a *..' "• '': •'■■ ■'•• •**• ,▼ ff.yy^ iTi^ i^i'y t* i^i' r -.> ,y :j^ .i-y ^ ■ x^r* i— i.i \t V V '♦'' '«' V' \' '<;' JAjLAJlA^A-^A ' • -v • .'■•-',:" • • .■ . ■, ; pr*frwr*r^r"ir , v"V^r"VV' , U"ir7Vr3r" , vr'< ' Cmttoir ft&Ll, y§4Mct ■ //,'■<,,;//■ t/, . ■ - I TO THE QUEEN'S MOST EXCELLENT MAJESTY. Madam, The cultivation of the Fine Arts has been regarded by all civilised nations as an ornament of the Diadem, but by England in the hisrher lio;ht of an essential instrument of her intellectual supremacy. Your Majesty's ancestors, distinguished as they were by the triumph of fleets and armies, never lost sight of the milder, but not less permanent lustre reflected on the throne and the people by the triumphs of the national mind. Yet, while your Majesty's known taste and royal munificence have already given new animation to the arts, the present work solicits your approval by higher claims than mere elegance of design or skill of execution. Illustrative of scenes once hallowed by the steps of the prophet and the apostle, possessing in all ages the highest interest for the scholar and the philosopher, and now opening the most sacred contemplations and most glowing prospects to the philanthropist and the Christian, these volumes are dedicated to your Majesty, as the Defender of the Faith of a great Christian empire, by, Madam, Your Majesty's most faithful Subjects and dutiful Servants, THE PUBLISHERS. L I 8 T F SUBJEC T S Vol. I. JERUSALEM AND GALILEE. 1 PORTRAIT OF DAVID ROBERTS, ESQ., R.A. 2 ENTRANCE TO THE HOLY SEPULCHRE— Title Vignette. 3 THE DAMASCUS GATE. 4 THE GREEK CHAPEL OF THE HOLY SEPULCHRE. 5 TOMB OF ST. JAMES. 6 JERUSALEM FROM THE ROAD LEADING TO BETHANY. 7 ENTRANCE TO THE TOMB OF THE KINGS. 8 THE MOSQUE OF OMAR, ON THE ANCIENT SITE OF THE TEMPLE. 9 THE TOMB OF ZECHARIAH, VALLEY OF JEHOSHAPHAT. 10 JERUSALEM FROM THE SOUTH. 11 CHURCH OF THE HOLY SEPULCHRE, EXTERIOR VIEW. 12 THE POOL OF BETHESDA. 13 THE TOWER OF DAVID. 14 THE SHRINE OF THE HOLY SEPULCHRE. 15 GOLDEN GATE OF THE TEMPLE, SHOWING THE ANCIENT WALLS. 16 JERUSALEM— THE CHURCH OF TILE PURIFICATION. 17 UPPER FOUNTAIN OF SILO AM— VALLEY OF JEHOSHAPHAT. 18 JERUSALEM FROM THE MOUNT OF OLIVES. 1!) STONE OF UNCTION— CHURCH OF THE HOLY SEPULCHRE. 20 CHAPEL OF ST. HELENA— CRYPT OF THE HOLY SEPULCHRE. 21 FOUNTAIN OF JOB— VALLEY OF HINNOM. 22 JERUSALEM FROM THE NORTH. 23 LOWER POOL OF SILO AX — VALLEY OF JEHOSHAPHAT. 24 THE ENTRANCE TO THE CITADEL OF JERUSALEM. 25 ABSALOM'S PILLAR— VALLEY OF JEHOSHAPHAT. 20 CALVARY— HOLY SEPULCHRE. 27 MOUNT TABOR, FROM THE PLAIN OF ESDRAELON. 28 NAZARETH, GENERAL VIEW. 29 FOUNTAIN OF THE VIRGIN, NAZARETH. 30 CONVENT OF THE TERRA SANTA. NAZARETH. 31 THE SHRLNE OF THE ANNUNCIATION, NAZARETH. 32 CHURCH OF THE ANNUNCIATION, NAZARETH. 33 FOUNTAIN OF CANA. 34 CANA, GENERAL VIEW. 35 TOWN OF TIBERIAS, LOOKING TOWARDS LEBANON. 36 THE SEA OF TIBERIAS, LOOKING TOWARDS BASHAN. 37 TIBERIAS, FROM THE WALLS ; SAFED IN THE DISTANCE. 38 TIBERLVS, LOOKING TOWARDS HERMON. 30 THE TOMB OF JOSEPH AT SHECHEM. 40 JACOB'S WELL AT SHECHEM. 41 ENTRANCE TO NABLOUS. 42 NABLOUS. ANCIENT SHECHEM. 43 RUINS OF THE CHURCH OF ST. JOHN". SEBASTE. 44 SEBASTE, ANCIENT SAMARIA. NOTICE OF MR. ROBERTS'S JOURNEY IN THE EAST. To visit the Holy Land and make drawings of the scenes "of sacred history and the antiquities of Egypt, had been, long before this journey was undertaken by Mr. Roberts, the brightest of his anticipations as an artist. He had already acquired so high a reputation for his skill and judgment in the treatment of architectural subjects, that the service of his pencil was sought, to make us acquainted with the structures of the Moors in Spain, and to make drawings from, and adapt for the use of the engraver, many of the sketches furnished by travellers in Palestine, of the buildings and objects of interest published in the "Illustrations of the Bible:" these studies, and his journey to Spain and Morocco for his Spanish scenery, excited in him an irrepressible desire to visit the East. The drawings of the French Commission in Egypt had been declared very incorrect, and De Laborde's Petra was charged also with inaccuracy. To go and draw for himself scenes and objects of such intense interest could alone satisfy him ; the result has been his richly-stored portfolios, from which the subjects for this work have been selected. Having made himself thoroughly acquainted with all matters reqxiisite for the journey, and such works as were published on the countries and objects he was about to visit, and having prepared himself with letters and introductions, especially from the Foreign Office to Colonel Campbell, our Consul-General in Egypt and Syria, he left London August 31st, 1838, and reached Alexandria on the 24th of September following. Every facility was kindly and readily given by Colonel Campbell for the accomplishment of our Artist's objects. The Nile was at its height, and therefore visited at the most advantageous time. He ascended to Cairo, with introductions from Colonel Campbell, and there, by the aid of those to whom he had been recommended, Mr. Roberts was furnished with a guard to accompany him everywhere, and protect him from interruption or insult whilst sketching: be even obtained permission to enter every mosque he desired to visit, a privilege never before given to a Christian, but to which one condition was attached — that in the instruments he used in making his studies, for he was allowed to paint there, he was not to desecrate the mosque by the introduction and use of brushes made of hog's biistles. From Cairo Mr. Roberts, with an Arab servant, ascended the Nile in a boat commanded by a captain with a crew of eight men, provisioned for three months. He was entirely master of the party, and carried the British flag at the mast-bead. He thus ascended to the second cataract, Wady Haifa, and before he returned to Cairo, he had made drawings of almost every edifice from the extremity of Nubia to the Mediterranean. NOTICE OF ME. ROBERTS S JOUKXEY IX THE EAST. While at Cairo, lie made the acquaintance of M. Linant, who had been De Laborde's companion in his visit to Petra; he kindly showed Mr. Roberts the original sketches which had been made in that excursion, and thus added stimulants, which were unnecessary, to his undertaking the interesting journey to Wady Moosa, or Petra. He immediately made preparations for crossing the Desert by the route of the Israelites to Mount Sinai — by Akaba, and through the great valley of El Ghor to Petra, and thence to Hebron, instead of entering Palestine by El Arish and Gaza, as he had intended. On the 8th of February, 1839, having been joined by Mr. Pell and Mr. Kinnear, (the latter of whom has since published an account of this journey,) they assumed the Arab dress, and, with their servants well armed, left Cairo : taking with them twenty-one camels, and escorted by nearly as many Bedouin Arabs, of the tribe of the Beni Saids. On the 27th they reached the Fortress of Akaba, on the Red Sea; here they parted with the Arab tribe hitherto their friends and guides, and put themselves under the escort of the tribe of Alloeens, who were to conduct them to Petra and thence to Hebron. On the 6th of March they reached Mount Hor, upon which rests the tomb of Aaron : at its base, deeply seated in its ravines and bounded by its precipitous sides and lofty peaks, lies the excavated city of Petra, the Idumea of the Greeks, the Edom of the prophet Jeremiah — the city of impregnable position, which gloried hi its strength, but which strikes the traveller, who is fortunate enough to visit it, as an awful realisation of the prophetic denunciations : — " Thy terribleness hath deceived thee, and the pride of thine heart, O thou that dwellest in the clefts of the rock, that boldest the height of the hill : though thou shouldest make thy nest as high as the eagle, I will bring thee down from thence, saith the Lord." 1 Mr. Roberts and his companions were the first who had been permitted to pitch their tents within Petra; it was the result of a long and violent altercation between the Arab tribe inhabiting Wady Moosa and the Alloeens, with whom an old grudge remained unsettled. At length a sufficient amount was agreed upon as a peace-offering for a truce, and the occupation of an encampment within the city for five days without molestation ; during this time our Artist, fortunately, worked incessantly on his studies, for on the fifth night the little party was assailed and some of their amis were carried off; but it was suspected by our travellers, that the attack of the Arabs of Wady Moosa was connived at by their guides, who were impatient to return ; the next morning they struck their" tents, and bade farewell to Petra, the wonder of the Desert. On the 16th, the party having reached Hebron, and learnt that the plague had barred access to Jerusalem, proceeded to the coast, visiting Gaza, Askelon, and Jaffa; but being informed here that no recent case had occurred in the Holy City, and that the quarantine would shortly be removed, they set out for Jerusalem, and arrived there on the 29th of March, the day before Palm Sunday, a day held by the Christians in the East in great veneration. While at Jerusalem, Mr. Roberts received much ' Jeremiah, xlix. l(j. NOTICE OF Ml!. ROBERTS S JOURNEY IN THE EAST. kindness and assistance from the then governor, Achniet Aga, whom he accompanied with above four thousand Christian pilgrims to Jericho and the river Jordan. He afterwards visited the Dead Sea, the Lake of Tiberias, the sea-coast and mountain-range of Lebanon, and the -ruins of Baalbec; such exertions, and the severe privations which he suffered on the journey, produced intermittent fever, which compelled him to abandon his projected excursions to Damascus and Palmyra. How entirely he had been devoted to the great objects he had proposed to himself before he left England, this work will abundantly prove. The extraordinary merit and interest of his drawings, when seen after his return, created a sensation not easily forgotten ; the fidelity of his accurate pencil, his skilful and rigid adherence to the truth of costume, his attention to just and characteristic effect, were acknowledged by all travellers and artists competent to judge. The demand for this work sprang out of the interest thus excited. Commissions from royalty and the chief patrons of art crowded upon him for pictures from the subjects he had studied in the East, and his contemporaries in art acknowledged his merits by the honour of electing him into the Royal Academy. ISRAEL. r I ^HE history of the Jews is the most characteristic, the most important, and the most sublime, in the world. For, to this people alone were given the primitive knowledge of the Almighty ; the trust of preserving it unstained while the earth was bowed down in idolatry; and finally, the magnificent privilege of dispensing it, in the appointed time, through all the families of mankind. For the declared purpose, at once of enabling the nation to fulfil this high office, and of distinguishing the divine commission, the whole existence of the people affords the most total contrast to that of all other nations. It differs from them all in its origin, its religion, its civil construction, and its historical career. The origin of the chief nations of pagan antiquity is proverbially lost in fable, acts of impossible heroism, transformations of imaginary deities, and dynasties of imaginary kings. At the point to which history ascends, they were simply gatherings of rude wanderers, formed into tribes by force or famine, and seizing upon territory by emigration or the hand of the stronger. But, the Jews, like the first dwellers in the earth, were the descendants of one pair ; their descent registered by the clearest and most authentic of all records; their ancestors leaving their original place of birth, neither urged by necessity nor tempted by the desire of possession ; those ancestors wholly alien in their habits to war, and in their persons wholly excluded from earthly sovereignty ; living and dying in the acknowledgment that they were " strangers and pilgrims upon the earth," though looking forward to mysterious promises mightier than the world could fulfil; and the people, when at last they came into possession, openly acknowledging that the triumph was gained not by their own prowess, but by the hand of Heaven. In the pagan world, religion was a tissue of traditions, without authority and without effect ; important to the priest as a matter of maintenance, and interesting to the people as a source of festivity or display ; but secretly despised by the philosopher, practically disregarded by the government, and performing altogether an obscure and secondary part among the general impulses of society. But, in the Jewish system, Religion was the grand object of the national existence, the prime mover of the whole machine of state ; its ministers holding the highest rank, its 2 ISRAEL. observances forming the habitual occupation of the people; its influence shaping their minds, their manners, and their fortunes; the national prosperity declared to depend on the public reverence for its principles, the national ruin involved in its desertion. Its conception was lofty, pure, and spiritual in the highest degree, while its ceremonial exceeded in strictness and splendour all that mankind has ever seen of worship — a whole tribe was devoted to the attendance of the temple — the whole people stood among nations as a general priesthood; religion, the unrivalled, perpetual, and inspired impulse of the dominion of Israel. The contrast is not less distinct in the polity of paganism. The codes of the most civilised nations were the result of time, accident, and the common necessities of public and personal life. Beginning in a few maxims, they grew with the exigencies of growing society, until they accumulated into substance, and were shaped into form. But the defects of their birth adhered to them still ; and their purest legislation exhibits barbarian cruelties, violent transgressions of right, and a general rude inadequacy to meet the claims of man in his intercourse with man. The political history of the pagan world is an exclusive display of human agency. Man is always in front. States rise by his virtues, and perish by his crimes; human energy, genius, and passion, are the universal instruments of national change. The hand of Heaven is seen only when it comes to write the sentence of empire, and then seen only in clouds. To the eye of the pagan, the vicissitudes of nations formed scarcely more than a vast game of chance. Beyond a few principles all was conjecture. The clearest foresight was circumscribed by the events of the day. No intelligence, however vigorous, could securely penetrate into the future fates of empires. In all those essential features, the distinction of the Jewish people was entire, and was divine. Their law was no tardy, obscure, and jarring compilation ; it was a System ; at once authoritative, adequate, and complete ; transmitted with a grandeur of circumstance which pronounced it the work of Heaven ; and fixed in the national mind by every motive which can bind men or nations ; by the promise of prosperity and the dread of suffering ; by the awe of the senses, the homage of the heart, and the conviction of the understanding. In the career of the nation, Divine Providence is the guide, the sustainer, and the sovereign. The popular fortunes are openly moulded by its will. Man looks on, while the mightiest events make their progress before him, scarcely more governed by his influence than the tides or the thunderstorm. Heaven holds the scale, man is but the dust of the balance. Battles are lost and won, conquests are achieved, and national punishments of the deepest kind, amounting to revolutions which extinguish the hope of Israel, are the work of Providence, openly proclaiming its resolves, in total contradiction to human expectancy, and as openly fulfilling them in total independence of human power. Two great agents wholly unknown, but by name, to pagan antiquity, Miracle and Prophecy, are the especial instruments of the Divine government among this extraordinary people. From the beginning of their existence, in the person of Abraham, the faculties ISRAEL. 