read the thirteenth and fourteenth chapters of Isaiah, with the fiftieth and fifty-first of Jeremiah, which contain a prophetic account of the taking of Babylon, and he will find that it was predicted that the city should be taken in the time of a festival, when her great men were in a state of intoxication; that her river was to be dried up; that her king was to be seized with perturbation; that the army of Cyrus was to enter by the course of the river, which he had diverted into another channel; that through the forgetfulness occasioned by the intemperance of the feast, the gates of brass, which shut up the descents from the quays to the river, were to be left open, and which, had they been shut, would have defeated the whole enterprise. All these 2 A

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circumstances, with the exception of the king's perturbation by the hand writing on the wall, narrated by Daniel, ch. v. the learned reader knows are fully proved to have taken place, by the testimony of two excellent Greek historians.* Xenophon having mentioned the king of Babylon's being slain, calls him "the impious king," a character which perfectly accords with that given him in scripture. Isaiah's prophecies were in the possession of the Old Testament church, about one hundred and sixty; and those of Jeremiah were sent to Babylon, about fiftysix years before the events took place which they describe. Isaiah mentions Cyrus by name, at least one hundred years before his birth, and marks him as the future deliverer of the Jews from their captivity in Babylon.

But the punishment of Babylon was to be gradual, and to be extended through many generations. After its fall, under Cyrus, it never recovered its former glory and fame. The building of Celucia in its neighbourhood, drained it, in a great measure, of its inhabitants; and the building of Ctesiphon occasioned its being left wholly desolate, nothing remaining but the walls. At one time, indeed, the progress of its curse appeared to be arrested. Alexander the Great fixed upon Babylon as the seat of his empire, and though the inhabited part of the city had been reduced from three hundred and sixty-eight to one hundred and ninety furlongs, he purposed to restore it to its ancient boundaries and splendour. By making it the capital of the world, he intended to make it rise with new glory, and to overpass its former limits, assuming even a more elevated and dignified rank than it had yet held

• Herodotus, Lib. 1. Xenophon, Cyropad, Lib. vi,

among the cities of the nations. The river Euphrates, which, from the time of Cyrus, had been diverted into a new, he purposed to restore to its ancient channel. He had even begun to carry these designs into execution. But Providence watched over the fulfilment of its own decrees, and with the death of that monarch, which happened at Babylon, all her hopes expired.

The kings of Persia, finding Babylon deserted, converted it into a park for hunting, by stocking it with wild. beasts. At length its walls fell down in several places, and were never repaired. The wild animals, which the Persian kings kept there for the pleasure of the chase, forsook it. Serpents and scorpions took up their abode in it; and even that principle of curiosity, which stimulates the antiquarian to explore the remains of every thing that was magnificent and splendid, was not sufficiently strong to draw him to a scene, where he must encounter death at every step. The river which had been diverted from its ancient channel, by overflowing the site of the city, changed it into a pool of water; and all the labour of modern travellers has not been able to discover, with certainty, the spot of ground upon which Babylon stood. So completely has God swept it with the besom of destruction. "Babylon, the glory of kingdoms, the beauty of the Chaldees' excellency, shall be as when God overthrew Sodom and Gomorrah; it shall never be inhabited, neither shall it be dwelt in from generation to generation; neither shall the Arabian pitch his tent there; neither shall the shepherds make their folds there; but wild beasts of the deserts shall lie there, and their houses shall be full of doleful creatures, and the wild beasts of the island shall cry in their desolate houses, and dragons in their pleasant palaces; and her time is near to come, and her days shall