on, when God shall bind up the breach of his people, and heal the stroke of their wound? and surely it is full time to try, whether christian kindness, and those efforts on which the blessing of God may be expected, may not be the means of preparing the way for their conversion, and for effecting far more, in a short space, towards that prophetic consummation of all their miseries, than all that coercive measures or savage cruelty ever have been, or ever could be, able to accomplish.

Many prophecies concerning the Jews, of more propitious import, are reserved for testimonies to future generations, if not to the present. To them the reader is referred, as they are to be found in scripture.* And that throughout all the changes which have happened in the kingdoms of the earth from the days of Moses to the present time, which is more than three thousand three hundred years, nothing should have happened to prevent the possibility of the accomplishment of these prophecies, but, on the contrary, that the state of the Jewish, and Christian, and Heathen nations at this day, should be such as renders them easily capable, not only of a figurative, but even of a literal completion in every particular, if the will of God be so; this is a MIRACLE, which hath nothing parallel to it in the phenomena of nature.'

In regard to the past, as we have seen on a

* Deut. xxx. 3-5. Isa. xi. 11, 12; lx. 9, 10, &c. ; lxi. 4. Jer. xxxi. 37, &c. Ezek. xxxvi.; xxxvii. Zech. ix. 12, &c. Amos ix. 13-15. Micah ii. 12.

brief review of their miseries, the most wonderful and amazing facts, such as never occurred among any other people, form the ordinary narrative of the history of the Jews, and fulfil literally the prophecies concerning them. These prophecies are ancient, as the oldest records in existence. They are clear, in their meaning, as any history can be. Many of them are apparently contradictory and irreconcilable to each other, and yet they are all literally true; and identified in every particular with the fate of the Jews. They were so unimaginable by human wisdom, that the whole compass of nature has never exhibited a parallel to the events. And the facts are visible, and present, and applicable, even to the most minute point. Could Moses, as an uninspired mortal, have described the history, the fate, the dispersion, the treatment, the dispositions of the Israelites to the present day, or for thirty-three centuries, seeing that he was astonished and amazed, on his descent from Sinai, at the change in their sentiments, and in their conduct, in the space of about as many days? Could various persons have testified, in different ages, of the self-same and of similar facts, as wonderful as they have proved to be true? Could they have divulged so many secrets of futurity when, of necessity, they were utterly ignorant of them all? or could they, by their own sagacity, have foretold events that were to happen hundreds and thousands of years thereafter, seeing that like all mortal men they knew not of themselves, what a day or an hour would bring forth? The probabilities were

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infinite against them. For the mind of man often hangs in doubt and uncertainty over the nearest events, and the most probable results; but in regard to remote ages, when thousands of years shall have passed away, and to facts respecting them, contrary to all previous knowledge, experience, analogy, or conception, it feels that they are dark as death to mortal ken. And viewing only the dispersion of the Jews, and some of its attendant circumstances-how their city was laid waste; their temple, which formed the constant place of their resort before, levelled with the ground and ploughed over like a field; their country ravaged, and themselves murdered in mass, falling before the sword, the famine, and the pestilence; how a remnant was left, but despoiled, persecuted, enslaved, and led into captivity; driven from their own land, not to a mountainous retreat, where they might subsist with safety, but dispersed among all nations, and left to the mercy of a world that everywhere hated and oppressed them, shattered in pieces like the wreck of a vessel in a mighty storm, scattered over the earth, like fragments on the waters; and instead of disappearing or mingling among the nations, remaining a perfectly distinc people, in every kingdom the same; meeting everywhere the same insult, and mockery, and oppression; finding no resting-place without an enemy soon to dispossess them; multiplying amidst all their miseries, so that though they were left few in numbers, were they now to be restored, the land would overflow for the multitude of men;

surviving their enemies; beholding, unchanged, the extinction of many nations, and the convulsions of all; robbed of their silver and gold, though cleaving to the love of them still, as the stumbling-block of their iniquity; often bereaved of their very children; disjoined and disorganized, but uniform and unaltered; ever bruised, but never broken; crushed always, but not utterly destroyed; weak, fearful, sorrowful, and afflicted; often driven to madness at the spectacle of their own miseries; taken up in the lips of talkers; the taunt, and hissing, and infamy, of all people; and continuing ever what they are to this day, a proverb and a by-word to the whole world: how did every fact, from its very nature, defy all conjecture; and how could mortal man, overlooking a hundred successive generations, have foretold any one of these wonders that are now conspicuous in these latter times? Who but the Father of spirits, possessed of perfect prescience, even of the knowledge of the will and of the actions of free, intelligent, and moral agents, could have revealed their unbounded and yet unceasing wanderings; unveiled all their destiny, and unmasked the minds of the Jews and of their enemies, in every age and in every clime? The creation of the world might as well be the work of chance as the revelation of these things. It is a visible display and demonstration of the power and prescience of God, and of the truth of his word. And, although it forms but a part of a small portion of the christian evidence, it lays not only a stone of stumbling, such as

infidels would try to cast in a christian's path; but it fixes at the very threshold of infidelity an insurmountable barrier, which all the ingenuity of sceptics cannot evade, and which all their power can never overthrow.

The anger of the Lord has not returned until he has executed, and till he has performed the thoughts of his heart; and in the latter days we may now consider it perfectly. Though he once caused to cleave unto him the whole house of Israel, and the whole house of Judah, as the girdle cleaveth to the loins of a man; yet when they despised his statutes, and walked contrary to him, and would not return from their own ways, He took away his peace, his loving kindnesses and mercies from them, and cast them out of his sight. But it was not till their neck became an iron sinew that he put upon it an iron yoke.

What seest thou? was the question of the Lord to the prophet, when he made to appear before him a sign of judgments that were to come upon the Jews. And the words were repeated at every sign. And now, on a retrospect of their actual sufferings, prolonged for ages, and not yet passed from view, and when all these have been to us a sign set before us that we may see it, it is the voice of the Lord that seems to put the question again-What seest thou? And who so blind as not to see that the Jews stand forth from anong the nations of the earth as a token, a sign, a wonder, and a witness to all people, that the prophets spoke not a vision of their hearts, but