3 of nature and man are placed under palpable control. The patriarch and the people are protected, tried, and delivered, by miraculous interposition. From the earliest period, their future existence is displayed with the clearness of history ; and yet, with that sublime consistency, which in its broadest displays of power and wisdom wastes nothing, each successive illumination is distinctly adapted to the necessities of the time. To Abraham, the founder of the race, the prediction gives an outline of the fortunes of his descendants, until their liberation from Egypt. To Jacob, with whom another era of the national existence began, as the father of the twelve tribes, the prediction is renewed, but further extending over their possession of the promised land. To Moses, with whom a third era began, in the redemption from Egypt, the prediction extends further still, com- prehending the whole period of conquest, possession, and decay; and reaching even beyond the final fall of the nation, into that vast and obscure region of time, when Judah was to be absorbed and hidden in the oppressions and conflicts of Gentilism; like the site of Paradise, covered by the swamp, and trampled by the barbarian, yet still retaining a melancholy reverence in the memory of mankind. The historv of the Jews commences with Abraham, the son of Terah, in the tenth 1996 generation from Noah, at a period when the earth was sunk in idolatry ; when even the patriarchal family had bowed down to the work of men's hands, and perhaps he alone retained the unpolluted worship of his fathers. It pleased the Almighty to interpose, in this last extremity of man, and once again to reveal His worship to the world. Nearly two thousand years before the birth of our Lord and Saviour, the word of God came to Abraham in " Ur of the Chaldees," commanding him to leave his country, and go forth; with the promise that he should be the founder of a nation. All the ways of Providence exhibit consistency. They are a series of profound analogies. The training of Israel closely resembles the training of the individual mind. In both, faith precedes sight ; and the nation and the man are alike taught full reliance and solemn submission, before either is led into consummate reward. Faith was the discipline of the patriarchs and the people for the long period of four hundred and thirty years. The life of Abraham was a powerful and unwearied exercise of faith. But to estimate his trial, we must remember his time. The member of a civilised community, he was suddenly commanded to abandon the fertile soil of Chaldea, in which his fathers had dwelt for ages, and go forth "he knew not where," to what wild region of the earth ; and this pilgrimage was to be made at a period when all beyond Chaldea, with perhaps the single exception of Egypt, was either a wilderness, or traversed by bands of warlike savages. Nor had he the common stimulants of barbarian enterprise. He was not the chieftain of a horde; he had neither ambition nor rapine before him; he was a keeper of sheep. He reached Haran, on the borders of the desert ; and there the divine guidance suffered him to remain until he was verging on old age. Suddenly, at a period when man naturally looks for rest, at the age of seventy-five, he was commanded again to 4 ISRAEL. uproot himself, to throw away the fruits of his labour during so many years, and begin a journey which might be interminable. But the injunction had grown stricter still. He was now not merely to leave his home, but to separate himself from his kindred: and thus at once doing violence to his natural affections, and divesting himself of the protection of all allied to him by blood, again begin his journey, and advance into Palestine, a country possessed by turbulent clans, and apparently, at that period, convulsed by recent invasion. Yet he obeyed, still unknowing in what portion of the world his journey was to terminate; nor was it until he had actually arrived within the borders of Palestine, that he received a knowledge of the promised land. Even there he found himself tried alike by the sterility of the soil and the violence of the people. He was successively, a fugitive in Egypt from famine, and a captive in the hands of one of the chiefs of Palestine. Released from both onty by miracle, he continued still to " dwell in tents," a stranger in the land. The birth of the promised son was retarded, until he was a hundred years old. Even this blessing but increased his trial. He was commanded to sacrifice Isaac ; and thus, by a single act, to extinguish at once the life miraculously given, the stay of his old age, the sole pledge of magnificent possession and countless posterity, and above all, the prophetic ancestor of that mightiest offspring, the Son alike of man and heaven, on whose brow was to be laid the perpetual diadem, and whose reign was to be the rejoicing of all generations. But, in this trial, of which the force is now beyond all calculation, (for in what human existence have interests and objects so vast ever been since combined ?) the patriarch was not simply submissive, he was confiding. In defiance of the strongest obstacles, he believed that the promise would be eventually fulfilled ; gave his entire con- viction to the divine words, and in solemn reverence and unhesitating belief, made his journey to the place of sacrifice, " accounting that God was able to raise him up, even from the dead." 1 It was not until he was on the point of consummating his obedience, that his trial was complete ; and he received his reward in the most illustrious acknow- ledgment of faith ever given to man. " By myself have I sworn, saith the Lord, because thou hast done this thing, and hast not withheld thy son, thine only son: that in blessing I will bless thee, and in multiplying I will multiply thy seed as the stars of heaven, and as the sand which is upon the sea- shore ; and thy seed shall possess the gate of his enemies ; and in thy seed shall all the nations of the earth be blessed; because thou hast obeyed my voice." 3 On the same scene, nineteen hundred years after, and on the eve of the fall of Israel, a more stupendous sacrifice was to be offered; the Supreme Father was to give up his Firstborn to death. The same great truth, that He could not be held by the bonds of the grave, was to be the essential faith of that most solemn of all sufferings : and the trial was to be followed by that promise of universal sovereignty and imperishable happiness, which constitutes the hope, as it will consummate the grandeur, of Christianity. The discipline continued for centuries. Abraham finished his course, still a pilgrim in the land, where the divine promise had foreordained the temple and the throne. Isaac, 1 Hebrews, xi. 19. s Genesis, xxii. 16-18. ISRAEL. 5 the especial son of promise, died like him, a pilgrim, yet confiding hi the future kingdom. Jacob bewail his career a fugitive and ended it an exile, yet with his last breath uttering a memorable prediction of the ample fulfilment of the divine words. The discipline extended to the nation. The Israelites were not only forced to abandon Palestine, but they were thrown into the power of a great and despotic kingdom, which gradually changed protection into tyranny ; and, by actual bondage, threatened to raise a perpetual barrier against their return. Yet faith survived. Neither the famine which drove them into Egypt, nor the violence which retained them there, could overcome their conviction. Joseph, the first minister, the monarch in all but name, refused to die an Egyptian, and enjoined that his remains should be borne away with his people on the day of their future march to Palestine. Even when they were fettered, generation after generation, to the soil, and a deepening slavery of two hundred years, must have seemed to set the seal to their exclusion, the principle sacredly survived. The parents of Moses preserved the infant, in the strength of a supernatural hope. Moses himself, when his fame ami his genius had grown to maturity, " mighty in words and deeds," the statesman and the soldier, with all the temptations of royal rank and opulence before him, refused to abandon his hope in the promise ; " refused to be called the son of Pharaoh's daughter, choosing rather to suffer affliction with the people of God." 1 But, his individual trial was to grow still more severe. In an attempt to arouse the spirit of his countrymen he failed, and made the bitter discovery, that they had lost all the feelings essential to freedom. He was pursued by the vengeance of the king, fled into the desert, and there, relinquishing for ever the hopes and habits of a life of distinction and command, took the staff of the shepherd. Yet, from this period, the supremacy of Providence only ascends with broader splendour. Means, the most utterly below human calculation, produce effects the most utterly above it; all is inadequacy on the part of man. To raise a nation of slaves into a nation of freemen, proverbially a task requiring the most extraordinary union of ability and ambition, is the task laid upon a man eighty years old, and still more disqualified by circumstances than by a g e 3 a fugitive in the desert, sunk into the monotonous life of a keeper of sheep, totally cut off from the country of his birth, and calmed into "the meekest man on earth." Even when the divine call conies to him, he exhibits reluctance, pleads personal inability, and finally yields only to miracle, But the conditions of this great achievement place it still more beyond the range of human faculties. In the face of the most civilised and powerful kingdom of their time, the deliverance of the Israelites was to be effected, without the sword. The slave-born was to be rescued from the slave-master by an act of public will; and not merely to obtain his freedom, but a portion of that master's wealth, as a compensation for his slavery. The deliverance was not to be an escape, but a triumph. The people were to march out in the open day ; with the king, the nobles, and the troops of Egypt looking on, yet not darhig to lift a weapon against the most helpless of all multitudes, a moving nation, 1 Hebrews, xi. 24, 25. 6 ISRAEL. encumbered with infancy and age, with flocks and herds, and with the provisions for their journey to Palestine. But this incalculable event only coincides with the general purpose of the interposition ; that of impressing man with a sense of providential power. The people were wholly passive. The Ten Plagues, a series of miracles, fought the battle ; in all displaying the might of God alone ; completed by the signal and final overthrow of the crowned oppressor, and his troops, the instruments of his tyranny ; at once displaying to the chosen people the divine wrath against incorrigible crime, and securing their march unmolested across the wilderness. But another and an illustrious development of the divine power was now to begin. The lesson of the Israelite in the wilderness was to commence, by the proof " that man does not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God." He was to be taught, by those appetites which appeal most immediately to his feelings, that God is alike the sovereign of nature and society; that the hourly provision of liis creatures is wholly the work of his will; and that instead of the corn, and wine, and general subsist- ence of man, his will might have substituted a totally different constitution of things, and provided for every want of the human frame, independently of the invention or the industry of the human species. The Israelites marched into the wilderness, prepared to reach Palestine by a direct and short route. An act of disobedience was visited by the divine declaration, lengthening their journey to forty years. But miracle then only began a grander development. In the midst of a region of rock and sand, where a flying troop of Arabs can now scarcely find water and herbage for their rapid march, the twelve tribes, with their cattle, were subsisted for forty years. Nothing can be conceived more decisive than the change, or more demon- strative of supernatural will. The food of Egypt, earned with stripes and toil, was replaced by food rained upon them from heaven ; and rained in that exact proportion, which no human arrangement has ever been able to accomplish among large bodies yf mankind — that no man should have a superfluity, and that no man should want. The descent of a double portion on the day before the sabbath, still more strongly tended to fix the mind on the source whence it came. But the miracle was not limited to food. It is expressly declared, that during their sojourn in the desert, even their clothing was supernaturaHy provided for. 1 The mere magnitude of the supply was overwhelming, it was the provision of food and clothing for millions. The desert, without being changed in its nature, underwent the same stupendous power. Streams not merely burst from the rock, but in such copiousness as to supply the wants of a nation. The brackish pools were not merely changed into refreshing waters, but into ' " I have led you forty years in the wilderness ; your clothes are not waxen old upon you, and thy shoe is not waxen old upon thy foot. (Deuteronomy, xxix. 5.) . . . . That ye might know that I am the Lord your God." (Ver. 6.) It has been suggested that the Israelites might have procured their raiment from the bordering nations. But how was this possible ? They had nothing to give in return : the ground produced nothing to them ; their flocks and herds, the property of a slave population, must have been few in Egypt, and could not have much increased in the scanty pasturage of the desert. On every side too the bordering clans seem to have shrunk from them with alarm, or met them with open hostility. Nor was this miracle more astonishing than the manna. ISRAEL. 7 reservoirs vast enough to slake the thirst of the moving multitude. The natural perils of the march were counteracted "by a still more expressive miracle ; in the tract infested by serpents, the sufferers under their poison were instantly healed by looking on a brazen serpent raised by their leader, an emblem of the future triumph of the Messiah over the original adversary of mankind. To consummate all those wonders ; the Divine Presence, in a pillar of cloud by day and of flame by night, shone on high in front of the tribes, marking where the camp was to be pitched, and advancing when it was again to be put in motion; a visible and unanswerable proof to the most doubting among the people, that the host were under the hourly guidance of Heaven. But a still more striking connexion was to be established ; God was to declare himself their actual king. One of the most astonishing features of Scripture is the divine conde- scension. The natural idea of Deity is that of lofty, abstract, unapproachable grandeur. But Scripture acknowledging all, and more than all the grandeur, continually mingles with it a human interest, an ultimate intercourse with human feelings, and even an association with human beings, closely resembling that of man with man. The Eternal condescends to meet Abraham as " friend with friend," He converses with Moses ." face to face," He is the peculiar " God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob ;" all prefiguring that still more intense condescension and measureless mercy, by which the Messiah finally took upon Him our nature, and even submitted to the death of a slave. He now condescended to offer Himself to the election of the people as their sovereign, in almost the lano-uacre of a human candidate for a throne. 1 In the third month after the departure from Egypt, and on the day of their entrance into the wilderness of Sinai, Moses was summoned to hear the divine command. " And the Lord called unto him out of the mountain, saying, Thus shalt thou say to the house of Jacob, and tell the children of Israel ; " Ye have seen what I did unto the Egyptians, and how I bare you on eagles' wings, and brought you unto myself. " Now therefore, if ye will obey my voice indeed, and keep my covenant, then ye shall be a peculiar treasure unto me above all people : for all the earth is mine : " And ye shall be unto me a kingdom of priests, and an holy nation. These are the words which thou shalt speak unto the children of Israel." 2 Moses returned to the host and proposed the terms of the covenant of royalty. It was publicly accepted. " And all the people answered together, and said, All that the Lord hath spoken we will do." 3 On this national acceptance, Jehovah put the first act of temporal sovereignty in practice, and proclaimed his will as the national legislator. The tribes were led by the fiery pillar to the front of the mountain range of Sinai, a noble elevation, in itself an object of natural astonishment to a multitude whose lives had been spent in the level country of Egypt ; and rendered more awful by the command which made a nearer approach to it death. On the third morning they were aroused by thunders and lightnings, and the sound of the angelic trumpet, " so that all the people that was in 1 Jahn, Hebrew Commonwealth, c. ii. § !). 2 Exodus, xix. 3-6. 3 Ibid. v. 8. 8 ISRAEL. the camp trembled." They then marched forth, to take their stations round the mount, and await the descent of God. " And Mount Sinai was altogether on a smoke, because the Lord descended upon it in fire : and the smoke thereof ascended as the smoke of a furnace, and the whole mount quaked greatly. " And when the voice of the trumpet sounded long, and waxed louder and louder, Moses spake, and God answered him by a voice. And the Lord came down upon Mount Sinai." 1 The Law was now given in three portions ; the first the Ten Commandments, openly proclaimed by the Divine voice, as the great principles of universal order; those principles, which our Lord and Saviour has declared permanently binding on all ages, and incapable of being changed in even an iota.- The two remaining portions, the law of worship, and the law of society, applicable chiefly to the Jew alone, were transmitted through Moses. This was the most majestic demonstration that was ever given to Israel, or perhaps will ever be given to man ; until that close of Christianity which it so singularly resembles — the Second coming, when " the Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the tramp of God." 3 And " the Lord Jesus shall be revealed from heaven with his mighty ansrels, in flaming fire, taking vengeance on them that know not God, and that obey not the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ." 4 In both, the leading features are the same, the grandeur, the wrath, the irresistible power, the flame, the trumpet, the voice of the angelic world, and the descending Deity. But all the past is eclipsed by the new glory of the second coming, the splendour of the Resurrection. It has been objected to the Mosaic Law, that it omits the doctrine of immortality; but the objection arises from confounding the nature of a religion and a law. The Israelites had the religion before. The patriarchs bowed down to Jehovah, worshipped Him with sacrifice, and looked forward to the advent of the Messiah. Their religion had the doctrine of immortality ; " they all died in faith," the hope of a resurrection. The object of law is the order of society. But society ends at the edge of the grave ; and the rewards and punishments of the future world are no more within the contemplation of its tribunals, than they are within its power. Yet the distinctions of the Mosaic code still raised it incomparably above all the efforts of human wisdom. It met, with an amplitude till then unknown, the threefold objects, of religious ceremonial, the privileges of the sovereign, and the rights of the people ; it exhibited the contrast of a law incapable of addition, diminution, or change, to the helpless perplexity, narrow principles, and perpetual changes of human legislation ; it brought forward the thunders of Omnipotence to assert its authenticity ; and, finally, it stamped all its provisions with a pledge beyond the highest reach of human power. Unlike human law, which knows only crime and penalty ; the Mosaic Law extended itself to righteousness and reward; it prepared expiation for offence to man and heaven; ' Exod. six. 18-20. » Matt. v. 18. 3 1 Thess. iv. 16. "2 These, i. 7, 8. ISRAEL. 9 and it proposed the most direct, intelligible, and impressive order of human recompense for virtue. While the doctrine of immortality raised the individual heart to its Maker; temporal happiness, in all its most touching, noble, and permanent forms, filled the national eye with beauty. To the allegiance of the Israelite were promised immediate blessings ; in salubrity of climate; in the richness of his corn, olive, and vine; in personal health, strength, and freedom; in the increase of the herd and the sheepfold; in length of life; in the succession and obedience of children ; in the security of the land from conquest ; in resistless triumph over all foreign hostility; in the endless duration of the national throne; in the boundless advance of his country in wealth, wisdom, and influence among nations ; and, to crown all, in seeing that country the sacred central light of the earth, Palestine, the chosen kingdom, and Jerusalem, the glorious city, of the King of kings. That a people so gifted, so honoured, and so blessed, should have cast all away, and fallen as Israel has fallen ; might make us in shame and sorrow wring our hands, and, with heads humbled in the dust, wonder at the unutterable weakness of man. At length, after the travel of forty years, the tribes approached the confines of the desert, and Moses was commanded to announce to them that he must give up the leadership to Joshua. The whole Law was then repeated, with solemn denunciations against the national crimes. Those were all prophecies ; and they still remain before the world's eye, the fiery characters of the impeachment drawn up against the most beloved and unhappy of nations. In language astonishing for its vividness, awful for its Divine indignation, and appalling for its historic reality, we see their successive sufferings; first in the pestilences and famines of the land, 1 then in the Captivity/ then in the Roman invasion and the horrors of the Siege, 3 and finally in the great dispersion: 4 — the whole prediction, like some vast picture in the skies, giving us at a glance the portraiture of those powerful changes and deep calamities, which for three thousand years have gone on beneath, realizing on the surface of the world. But it is equally the subject of prophecy, that this fall shall not be for ever ;. that Judah shall be restored, and restored not by the slow and encumbered processes of human renovation, but by means whose simplicity implies Divine suddenness, completeness, and power : not by a change of masters, nor of location ; not by conquest, nor civil convulsion ; but by a change of mind. " And it shall come to pass, when all these things are come upon thee, the blessing and the curse, which I have set before thee, and thou shalt call them to mind among all the nations, whither the Lord thy God hath driven thee, " And shalt return unto the Lord thy God " That then the Lord thy God will turn thy captivity, and have compassion upon thee, and will return and gather thee from all the nations, whither the Lord thy God hath scattered thee " And the Lord thy God will bring thee into the land which thy fathers possessed, and thou shalt possess it ; and he will do thee good, and multiply thee above thy fathers 1 Deut. xxviii. 22. J Ibid. 36. 3 Ibid. 49. * Ibid. 64. 10 ISRAEL. " And the Lord thy God will make thee plenteous in every work of thine hand, in the fruit of thy body, and in the fruit of thy cattle, and in the fruit of thy land, for good : for the Lord will again rejoice over thee for good, as he rejoiced over thy fathers." 1 Those declarations evidently imply hoth dispersion and restoration on a larger scale, than any which had heen experienced before the Roman overthrow of Judah. The fall of the kingdom of Israel imder Babylon was an extinction, not a dispersion. The Babylonish captivity of Judah was not a dispersion, but an exile. The restoration under Ezra and Nehemiah, instead of displaying the redundant prosperity of a renewed kingdom, and still more the rekindled glory, and boundless blessing, of this great prophecy, was the return of a feeble remnant, 50,000 liberated prisoners, to a desolate country, constantly under the yoke of the heathen, trampled by every power which drew the sword for Eastern supremacy, and finally crushed under Roman massacre. The fulfilment is yet to come. It is still in clouds, but those clouds will clear away ; the sun is behind ; and a burst of consummate splendour, which only awaits the appointed time, will yet irradiate the triumph of Judah and her Redeemer. " The Lord thy God will circumcise thine heart, and the heart of thy seed, to love the Lord thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, that thou mayest live " 2 "The word is very nigh unto thee, in thy mouth, and in thy heart, that thou mayest do it." 3 The Commission given to Moses was fulfilled by his advance to the Promised land. He was now one hundred and twenty years old, and, though " his eye was not dim, nor his natural force abated," it was revealed to him that he must die. He resigned himself to the Divine command; closing his career with an inspired hymn, which he left to be sung by the nation through all ages ; as a brief, yet most magnificent, summary of the protection, the love, and the miracles of Jeiiovaii, the hazards of the national crimes, and the ultimate and exhaustless mercy, which would watch over them even in the darkest hours of the Divine justice. 4 The march was now resumed. God was the king of the tribes ; the impression of his actual sovereignty was essential; and it was sustained in every form capable of acting _on the senses or the mind. The tabernacle was less a temple, than the pavilion of a monarch living in the midst of his people, the tent of a great chieftain leading his army; 5 all the sacrifices were in the open air. From within the curtains of that tent, Moses constantly received his orders for the march, and his counsel in the difficulties of the government. In the inner chamber sat the Divine Presence, in glory, above the cherubim. In the outer were placed the furnitures of Oriental royalty ; a kingly table covered with gold, and 1 Deut. xxx. 1—9. s Ibid. 0. 3 Ibid. 14. ' Dent, xxxii. ■"' Jahn, Hebrew Comrnonwealtb. ISRAEL. 11 constantly prepared for a banquet ; with a daily renewal of food, golden bowls of wine, incense, and lamps burning. The whole tribe of the Levites were the appointed royal guards, officers, and attendants. Above the tabernacle shone perpetually the Divine flame, the sign of the sovereign residence, the kingly standard, at whose moving alone the camp was struck, and at whose standing still, all again stood still. 1 Probably man has never since seen a human display so striking as the march through the wilderness. Xerxes may have been followed by a more numerous multitude, but it was a multitude of the Scythian, the Thracian, and the Asiatic; a half-savage and tumultuous gathering of wild men, in which the disciplined pomp of Persia was obscured and hurried along. The myriads of an Attila or. a Zengis were barbarians, sweeping the land like an universal flame ; or like the locusts, seen, only in the act of devastation, or on the whig. But the march of Israel, in its vastness, its strength, and its order, was sublime. The simultaneous movement of millions of human beings, 2 marshalled by their tribes, advancing under the standards of their princes, to the sound of trumpets and hymns ; and the whole mighty mass expanding across the unobstructed plains, seen under the bright horizon, and heard in the unruffled air, of the wilderness ; with the tabernacle and the Glory in the centre, giving a superhuman character to the whole ; possesses an exclusive and unrivalled grandeur. With such a scene suddenly disclosed to his eyes, how well can we comprehend the amazement and delight which wring from Balaam his unwilling homage ! His first impression is of their incalculable number. " From the top of the rocks I see him, and from the hills I behold him 1 The march of the Israelites forms a striking contrast to the confusion and irregularity of the Asiatic armies in all ages. The poetic armies of the Iliad, some hundreds of years after, exhibit the primitive confusion ; for though the Greeks march steadily to the encounter, their chief order is in their distribution under their princes ; but the Trojans are only a gallant mob. Even in more systematic days, the march of the Babylonian and Persian armies was rather a diffusion of hordes over the face of the country, than the solid movement of a disciplined force. The first march, in the modern sense of the word, was perhaps that of the <: Ten Thousand," and its success may have been largely owing to the astonishment with which its regularity struck the Persian cavalry and the C'arduchian mountaineers. But we are to recollect that the march of Moses was not even that of an Asiatic army ; not of soldiers, but of every diversity of population ; and not of a multitude, forced to some semblance of order by the pressure of an enemy ; but of an immense emigration of peasantry, with no enemy to compel their vigilance, and with the desert open round them. The march was by sound of trumpet. Each tribe moved under its own prince and its own banner. The whole were in four grand divisions, marked by the four quarters of the heavens, with the tabernacle in the centre. On the first Bounding, the eastern grand division moved, consisting of the tribes of Judah, Issachar, and Zebulun. The tabernacle was then taken down and borne along. The southern grand division, formed of Reuben, Simeon, and Gad, next moved, followed by the bearers of the vessels of the sanctuary. Then the western grand division, of Ephraim, Manasseh, and Benjamin, struck their tents and marched. Lastly came the northern grand division, of Dan, Asher, and Naphtali ; the whole forming one immense column ; which, on halting, again took its original stations round the tabernacle. 2 The number of the Israelites, at the close of their Egyptian bondage, has been a matter of some dispute. It has been, for instance, denied that the increase from seventy persons to 603,550 males above twenty years of age (besides 22,000 males from a month old among the Levites), in the space of 430 years, was probable. But Jahn (Hebrew Commonwealth), in a learned note, shows that the natural increase might have been much more, namely, 977,280 males above twenty years. The actual number of the people has been reckoned at two million four hundred thousand souls. 12 ISRAEL. "Who can count the dust of Jacob, and the number of the fourth part of Israel?" He changes his place of sacrifice, again tries his incantation, and is struck with a still deeper sense of that irresistible power which must defy alike sorcery and arms. " The Lord his God is with him, and the shout of a king is among them. . . . Surely there is no enchantment against Jacob, neither is there any divination against Israel .... Behold, the people shall rise up as a great lion, and lift himself up as a young lion : he shall not lie down till he eat of the prey, and tlrink of the blood of the slain." At evening he makes a third attempt to blaspheme; but the host are now encamped, and the beauty of the sight fills his lips with a strain of pastoral and lovely imagery. " How goodly are thy tents, O Jacob, and thy tabernacles, O Israel ! "As the valleys are they spread forth as gardens b}- the river's side, as the trees of lign-aloes which the Lord hath planted, and as cedar-trees beside the waters." But the evil spirit within the soothsayer is at length totally vanquished ; he abandons the work of magic, sees in futurity an intellectual Star, which eclipses all the rising splendours of the skies, and bursts out into uncontrollable and triumphant prediction. "He hath said, which heard the words of God, and knew the knowledge of the Most High, which saw the vision of the Almighty, falling into a trance, but having his eyes op>en. "I shall see him, but not now: I shall behold him, but not nigh; there shall come a Star out of Jacob, and a Sceptre shall rise out of Israel, and shall smite the corners of Moab, and destroy all the children of Sheth. " And Edom shall he a possession, Sen - also shall be a possession for his enemies ; and Israel shall do valiantly. " Out of Jacob shall come he that shall have dominion." 1 The entrance into Canaan bore the same character of Divine royalty. On reaching the banks of the Jordan, the people found an obstacle which they possessed no human means of surmounting, a river in a state of inundation, spreading beyond its usual channel, a deep and rapid torrent. The order of march was now changed, and the tabernacle remained no longer in the centre of the tribes ; God was their chieftain, and He led the way. The tabernacle was borne to the front, the host followed. As the foot of the priest touched the river, it shrank before him, and, by a new miracle, as in the passage of the Red Sea, the whole host marched over dry-shod and established their camp on the enemy's shore. Their first conquest was alike by miracle. As God had shown himself the guide, He showed himself the conqueror." Jericho, the first city on their march, was made his exclusive conquest : it was forbidden to be assailed by arms ; the ark was carried round it, the priests blew their trumpets, and the battlements fell : the trophy alone of the irresistible Lord who led the armies of Israel. 1451 From this period the history assumes more distinctly the form of civil government, and, Ra until the building of the Temple, then distant 447 years, exhibits alternately the Divine Numbers, xxiv. " Joshua, vi. ISRAEL. " 13 agency, and the general influence of human weakness and wisdom. But the first legislative act of Joshua was altogether supernatural. It was the division of Palestine among the people. This event has had no example in human annals. In the ages of heathen conquest, and still later, in the feudal era, there have been arbitrary allotments of territory, on condition of service ; but none bear a comparison with the great Jewish division, in its extent, its personal advantages, and its national security. By the Divine command, Palestine was divided into twelve provinces, one for each tribe, and the partition reached downward, until every family was provided for ; and this provision was not merely for life, but for ever. Debt, which formed the misery of the lower classes in heathenism, and, in its heavier pressure, sank them into hopeless slavery, could weigh down no man in Palestine ; every seven years brought a full discharge of the debtor, and a full release of the bondsman. The alienation of estates, which in later ages embitters life, and extinguishes families, could not take place in Israel; for at the end of every fifty years, on the proclamation of the jubilee, all estates reverted to their original owners. The most ample and studied preparation was made for passing existence in rational, healthful, and elevated enjoyments. The national occupation was wholly in the garden and the field ; all Judea was one vast scene of agriculture ; man was not self-condemned to darkness, exhaustion, and disease, in those wasting and melancholy labours, which later necessities inflict on him in the manufactory and the mine. The man of Israel was a free, cheerful, and vigorous being ; a proprietor of the land which he cultivated ; retaining it by a title which no human power could enfeeble; sitting under the forest and the fruit tree which he had planted with his own hands, and secure of transmitting his innocent and lovely wealth to his remotest posterity. His soil luxuriant, his climate the finest in the world, his country divinely shielded from foreign force and domestic convulsion ; what could add to the substantial happiness of this favourite of Heaven ? But, independently of the enjoyments which every man might find for himself in the animation and the abundance of pastoral life ; the year was a succession of great festivals, some solemn and magnificent, some cheering; and graceful, and all interesting from their variety, their beauty, and their vivid connexion with the memory of their forefathers. Of the three chief celebrations, the Passover, the Pentecost, and the Feast of Tabernacles, each was fixed at the gathering of a peculiar harvest, — the barley, the wheat, and the vine, — seasons in all lands instinctively devoted to enjoyment. Besides those, they had the Feast of Trumpets and the Feast of Expiation. But this principle of relieving the mind of the nation from the possible monotony of a merely rural life, and fixing it on higher things, was still more powerfully sustained in one great institution, at once more immediate, and extending over a larger space of national existence — the SABBATH, constantly recurring, occupying the seventh part of the life of every man, and given declaredly to recur till the end of time, and as the perpetual pledge of a still more illustrious Rest. The impression was reiterated: every seven years witnessed another sabbath of a year, when not only the labourer and his beast of burthen rested, but the land itself was free from toil ; an ordinance which demanded a stupendous miracle, and which, by the produce of a triple crop in the sixth year, showed that Jehovah was still the father of his people. 14 ISRAEL. But the noblest of all celebrations, one totally unexampled among mankind, and worthy of the Supreme beneficence alone, was the Jubilee, the Great Sabbath, returning at the end of every seven sabbaths of years. On the tenth day of the month Tlsri (September), on the evening of the Day of Expiation, the trumpets sounded, and the day of universal liberty began. From that moment, all debts were cancelled; all slaves free ; all families, whom chance had thrown into poverty, joyously prepared for a return to the houses and lands of their ancestors. Even no arm was to be wearied by sudden labour, for the land in this year also rested, its provision was given in the miraculous produce of the year before ; all was to be unmixed enjoyment, the full sense of restoration, unalloyed gratitude to the Eternal Source of all virtue, happiness, and mercy. The human intellect is probably unequal to a full knowledge of the purposes for which the arm of Heaven had been thus distinctly revealed; yet may not a conjecture be hazarded, that the division of Palestine was intended to give the world some image of what it might have been if the original design of the Creator had been accomplished ? If the first man had not fallen, the Earth must have been only a more extended Paradise. There could have been no vice, no violence, no war, no mortality. The provinces of the world would have been divided without force, and retained without fear. Mankind would have multiplied, until the earth was replenished ; and the number might have then been kept within the bounds of safety, by some of those mysterious limits which belong to the law of human increase, or met by some of those countless expedients which lie hid in the treasury of Omniscience. All mankind would have been one great family, circle extending beyond circle, of filial reverence and sacred love; Paradise, still the garden of God, the place of the Divine glory, the central throne and temple to which all the eyes of earth were turned ; to which all its worship, tribute, and homage, were brought ; and to which all the families of mankind approached in succession, to behold the face of Adam, the immortal, at once the priest and the king, and to pay their grateful and solemn allegiance to the Almighty Lord of all. Imagination sinks under those memories ; it can only fold its wings and adore. But they shall yet be realised, and more than realised. The promise is given, and Paradise shall return. It is impressive, to observe how closely the chief features of this original state were retained hi the Jewish system. We thus see the land distributed, not by chance or violence, but by the Divine will, and the distribution declared to be unchangeable by man ; we see a central, holy region, the city of the Lord, the especial place of national veneration ; where the Divine glory was enthroned above the cherubim : we see the appointed ascent of the tribes three times a-year to the Temple ; the spiritual father of the nation, the high-priest, by an unchangeable office and descent, exercising the functions of priest and ruler ; the population secured against all the hazards of war during their absence at Jerusalem; the whole occupation of the people, like that of Adam, to " dress the garden and keep it ;" and, by a not less memorable similitude, that singular limitation of popular increase, which, for fourteen hundred years, suffered it scarcely to fall below, or to exceed, the numbers during the first ages of the possession. ISRAEL. 15 But may not this sacred model indicate the future as well as the past? May it not shadow forth the superb changes so long announced by prophecy; the new construction of earthly power, the heating of the sword and spear into the ploughshare, the living verdure of the moral wilderness, the subduing of the craft, corruption, and ferocity of human nature, and the ultimate establishment of one golden sceptre in the midst of a regenerated and rejoicing world ? During the long period, from the conquest of Canaan until the reign of Saul, the people continued under the direct government of the Almighty. Viceroys, bearing the name of judges, chiefly administered the details, but the principle was theocracy. Tins was the happiest existence of Israel. Though the separate tribes, falling from time to time into idolatry, were punished by peculiar defeats, and local captivities, the great body was uninjured : and of the 447 years of this period, scarcely more than a fourth was thus marked with misfortune. Even when the people hi their vanity demanded an earthly king, the monarch was anointed by the declared will of Jehovah. The building of the Temple by Solomon, a labour of seven years, which employed all the skill and opulence of the kingdom, and its consecration by the descent of the Shekinah, consummated this glorious series of providential triumphs. In her Heaven-gifted king, the most illustrious monarch that ever sat upon a throne, in her authority over the surrounding nations, and in her possession of a worship at once the truest, the loftiest, and the most distinguished by Heaven ; Israel seemed to have at length acquired the pledge of those transcendant prospects, which formed the hopes of her patriarchs and the promises of her Omnipotent protector. But it is a melancholy warning against human nature, that from this moment she began to decline. The promise was conditional, and the condition was violated. The king, sinking into idolatry, that High Treason against which the hand of Heaven had been raising barriers for five hundred years, drew down with him the people. From the reign of Solomon all was downfall, sometimes headlong, sometimes retarded, but still descending ; temporal power soon shared the fate of spiritual integrity ; the thunderbolt came at last, and shivered the throne into fragments never to be united again. By the Ten Commandments, idolatry had been pronounced the especial act which amounted to hatred of God, and the especial guilt which branded his wrath on generation after generation. In this language there was nothing arbitrary ; all the Divine prohibitions are only examples of the Divine benevolence; the inevitable effects of idolatry in every age have been to corrupt the heart and blind the understanding. The chief part of human vice is obviously the result of allowing the sensual faculties to predominate over the moral and intellectual. Man, indulging in the immediate enjoyment, in neglect of the nobler but the more remote, habitually learns to substitute passion for duty, sense for soul, and earth for eternity. But, to elevate him into the power of self-control, what coidd be conceived more effectual than the idea of an Omnipotent Being, sustaining, impelling, and governing the whole course of man and nature ; incapable of being resisted or deceived ; reading every motive, and viewing every moment of human life, at once with the eye of a father and the justice of a sovereign ; yet hi all this vast and vivid activity of providence, Invisible! The mere thought of such a Being, so 16 ISRAEL. incontestably superior in substantial power to all that the senses can display, must tend to shake their supremacy. Experience proves this ; and perhaps no man has ever fixed his mind upon the idea of a Supreme Being, 'without feeling himself for the time less shackled by his corporeal nature. The impression is more effectual still, when we regard the Almighty in his relation to human existence, as our Father, our Redeemer, and our God. But the habit created by the simplest conception of infinite power, vigilance, and government always present, yet always invisible, and thus asserting a resistless predomi- nance of the unseen over the seen, must, like all other habits, have a tendency to spread over the whole mind. On this principle we can account for the extraordinary magnificence of the Jewish temple. Heathenism was profuse in its decoration of the altar. The Jewish religion was utterly abhorrent of its rites, and yet in that pomp of public worship where heathenism laid its chief snares for the popular mind, Judaism altogether eclipsed its most prodigal splendours. All that the arts and opulence of the earth could contribute, architectural grandeur, the jewels and embroidery of the East, thousands of minstrels, tens of thousands of attendants, glittering vestures, the most stately and solemn ritual of the earth, illustrated the temple on Mount Sion. In both instances alike, the purpose was to exalt the object of the worship ; but in Judah the worship was of the Invisible. An image on the altar, even the most sublime that ever entered into the mind of man, would have degraded the spirituality of the worship, have overthrown the true virtue of the magnificence, and have so far tended to restore the dominion of the senses. We can comprehend the astonishment of a heathen conqueror, a Pompey or a Titus, when, after hastening through marble courts, and passing through veil within veil of gold and purple, to gaze on the overwhelming lustre of the idol worthy of such a shrine, he found nothing but the loneliness of the sanctuary ; vet a loneliness more majestic, than if it had displayed a colossus of solid diamond. But other and not less direct charges lie against idolatry. It gives an untrue representation ; a picture or a statue cannot express the existence of Deity. It gives a humiliating one — matter for spirit, lifelessness for essential activity, the stock and the stone for power ; feeble, earthly locality for that Infinite Presence, which " the heaven and the heaven of heavens cannot contain." The practical evil is darker still. It is the course of human nature to substitute the seen for the unseen ; the image quickly supersedes the God ; yet the most prostrate worshipper must feel that the statue is but the work of men's hands : if such be the deity, what must be the religion? Heathenism made gods as rapidly as it made statues. Men soon deified their passions, their follies, and even their vices; thus religion, instead of being the check, became the spur to crime. The evil naturally spread : number produced rivalry, popularity was courted by arts which beguiled, exhibitions which bewildered, and abominations which corrupted the people, until Satan was Lord of earth, and the heathen altar his throne. 1 1 "New Interpretation of the Apocalypse." ISRAEL. 17 From tliis period another era commences in the fortunes of the chosen people. The Great Covenant by which Judea was to have constituted the foremost sovereignty of the Earth was henceforth dissolved. Yet, the judgment was measured ; and while the sudden and total plunge of the ten tribes into the depths of idolatry marked them for ruin, the remaining virtue of Judah was to be warned by suffering. But the division of the kingdom of David was irreparable. The moral earthquake was already shaking the foundations of the land. Even hi this rapid glance at the Jewish history, it is impossible to regard without equal reverence and wonder the long-suffering of Heaven, and the fine adaptation of the expedients employed to retard the guilt of man. A new antagonist, National Apostasy, was rising, like the Evil Spirit from the abyss ; but the combat was to be changeful and terrible, before its hour was come to overshadow the land. The division of the kingdom of David under Eehoboam, threatened the total ruin of religion in the new kingdom of Israel. The erection of the two idol temples at Bethel and Dan, for the express purpose of preventing the intercourse of the people with Jerusalem, the general flight or expulsion of the Levites, and the universal degradation of the priest- hood, by the appointment of " priests of the lowest of the people, which were not of the sons of Levi," 1 the change of the established feast of tabernacles, and the king's own assumption of the priestly office when " he offered upon the altar, and burnt incense," had evidently extinguished the habitual means of religious knowledge. To the subjects of Jeroboam, Jerusalem, with all its sacred influences, existed no more. — The Temple, the priesthood of Aaron, the teaching of the law, and all the solemn and touching remembrances of the religion of their fathers, had vanished in the mystic and corrupting ceremonial of an Egyptian altar, to which they saw their king leading the worship, and to which they were allured, at once, by royal example, the pride of national independence, and the dazzling captivations which paganism in all ages offers to the vanity and the passions of man. Yet it was in this fearful emergency, that we find a new development of the exhaustless resources of the Divine wisdom. All appeal to the memory of the pure religion was obviously at an end ; and the force of arms was distinctly prohibited,- if force could ever be a legitimate ground of conviction. But a form of national appeal was suddenly brought into action, unexampled in its comprehensiveness, in the nature of its objects, and hi the variety, vigour, and constant applicability, of its power. - From the close of the Settlement in Canaan, Prophecy and Miracle had almost wholly ceased ; in the Conquest then office was completed ; and, with a few occasional exceptions, 3 the people, for the long period of four hundred years, were left to the ordinary guidance of human faculties. But it was in the declining days of the national history ; when the kingdom of David was not only shorn of its beams, but seemed sinking into night by the course of nature ; that a sacred and astonishing splendour was to rise, and, for a time, fill the horizon. For the direct purpose, at once of rebuking the national crimes, and leading the way to national 1 1 Kings, xii. 28—33. ■ 1 Kings, xii. 24. 3 The birth of Samson, the calling of Samuel, the prophecy of the division, &c. 18 ISRAEL. restoration ; of declaring the Divine judgments against the haughtiness of kings and people, and administering the hopes of mercy by an authority altogether above the diadem ; a race of men were summoned, to whom none similar had existed in the history of the Gentile world, or even of Judaism. In the earlier ages, the prophetic spirit had been given only to individuals holding a memorable rank, and on memorable occasions: thus Jacob, on his death-bed, prophesied the fortunes of the twelve tribes; and thus Moses, within sight of death, prophesied the fortunes of the nation. But the inspired power was now to take a new form and a new extension. The prophets of the kingdoms of Judah and Israel were to be called from every rank of life : some from the royal household, some from the schools of the prophets, and some even from the sheepfold and the plough. Their appeals were to be as varied as their origin, yet all eloquent and glowing ; some pouring out the sternest strains of scorn and condemnation; some pathetic and solemn, soliciting "Judah to be saved," and Israel to return to its King and its Father ; all uttering a language which mankind had never heard before, which has never since been heard, but from inspiration, and which, in all ages, by its boldness, its majesty, and its truth, has vindicated the lips which spoke it, as touched with fire from heaven. Among all the conceptions which human pride has laboured to form of human capabilitv, nothing has ever equalled the character of the Jewish prophet. The lofty fortitude, that devoted itself to the peril of arraigning the passions of monarchs and resisting the prejudices of nations ; the not less lofty self-denial, that made his life a continual pilgrimage, untainted by the national corruption ; the solemn sincerity with which he declared the whole counsel of the Almighty ; and the magnificent elevation of heart and understanding, the ardour of feeling and the blaze of knowledge, which must have made his solitary hours glorious, form a character altogether above the stature of the world. In the Jewish prophet, we see the noblest gifts of our nature still more ennobled by their employment ; man the immediate agent of Omnipotence ; in his spirit and his life, exhibiting the humility of virtue ; in his powers and his labours, making the nearest approach to those splendid beings, who are " as the whirlwind and the flame of fire." B.C. From the period of the Division, we see the prophets, without popular rank or royal commission, exercising, by the sole influence of their inspiration, the highest authority in the leading transactions of Judah and Israel ; arbiters of peace and war ; uttering the most fearless defiances in the face of a succession of monarchs frenzied with personal profligacy and the sense of unrestrained power : and asserting the majesty of Jehovah in the midst of altars flaming to idols, and nations pampered with every vice of heathenism. Even in the reign of Solomon, then in the pride of a long life of sovereignty, and the most splendid monarch of the world, Abijah the prophet came, to denounce the sins of king and people ; to declare the division of the kingdom, the alienation of the ten tribes to a subject, and the reduction of the throne of David to a diminished and struggling sovereigntv. ISRAEL. 19 With what a sound of terror must words like these have startled an Eastern king, surrounded with all the pomps and pleasures of the stateliest court of mankind : " Thus saith the Lord; Behold, I will rend the kingdom out of the hand of Solomon." A tremendous denunciation, scarcely lightened by the promise of the enfeebled throne. " Howbeit, I will not take the whole kingdom out of his hand : but I will make him prince all the days of his life, for David my servant's sake. And unto his son will I give one tribe, 1 that David my servant may have a light always before me in Jerusalem." 2 This declaration was made to Jeroboam, but evidently communicated to the king, who issued an instant order for his death. In this simple, but decisive maimer, was a great sovereignty broken up, and a throne given away, in a conference between two private individuals, without the intervention of councils or armies. On the revolt of the ten tribes, Rehoboam hastily summons a vast army, and, evidently expecting to take the revolters by surprise, is on the point of rushing upon Israel ; when the prophet Shemaiah stands in his way, forbids the invasion, and commands an impetuous monarch, inflamed alike with the sense of wrong and the hope of victory, and at the head of a hundred and eighty thousand chosen troops, to stop in his march, and disband his army ; and is obeyed. " Thus saith the Lord, Ye shall not go up, nor fight against your brethren, the children of Israel : return, every man to his house, for this thing is from me. They hearkened therefore to the word of the Lord, and returned to depart, according to the word of the Lord." 3 But it was in the still more disastrous days of both kingdoms that prophecy and miracle shone with still more conspicuous lustre. Yet a striking distinction marks their use. Miracle is almost solely directed to the kingdom of Israel, prophecy almost solely to the kingdom of Judah. — The deeper guilt and more intractable rebellion of the ten tribes are assailed by the terrors and wonders of the senses; the less stubborn infidelity and less furious vice of Judah are addressed by the hopes and fears of the heart. Of all the prophets, but two, Hosea and Amos, were sent directly to Israel; and their language, sharp, wild, and terrible, is like the sound of a trumpet for the assault. " Hear the word of the Lord, ye children of Israel :" is the outcry of Hosea; " for the Lord hath a controversy with the inhabitants of the land, because there is no truth, nor mercy, nor knowledge of God in the land. By swearing, and lying, and killing, and stealing, and committing adultery, they break out, and blood toucheth blood. Therefore shall the land mourn " 4 " Hear this word that the Lord hath spoken against you, O children of Israel," is the outcry of Amos ; " The lion hath roared, who will not fear ? the Lord God hath spoken, who can but prophesy ? Publish in the palaces at Ashdod, and in the palaces in the land of Egypt, and say, Assemble yourselves upon the mountains of Samaria, and behold the great tumults in the midst thereof, and the oppressed in the midst thereof. . . . Thus saith 1 Judah and Benjamin were reckoned as one, the Temple being built on the boundary-line of both. 3 1 Kings, xi. 31-34, 36. 3 1 Kings, xii. 24. 4 Hosea, iv. 1, 2, 3. 20 ISRAEL. the Lord, As the shepherd taketh out of the mouth of the lion two legs, or a piece of an ear; so shall the children of Israel he taken out that dwell in Samaria." 1 The principle is sustained throughout the history ; the deeper emergency only calls forth the more powerful warning. B.C. Within half a century from the Division, the guilt of Israel fearfully exemplified the ' natural coiisequence of all deviations from the purity of the Divine worship. The homage to the golden calves of Dan and Bethel had been introduced only as a partial and popular mixture of the Egyptian ceremonial with the Jewish ; a royal expedient to bend religion to the policy of the throne. But, the result was inevitable. The worship fell continually into deeper corruption, until, at length, it sank into the darkest depths of paganism. 8 — Ahab, by his marriage with Jezebel, the daughter of Ethbaal, King of Sidon, established the Sidonian idolatry. Persecution instantly followed ; the church disappeared ; the " Schools of the Prophets " were put to the sword, or fled to caverns and forests ; and the people plunged headlong into the sanguinary and polluting worship of Baal. To arrest this ruin, a man of the most unrivalled gifts was now called from obscurity, Elijah the Tishbite; the second Moses ; if inferior to the illustrious leader through the wilderness, in the magnitude of his task and the length of his services ; yet superior in the space which he was to fill in the eye of the future; the type of the Baptist; the glorified witness, with Moses, of the trans- figuration ; the destined restorer of the chosen people ; and the herald of the consummation of all things. Unlike the prophets of his time, his first miracle exhibited the powers of the Mosaic age ; it extended over the whole nation. Boldly entering the royal presence, he pronounced — that a drought was at hand, in which neither dew nor rain should fall, until it was his will to withdraw the curse from Israel. Of the three great scriptural scourges, war, pestilence, and famine, the last is palpably the most fitted to enforce on a people the necessity of a moral change. War is a whirlwind of all the fiercer passions, a tumult of fear and flight, of hot revenge and mad exultation, a fever and a frenzy of the land. Pestilence sweeps the soil with such tremendous rapidity, that it leaves no room for thought, or no thought but of terror ; or even generates in the survivors a reckless licentiousness from mere despair ; " Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die." But Famine, slow, searching, and terrible, while it wrings every sense, gives the heart time to feel. When the land had been thus smitten for three years, Elijah again appeared before the kinc, publicly arraigned his guilt as the source of the national calamity, and challenged the whole idolatrous priesthood, the " four hundred prophets of the groves and the four hundred and fifty prophets of Baal," to meet him alone, and decide, in the presence of the nation whether Jehovah or Baal were the true God of earth and heaven. The scene of tins great trial was palpably chosen to give the most complete openness to 1 Amos, iii. 1, &c. 2 1 Kings, xvi. 31, 32. ISRAEL. 21 the whole solemn transaction. It was neither in temple nor in palace, in forest nor in field, but on the bold promontory of Carmel, where all must be visible to the multitude below ; that multitude, gathered from all Israel, serious and subdued by long privation, and anxious for the decision on which might depend the national existence. The vastness of the assem- blage, the royal pomp, the wild and mystic pageantry on the mountain's brow : even the natural magnificence of the scene, the noble mountain-range, the boundless sea, the sky unshadowed with a cloud, or only tinctured with the colourings of a Syrian sunset ; were well calculated to prepare the heart for the still mightier impressions of miracle. At length, at the hour of evening sacrifice ; that sacrifice so long intermitted by apostate Israel; the solitary man of God advances ; he builds his altar, the fire from heaven descends, the sacrifice is consumed in the sight of all ; the idolatrous priesthood, in astonishment and terror, see their doom ; and the air is rent with the thunder of the thousands and tens of thousands, shouting, " The Lord, He is the God. The Lord, He is the God." But another miracle is at hand: while the prophet prays on the summit of the moun- tain, the heavens are covered with clouds ; the rain which no man had seen for three years, pours down in torrents ; the land is refreshed and lives ; and Elijah, like a conqueror leading his captives, rushes before the royal troop triumphantly to the city of the king. At this period, we have the unparalleled instance of a visible Church reduced to one man, and yet sustained. Elijah's description of the Church is total ruin. " The children of Israel have forsaken thy covenant, thrown down thine altars, and slain thy prophets with the sword; and I, even I only, am left; and they seek my life to take it away." 1 Threat- ened with death, yet evidently fearing less for himself, than for the extinction of the last remnant of the true worshippers, he flies into the wilderness. There he seems to have been divinely adopted as the representative of the Church. Like the Mosaic Church he was there supported with Divine food ; like its pilgrimage of forty years, his journey extended to the slow traverse of forty days ; - and like the Mosaic Church he stood at Horcb in the presence of Jehovah, heard the Divine words, and saw the terrors of the Divine Majesty. But a most memorable change now begins. As at Horeb the law was revealed to Moses, at Horeb a new form of Divine instruction is revealed to Elijah. Like the Mosaic Church he sees the mountain shaken by the Divine presence, the whirlwind, the earthquake, and the flame ; but unlike it, he hears them followed by " a still small voice." In the giving of the law, when the Almighty ceased to speak in his terrors, He spoke to the people no more. But He now conversed with Elijah ; and gently rebuking his doubts of the Providence that sustains the Church, even when it is lost to the human eye, by telling him that there were still " seven thousand men who had not bowed the knee to Baal," gave a direct proof of the Divine retribution on its enemies, by commanding him to prepare two private individuals, Hazael and Jehu, for the diadems of Syria and Israel, with the express purpose of extinguishing the last trace of the tyrannical and idolatrous dynasty in possession of the throne. The circumstances of this high interview solve the long-standing difficulty, Why was 1 1 Kings, xix. 10. * Hales remarks that the distance from Beersheba to Horeb was but 150 miles, which might have been travelled in five or six days. — Chronology, vol. ii. The journey was evidently emblematic. 22 ISRAEL. Elijah the representative of Prophecy, as Moses was of the Law, at the Transfiguration, when he was neither the earliest of the prophets even in his own age, nor has left any prophetic book behind him? The obvious reason is, that to him was first declared, and declared with the most awful and impressive solemnities, the approaching change in the character of the Divine communications. Man was still to be addressed by the undi- minished terrors of Jehovah, but persuasion was to be mingled with those terrors ; the guilt of rebellious kings and nations was to be punished with all the ancient severity, yet the declaration of wrath was to be connected with appeals to the heart ; the fear of the senses was to be seconded by the awakening of the conscience; the thunders were still to echo overhead, but the " still, small voice," was to be at the side of man. 1 The apostate nations, no longer confronted with the startling and rare presence of a prophet coming only to announce doom, were to be given into the constant tutelage of a race of inspired servants of Heaven, living among them, alternately consoling and condemning, warning them of their wanderings, as man with man, and, amid the sternest tlneats of judgment, commissioned to speak the most benignant language of mercy. 2 The ways of Providence are the noblest study of man ; and if the Jewish history had been given for this purpose alone, the force and fulness of its sacred developments would render it invaluable. The missions of Elijah and Elisha signally exhibit a Divine operation — the adoption of means above man to meet a strong emergency. They were summoned, in the darkest time of religion and the state, to sustain the state, and, by the influence thus acquired, to sustain religion. Their powers, and the direction of those powers, were rendered strikingly adequate to those seemingly discordant objects: and we see them, without violating the simplicity of the prophetic character, exercising the most resistless public impression in all the straggles of the country ; without assuming the office of the statesman or the soldier, directing national council and achieving national victory. When the danger is dispersed, they retire alike from popular admiration and royal gratitude; when it again clouds the horizon, they come forward once more, moving before the people, like the pillar of flame in the wilderness, lofty and intangible; at once throwing light on the darkness of the hour, and raising the general eye to heaven. 1 The commentators have generally conceived this change to allude to the preaching of the GospeL But this explanation will not account for the presence of the thunders of Sinai. In addition, the 1 'reaching of the Gospel was still at the distance of almost a thousand years, while the national prophetic teaching began before the close of the century ; Amos and Hosea prophesying about B.C. 810, followed by thirteen prophets, until the close of the prophetic period in Malachi, B.c. 436 — a wondrous time, almost four hundred years of continued inspiration ! Jonah, who makes up the number of the sixteen, had prophesied only to Nineveh. 2 Davidson justly remarks on this subject, " I observe that the Moral Revelation made by the succes- sion of prophets holds an intermediate place between the Law and the Gospel : it is a step beyond the Law, in respect of the greater fulness of some of its doctrines and precepts ; it is a more perfect exposi- tion of the principles of personal holiness and virtue In the prophets there is a more luminous and more perfectly reasoned rule of life and faith than in the primary Law." — Sermons on Prophecy, p. 4-1. ISRAEL. 23 Benhadad, the Syrian, suddenly declares war against Israel, and, at the head of two- and-thirty vassal kings, pours so overwhelming a force into the country, that all resistance is abandoned. The King of Israel flies before him, and, with the remnant of his army, takes refuge in the capital, where he is besieged, and where his refusal to surrender at mercy is answered by an immediate order for the storm. Of all the combinations of human terror, such a crisis must be the most terrible. For what language can equal the reality of its despair ; the agonising images of insult, rapine, and massacre before the general eye ; the vast and various miseries of a fugitive population, crowded within the walls of a great city, with a barbarian enemy at its gates, awaiting only the signal for slaughter ! Ahab, in utter hopelessness, surrounded by his nobles, sits hi his palace, expecting to hear only the roar of the assault. It is at this last moment, that one of the prophets, at whose head was Elijah, is sent to the king : he enters the royal presence, and proclaims the words : — " Thus saith the Lord, Hast thou seen all this great multitude ? Behold, I will deliver it into thine hand this day." He then declares the purpose of the miracle : " And thou shalt know that I am the Loud." 1 The king, still in despair, scornfully asks, where he is to find an army? " By whom" am I to fight this battle? He is answered, Even by the few within this hall ; " By the young men of the princes of the provinces." And " who shall order the battle?" who is to be the leader in this frantic enterprise ? asks the hopeless and unbelieving king. " Thou," sceptic and trembler, even thou ! is the prophet's answer. By the Divine command the princes, amounting only to two hundred and thirty-two men, issue from the gates, to attack the whole host of Syria ! They are not suffered even to wait for night, or to try the effect of surprise. The miracle is to vindicate itself to all eyes ; they march out in noonday. The Syrian king, in contempt of their numbers, orders them to be taken alive. But, impelled by the Divine power, they are irresistible ; they are seen to destroy those sent to seize them, rush into the camp, and fill it with slaughter. The seven thousand troops in Samaria sally forth with Ahab at their head, and complete the rout of the invader. Taking events like those in the simplest light, what must be their inevitable effect on the mind of any people, in any period of the earth ? What a tide of wonder must rush through the general bosom ! what acclamations must burst from the lips of the thousands watching from the walls the progress of the victory ! what rejoicings must swell the heart of parent and child thus rescued beyond all hope from the havoc of the sword ! and what an instinctive contrast must have been drawn alike by peasant and king between the rising of a day when every man expected to be in his grave before its close, and the coming of an evening filled with the exultation of boundless triumph and matchless miracle! Even intractable as Israel was, how many a knee, before that sun went down, must have bowed to the Mighty God; who had been the shield of their fathers, and who, in all their wanderings, had not yet forgotten his people Israel ! Yet this was but one of many deliverances. Before the prophetic messenger left the king, he warned him to expect another invasion in the next year. But when the event 1 1 Kings, xx. 13, &c. 24 ISRAEL. came, Ahab, always unbelieving, was still unprepared ; and tbe few troops which he could bring into the field looked " like two little flocks of kids, but the Syrians filled the country." 1 In this imminent hazard, when to fight or fly was equally hopeless, a prophetic mes- senger was again sent to announce victory. And his announcement pressed the moral on the national mind, for which the miraculous deliverance was again given ; " Ye shall know that I am the Lord." In the strength of miracle, the little, despairing army, defeats the countless host, with the loss of a hundred thousand men : the victory is final, and the Syrian monarch is reduced to send an embassy in sackcloth to beg a peace and his life. Yet even those great transactions were regarded as of so subordinate a rank, that they were left to agents without a name. At length Elijah comes forward, for the higher office of vindicating the Divine Law, outraged in the person of Naboth.* The refusal of the Jezreelite to sell, or to exchange, his vineyard, had been founded on neither avarice nor obstinacy, but on the principle, that he had no right to alienate property given by the original division of Joshua. " The Lord forbid it me, that I should give the inheritance of my fathers unto thee." Ahab felt the force of the plea; but Jezebel, contemptuous of the national law, was suffered by him to seize the vineyard, and murder its owner. Then instantly follows the retribution; Elijah goes to meet Ahab in the very scene of his guilt, the vineyard of Naboth ; charges him with the act of rapine and blood, and boldly pro- nounces to a tyrant, who might have ordered him to the axe, the overwhelming sentence : that he, his queen, and his whole posterity, shall die violent deaths, and those deaths visibly connected with the punishment of his crime: — that dogs shall lick the blood of Ahab on the spot where the blood of Naboth was shed ; that dogs shall devour Jezebel within sight of the vineyard of Naboth ; and that, whether his posterity perish in city or in field, they shall alike be deprived of sepulture, until his line perishes for ever. ! The qualities conferred on Elijah and Elisha were expressly of that class, which draws upon itself the broadest gaze of nations. In times of public danger, the chief demand is for those powerful and energetic faculties which are found to repel the danger. All other talents are vapid and trivial in comparison with those of the great soldier, the sagacious statesman, and the vigorous and inventive administrator. But both those memorable men possessed still higher claims, in their infallible success. Whenever they appear, the public ruin is stayed, the perplexities of council are cleared up, the doubtful battle is won : when the national vessel is running wildly before the storm, they are not merely found to be the only men who can take the helm, but they control the storm : when the kingdom is quivering with the moral earthquake, they are not merely the only guides of the people to solid ground, but they still the heavings of the soil. Finally, the two leading objects of their missions — the safety of the remnant of the Church, and the overthrow of Baal, were accomplished. The Church was no longer invisible; the " sons of the prophets" were no longer compelled to lude in the forest and the cavern. One of their " schools " began to exist even in Dan, the city of the idol of Jero- boam. Elijah was openly acknowledged as their head; and fifty of their number, when ' 1 Kings, -\x. -27, Sec. 2 1 Kings, xxi. 1, &c. 3 Ibid. 17. &c. ISRAEL. 25 about to be transferred to the guidance of Elisha, were present at Jordan, to witness the transmission of bis authority, in the moment of that most wondrous and unearthly testimony to his labours, his ascent to immortality without having tasted of the grave. 1 The Sidonian idolatry was utterly extinguished in Israel. The first public act of Elijah had been the extermination of its priesthood by the people, while under the impulse of the mighty miracle of Carmel. The last public act of Elisha was the appointment of Jehu to the diadem, with the immediate result of rooting out the worship of Baal, said abolishing the dynasty by which it bad been brought into the unhappy land. The general career of Elisha wears the same majestic and vigorous physiognomy which marked that of his predecessor. Like him he rescues the Israelite armies from successive dangers, paralyses invasion, rebukes the guilt of kings and people, and in all things acts as the essential leader of the land. And when, at length, his renown as the National Protector becomes so fully acknowledged, that his capture is regarded as the first necessary achievement of the war, he defeats at Dothan the army sent to seize him, and completes the demonstration of power by a new miracle, before whose magnificence imagination droops the wing; he shows the armies of heaven descending, to guard the city of the servant of the Lord. The healing of Naaman, " the captain of the host of the King of Syria," extended the renown of Elisha's powers. But the event is here alluded to merely for the purpose of noticing a cavil, grounded on his supposed permission to the Syrian general to worship an idol in compliance with authority : " When my master goeth into the house of Rimmon, to worship there, and he leaneth on my hand, and I bow myself in the house of Rimmon: .... the Lord pardon thy servant in this thing." Elisha's only answer is, " Go in peace." Those words are simply the common form of dismissal. The prophet's commission was ended, when the miracle was wrought ; he was not empowered to enter into other subjects. " Go in peace," was simply the declared termination of a Divine act, to which nothing was to be superadded by either the counsel or the agency of man. With the overthrow of the altars of Baal, the ultimate task of the prophet was evidently complete. Israel still continued idolatrous ; but the zeal of the new king, doubtless advised by Elisha, and rendered safe by the influence of his character among the people, had relieved the nation from a worship not only of the most corrupting vice, but of the most remorseless cruelty, for human victims were burnt in its fires. From this period, during three reigns, we scarcely hear his name ; until Joash the king comes to seek his counsel in a new emer- gency of the state; but he is then in extreme old age, and on his death-bed. Yet his character as the National Defender is recognised in the lanwuacre of the king, at an interval of perhaps half a century from his public life, How powerful must have been its impres- sion, in the days when the state was trembling for its existence, and he stood, the embodied strength of Israel. Joash exclaims over his expiring hour, " My father, my father, the chariot of Israel and the horsemen thereof." Thus identifying his mission with that of his master, and giving him the same illustrious title, which, from his own lips, and the shout of the prophets, had followed the ascending glory of Elijah. 8 1 1 Kings, vi. 13, &c. 588. 26 ISRAEL. B.C. But the Divine long-suffering at last came to its close. The idolatry of Israel was incorrigible, and, in the 253rd year of the Revolt, the kingdom was swept by an Assyrian invasion, and the ten tribes were carried into captivity, in Media. From this shock the throne never rose again. B.C. The trial of Judah continued for 134 years longer; perhaps, from her occasional returns to the true worship. But her idolatry, towards the end of the period, became intolerable. Manasseh gathered all the profanations of the surrounding heathen, and even accumulated upon them the abhorred worship of Baal. The fall of the nation was thence- forth sealed, and in the 387th year of the Revolt 1 Judah was carried into captivity in Babylon. But in this long course of national convulsion one proof of Divine design is sustained, totally unexampled in the history of the world, — the unbroken succession of the kings of Judah. The rank of monarchs places them so much above the wants and objects of ordinary life, that their minds naturally fix upon the future. The loss of offspring, or the extinction of their dynasties, are almost the only points on which they can be approached by personal misfortune. Thus we find the declaration, that " no son shall sit upon the throne," the most frequent prophetic punishment of criminal sovereigns. But to Judah, in the person of Solomon, it had been declared : " I will establish the throne of thy kingdom, according as I have covenanted with David thy father, saying, There shall not fail thee a man to be ruler in Israel." 8 This promise was fulfilled: and the throne of Judah was actually held by a descendant of David in the direct line during the unequalled period of 427 years. In immediate contrast, the kingdom of Israel exhibited a rapid succession of dynasties. Yet the political condition of both countries in all other respects was nearly the same ; both were alike exposed to all the hazards which dislocate a royal succession ; both suffered from desperate invasions, conspiracies, and even domestic massacres; both alike swam in a tide of blood, but the diadem of Israel was frequently submerged, while the diadem of Judah floated constantly along. The kings of Israel appear and disappear, like the phantoms of a fevered brain ; but a son of David is constantly seen sitting in feeble, but steady, light on the throne of Jerusalem. It is scarcely possible to conceive a more remarkable proof of Provi- dence; as an argument for the Divine control over the course of things, it is distinct, decisive, and unanswerable. 3 1 Jalin, Heb. Commonwealth. - 2 Chronicles, vii. 18. Of course, this implied, only while the throne itself continued ; for in the same sentence its duration is rendered contingent on its obedience. " If ye shall go to serve other gods, then will I pluck them up." And the cessation of the line and the fall of the throne were alike finally produced by idolatry. 3 No throne, ancient or modern, offers a parallel to this unbroken line. Of the twelve Caesars, but one was succeeded by his son. The modern succession, in modern thrones, has been a perpetual change, even of dynasties, generally once in a century and a half. The French throne, within the last three hundred and fifty years, from the death of Charles VIIL, in 1479, has had six changes of family. But the throne of Judah exhibited, not only the same family, but the direct following of son after son in nineteen kings, from David to Jechoniah, in whose reign Judah was conquered by Nebuchadnezzar, and the king sent to Babylon. His uncle Zedekiah, the first instance of the broken succession, was then left ISRAEL. 27 But Judah, to human eyes, was at length utterly undone, her throne, her religion, her laws, all the elements of national existence, were dissolved : her king in chains, her people slaves, and her land a desert. She had seen Israel devastated a century and a half before, and mouldering away into the mass of barbarism, without an attempt at restoration. Nor was she in the hands of a decaying sovereignty, from whose languors escape might be possible. She was the captive of a bold, vigilant, and ambitious soldier, a conqueror who had covered Western Asia with irresistible invasion, and a king who had amassed under one sceptre the greatest power that the world had ever seen. There could be no more complete image of national ruin. Yet we see this overwhelming ruin converted only into a new development of Provi- dence. Prophecy and Miracle, so long associated, were now to be separated. Prophecy was still heard by the people, in the solemn dirges of Jeremiah, those funeral anthems of a fallen nation; but miracle was no longer directed to Judah. The great experiment had been brought to a conclusion by her own self-will. As a nation she was no more. Miracle was henceforth to be directed to a more influential source, her heathen master, the King of Babylon. From among the captives, four youths were seen suddenly raised to a high rank in the B.C. state ; three to the government of the city and province of Babylon, and the fourth, Daniel, to the head of those magi, or diviners, without whose advice an Eastern sovereign scarcely transacted any business of life. This extraordinary elevation was produced by a Divine dream, which Daniel alone had been empowered to interpret, the memorable revelation of the " Five Empires ;" and its direct result to the Jews must have been, not only the powerful protection given by high office, but general respect for a people thus capable of repaying protection by a knowledge above man. Yet, the arrogance of a barbarian despot, and the caprices of a corrupt nation, soon lose all sense of respect for those within their power. It was to be revived by a new miracle. The rank of the Jewish governors of Babylon must have been an object of jealousy to the haughty soldiers and ministers surrounding the throne. The dedication of a Golden Image, probably to Belus, was made the occasion of involving them in a charge of disobedience to the royal command. On being questioned by the king, they refused the idolatrous homage, and were sentenced on the spot to be burned alive. Instantly, in the presence of the monarch and his nobles, a mighty wonder was wrought. Four men were seen " walking in the midst of the fire, and they had no hurt ; and the fourth was like the Son of God." They were brought out of the furnace, and Nebuchad- upon the dependent throne. But this was a mere pause in ruin ; for the city was again sacked, Zedekiah's eyes were put out, and the Temple and the walls of Jerusalem were destroyed. The failure of offspring had been already predicted by Jeremiah. " Is this man, Coniah, (Jechouiah,) a despised broken vessel?" ..." earth, earth, earth, hear the word of the Lord. Thus saith the Lord, AVrite ye this man childless, a man that shall not prosper in his days : for no man of his seed shall prosper, sitting upon the throne of David, and ruling any more in Judah." — xxii. 29, 30. 28 ISRAEL. nezzar, overwhelmed and astonished, blessed the " God of the Jews ;" and made a decree, " That every people, nation, and language, which speak anything amiss against the God of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, shall be cut in pieces." This was followed by a new accession of authority. " Then the king promoted Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, in the province of Babylon." 1 The attempt to destroy them had thus given a new illustration of the power of Jehovah among the heathen, and a new protection to the captive people. But Nebuchadnezzar, in his unchecked fortune, and the glittering scenes around him, gradually forgot the supremacy of the God of the Jews, a forgetfulness which would naturally be followed by the oppression of his captives. A Divine dream was sent to remind him of the precariousness of human power. Daniel alone could give the interpreta- tion, and he declared it to be a summons to " break off his sins by righteousness, and his iniquities by showing mercy to the poor." 2 But the warning was forgotten, and within a twelvemonth, in the midst of a new burst of pride, at the moment of ascribing all his grandeur to himself, he heard his sentence from heaven ; " The kingdom is departed from thee." He was exiled from the throne, in a frenzy which lasted for seven years. But this interregnum evidently administered to the increased protection of the Jews ; a capricious and dangerous depository of power was deprived of all means of injury ; while no successor, perhaps, equally dangerous, was suffered to ascend the throne. The three Jews and Daniel retained the virtual sovereignty of the empire; the jealousies and conspiracies of the native priests and princes must have been powerfully checked by the awful spectacle of their great king suffering before their eyes, under the declared hand of Jehovah ; and the general feeling must have become still more impressive, when they heard him, on the first return of his understanding, pouring out the most boundless acknowledgment of the true God. " Nebuchadnezzar the king, unto all people, nations, and languages, that dwell in all the earth ; Peace be multiplied unto you. I thought it good to show the signs and wondei - s that the High God hath wrought toward me. How great are his signs! and how mighty are his wonders ; his kingdom is an everlasting kingdom, and his dominion is from generation to generation." 3 This event, which was soon followed by his death, must have placed th e captives with powerful recommendation in the hands of his successor. And thus we find, that one of the first acts of Evil-Merodach, his son, was to bring the Jewish king from his dungeon, in the thirty-seventh year of his captivity, treat him with honour, and place him above all the other captive kings. The accession of Belshazzar, the third in descent, again obviously endangered the con- dition of the captives. The king was a tyrant and a man of blood. 4 The fame of Daniel, who would naturally shrink from such association, had evidently passed away. The Jewish governors of Babylon were perhaps dead, for their names are heard no more, and the king's 1 That the suggestion of ei'eeting the idol, or, at least, of compelling homage on its dedication, was an intrigue to destroy the Jewish governors ; is rendered the more probable by our not hearing of any charge against Daniel, who held no civil office, or the other Jews, among whom there must have been many who would have refused the homage ; and also by the king's subsequent decree, to " all who shall speak anything amiss against the God" of the three Jews. s Daniel, iv. 8, &c. 3 Daniel, iv. 1, &c. 4 Xenophou, Cyrop. 1. iv. ISRAEL. 29 prejudice against the Jews was shown by the last outrage of his reign, the profanation of the sacred vessels of the Temple, in the feast given to his thousand lords. But a new miracle replaces Daniel and his people before the eyes of the nation. He alone can interpret the memorable " handwriting on the wall," and as a recompense, he is declared the " third ruler in the kingdom." The prophecy of royal ruin is fulfilled, for on that night Belshazzar is slain; and thus, when Darius the Mede is installed upon the throne, he finds a Jew holding one of the great offices of the kingdom, that office conferred in acknowledgment of more than mortal wisdom, and that wisdom connected with the express event to which he owed his throne. The result is, the immediate elevation of Daniel to the highest rank of a subject ; in the new settlement of the empire, by its division into one hundred and twenty provinces, he is placed not only above the princes of the provinces, but made first of the Three Presidents of the State. The protector of the Jewish people thus stands next to the throne. But Darius was still a stranger to the name of the God of Jacob : and he was to be taught only by a new miracle. The same jealousy which had acted against the three Jewish governors of Babylon, acted against Daniel. While only the chief of the diviners he had been spared; but his office was now of the highest civil authority, and it was resolved to ruin the Minister. Yet, as Darius was not an idolater, the old artifice of homage to an idol could not be adopted again. The conspirators, therefore, tempted the royal vanity, and demanded the issue of a decree, that " for thirty days, no prayer should be offered but to the king," on penalty of death. Daniel, for whom the snare was expressly laid, was watched, and found praying, as usual, three times a-day, with his face towards Jerusalem, The decree was irreversible, and he was thrown to the lions. " But God sent his angel, and shut the mouth of the lions." Daniel came forth in sacred safety. The royal vengeance fell on the conspirators ; and thus, at once, with his character divinely attested, and his enemies removed, he obtained a new security for his people ; a proclamation of general homage to the " God of the Jews" thus going forth to the empire. " Then King Darius wrote ... I make a decree, That in every dominion of my kingdom men tremble and fear before the God of Daniel : for He is the living God, and steadfast for ever, and His kingdom shall be even unto the end. He delivereth and rescueth, and He worketh signs and wonders in heaven and in earth, who hath delivered Daniel from the power of the lions." 1 Another signal event was at hand. At the commencement of the Captivity, Jeremiah B - c - the prophet had pronounced, that it should end in seventy years ; and that the fall of the Babylonian empire should be simultaneous with its close. " Thus] saith the Lord, That after seventy years be accomplished at Babylon I will visit you, and perform my good word toward you, in causing you to return to this place." 2 " And it shall come to pass, when seventy years are accomplished, that I will punish the king of Babylon, and that nation, saith the Lord, for their iniquity, and the land of the Chaldeans, and will make it perpetual desolations." 3 1 Daniel, vi. 25. &c. '-' Jeremiah, xxix. 10. ' Ibid. xxv. 12. 30 ISRAEL. Both events were of the most improbable kind, for there was. perhaps no record of a nation thus restored, and Babylon was then at the height of human supremacy. Yet both were exactly fulfilled ; the sands and mountains of Persia, within the seventy years, sent forth a subverter of the throne of Nebuchadnezzar; and the first act of the conqueror was to give liberty to the captive people. " Now in the first year of Cyrus king of Persia, that the word of the Lord by the mouth of Jeremiah might be fulfilled, the Lord stirred up the spirit of Cyrus king of Persia, that he made a proclamation throughout all his kingdom, and put it also in writing, saying, Thus saith Cyrus king of Persia, the Lord God of heaven hath given me all the kingdoms of the earth ; and He hath charged me to build Him an house at Jerusalem, which is in Judah. Who is there among you of all his people ? his God be with him, and let him go up to Jerusalem, which is in Judah, and build the house of the Lord God of Israel, (He is the God,) which is in Jerusalem." 1 This proclamation was not more contradictory to the habits of ancient conquest, than to Persian principles, for the Persians abhorred the building of temples, as derogatory to the grandeur of the Deity. But in this instance, not only w r as the building of the Jewish temple ordered, but the king offered his treasures for the work, and even for the supply of the sacrifices. He further ordered that the 5400 gold and silver vessels of the Temple, which had been given to the idol shrines of Babylon, should be restored; and in thus relinquishing his spoil and releasing his captives, he further declared, that he was only pei-forming a charge laid upon him by the " Lord God of heaven." 2 From this period a new and a total change took place in the fortunes of the people. They were henceforth to remain a broken nation, and their existence was to be almost a continued bondage under the successive pagan masters of Western Asia ; the ten tribes were lost; only a remnant of Judah returned from Babylon; the rebuilding of the walls of Jerusalem was slow ; and the poverty of the Temple was a source of sorrow to those who remembered the majesty and opulence of the glorious structure of Solomon. Yet Haggai even then proclaimed, in language full of all the ancient fire of prophecy, that a still nobler splendour than the past was to distinguish the impoverished Temple. " Who," he cries, " is left among you that saw this house in her first glory? and how do ye see it now? is it not in your eyes in comparison of it as nothing? Yet now be strong, O Zerubbabel, saith the Lord . . . For thus saith the Lord of Hosts ; Yet once, it is a little while, and I will shake the heavens, and the earth, and the sea, and the dry land ; and I will shake all nations, and the Desire of all nations shall come : and I will fill this house with glory, saith the Lord of Hosts." 3 B.C. Malachi closed the prophetic canon by declarations equally distinct, that a Mighty oat. 1 Ezra, i. 1, &c. a Josephus (Antiq. xi. 1, 2,) records a probable tradition, that Daniel showed to the king the prophecy of Isaiah, designating him by name as the liberator of the people. " Thus saith the Lord, thy Redeemer ; .... I am the Lord that maketh all things ; . . . . That saith of Cyrus, He is my Shepherd, and shall perform all my pleasure : even saying to Jerusalem, Thou shalt be built ; and to the temple, Thy foundation shall be laid." (Isaiah, xliv. 24, 28.) 3 Haggai, ii. 3, &c. ISRAEL. 31 Restorer should come, and yet that his corning should sternly reveal the corruptions of Judah. " The Lord, whom ye seek, shall suddenly come to his temple, even the Messenger of the Covenant, whom ye delight in . . . But who may abide the day of his coming ? and who shall stand when he appeareth ? . . . For, behold, the day cometh, that shall burn as an oven ; and all the proud, yea, and all that do wickedly, shall be stubble : . . . But unto you that fear my name shall the Sun of Righteousness arise with healing in his wings." 1 From the era of the Restoration, Prophecy and Miracle were no more. A sudden stop was put, for nearly four hundred years, to those Divine interpositions which had acted with such powerful and constant agency on the national career. Judah had now finally fallen from her original inheritance, and, like the first master of mankind, she was to eat her bread in toil, and find the earth fertile only in the thorn and thistle. Yet it is remark- able, that she offended no more by the especial sin of her past generations ; she was never again the idolater. And it is not less remarkable, that, as if for the express purpose of guarding her against a recurrence of the temptation, she was placed, for nearly two hundred years, under the guardianship of the only empire of heathenism, which abhorred the worship of images. But her whole career was now to exhibit even more than the common casualties of nations. She had descended from her original elevation, and, instead of sitting on a height from which only an unclouded heaven spread above her, and the tempests which devastated the pagan world rolled beneath her feet, she was to walk through the perpetual storm. Her original destination had been sovereignty, she was once to shine " the glory of all kingdoms ; " but she had cast away this inheritance ; and she was no more to impress the world by grandeur or enlighten it by wisdom ; her office henceforth was simply, to preserve the " oracles of God," to give a melancholy proof of the prophecies in her sufferings, and to secure the descent of the Messiah in the line of David. For duties like those obscurity was sufficient, yet duration was essential; and of her astonishing history, there is no feature more astonishing than her existence for the next five hundred years. Perpetually on the verge of dissolution, she still survived; she saw the young and vigorous empires of Babylon, Persia, and Macedon successively sink into the grave, yet without sharing their mortality ; with every disqualification for permanency, a fettered vassal, in the presence of vast sovereignties ; a disarmed race surrounded with a world of warriors ; a helpless province, lying in the highroad of every competitor for the throne of Western Asia, she still resisted the principle of decay. Prophecy stood between her and the sepulchre ; a great prediction was to be fulfilled, and, until then, she was to defy the contingencies of the world. Jacob, on his death-bed, seventeen hundred years before, had prophesied, " The Sceptre shall not depart from Judah, nor a Lawgiver, from between his feet, until Shiloh come ; and unto him shall the gathering of the people be." 3 ' Malachi, iii. 1, &c. ; iv. 1, &c. 5 Genesis, xlix. 10. The commentators have injured this prophecy by overstraining it. Its mean- ing obviously is, not that a continued sovereignty was to exist in Judah, (which would be equally contradictory to history and prophecy), but, that the throne was not to be ultimately extinguished, until the coming of the Shiloh (the Sent), the Messiah. 32 ISRAEL. From the epoch of the Captivity, the fulfilment of this prediction had become con- stantly more hopeless. Judah, successively a Persian vieeroyalty, a slave of the ferocious monarchies of Egypt and Syria, and a Roman conquest, had lost sight of the diadem for nearly five hundred years ; finally Rome, on declaring her tributary, had totally forbidden its assumption. 1 Yet, on the eve of the coming of our Lord, Judah saw a Tdng, established by Rome herself; the first Herod, a man singularly formed for his troubled time; insatiable in the pursuit of power, but splendid in its possession, steering with unexampled dexterity through the conflicting factions of his country, conciliating all the successive masters of Rome, and, at length, after undergoing the most eminent personal hazards, calmly seated on a throne, sanctioned alike by Antony and Augustus, the rivals for the empire of the world. Herod was the first monarch of all Palestine since the Captivity, as his grandson Agrippa (a.d. 41) was the last" The prophecy was now to be fulfilled. In the twentieth year of his reign, Herod commenced the rebuilding of the Temple. 3 And in the beginning of the last year of the sole monarch of Judah, the mightiest event of human history was accomplished ; the Shiloh came ; the Lord Jesus Christ was bohn. 4. The purpose for which Israel had been formed, protected, sustained, and disciplined, was now done; and the catastrophe earned by long disobedience was to come. It had been predicted by Moses, eight hundred years before ; that Judah should perish by war, and that war made not by an Asiatic nation, but by one from a remote quarter of the globe, of a language unknown to the Oriental ear, and of unrivalled military power, and merciless execution. 5 The sword was now put into the irresistible and unsparing hand of Rome. The well-known havoc of the siege fearfully fulfilled the prophecy. The factions of Eleazar, Simon, and John, enfeebled the strength of the defenders, until the city fell. In the year 71 of our era, Jerusalem was stormed by the legions under Titus, and the Temple was burned ; one million one hundred thousand Jews perished by famine and the sword within the walls, and ninety-seven thousand were sold into captivity. Tliis was the mortal 1 Aristobulus, about one hundred and seventy years before the national fall, had assumed the crown, but it was an unauthorised act, protested against by the people, and finally producing only a more formal and declared prohibition by the Roman government, at the capture of Jerusalem by Pompey, B.C. 63. — Antiq. xiv. 43. 2 At his death his kingdom was divided among his family, and Archelaus, whom he had appointed his heir, was named ethnarch, and prohibited to bear the title of king. — Joseph. Antiq. svii. 11. The first Agrippa was king but for three years ; the second had a mutilated kingdom. 3 With the object of defeating the prophecy of Malachi, it has been said, that the temple built by Herod was the th ird. But it was always regarded by the nation as the second, because it was built by portions only, as the former was removed, and also because the daily sacrifices had never been inter- mitted. ( Hales, Chron. vol. ii. p. 650.) Josephus, in stating the duration of the second temple, reckons from the "second year of King Cyrus to the destruction under Vespasian." The interval was 605 years. 4 It is not necessary to more than advert here to the differences of chi-onologers on the actual epoch of our Lord. The common calculation, introduced into the Western Church by Dionysius, a.d. 526, makes it some years later than the truth. But this does not interfere with the fact, of its being a shoi't period before the death of Herod, as is evident from his decree for the massacre of the infants at Beth- lehem. — Jahn, Heb. Commonwealth. 5 Deuteronomy, xxviii. ISRAEL. 33 wound; yet the hostile spirit survived for sixty troubled years, until a new insurrection broke out under Barchochebas (a.d. 134). Roman vengeance was then slaked to the full. 1 The whole of the Jewish settlements on the Mediterranean were covered with carnage ; hi Palestine 580,000 Jews perished in battle, or in flight and famine ; and Judah, " scattered and peeled," was plunged into a depth of desolation, from which, in the long lapse of seventeen centuries, she has never been restored. Even in this brief retrospect, it will be seen that the history of the Jews establishes, on the most solid grounds, the three truths most important to human knowledge: — the Being of a God, a Perpetual Providence, and a Moral Government of the world. From its commencement, the idea of a Supreme Lord of heaven and earth is held continually before the mind. God forms the nation, protects it by His pow r er, guides it by His wisdom, and punishes it by His justice ; He is present to us in all the great relations of society ; He is Father, Lawgiver, Judge, and King. From its commencement, Providence is constantly shown in action ; not as a remote and general supremacy, but as an immediate and particular superintendence ; not power limiting itself to a rare and periodic interposition, but power combining the force of miracle with the most instant promptitude ; not wisdom abstract and mysterious, but wisdom practical and shaping itself to all difficulties, continually meeting the changes of events by changes of expediency, alike unexpected in their nature, and complete in their adaptation ; and ultimately, without infringing on human liberty, controlling all things into the direction of one sacred and beneficent Will. From its commencement, the Moral Government of God is impressed on the whole condition of the people. If the universe has been created for the purpose of revealing the perfections of the Creator, it is not inconsistent with our consciousness of the variety and grandeur of the Divine attributes, to conceive that every orb of the countless millions which fill the skies may be the scene of some especial attribute. But we know, that Justice and Mercy are pre-eminently those illustrated in the Divine government of our world. The great displays of those attributes have obviously been successive, and they form the subjects of the two dispensations. Judaism was the representative of Justice. Its Law was " given on account of transgressions ; " it was delivered in terrors, and enforced by death. Penalty was stamped on the whole frame of the religion ; sacrifice was always before the national eyes ; " Without shedding of blood there was no remission." And this purpose accounts at once for the sternness of the national discipline, and the severity of the national treatment of the Canaanites. Both were the result of that superior will which systematically connected punishment with crime. The lapses of the Israelite tribes themselves were inevitably followed by plague, famine, or the sword. At length crime grew intolerable, and the nation was extinguished. Justice then had its perfect work; and the appointed time for the revelation of mercy was come. ' Dio Cassius, 1. lsix. 34 ISRAEL. Christianity is the representative of Mercy. It came after Judaism ; for justice must condemn, before mercy can forgive. It was solemnly proclaimed by angels, the minister- ing spirits of the Old Covenant, as the establishment of a New Covenant; in which a new mediatorship was to exist, in which the glory was to belong exclusively to " God in the highest," and " peace " was to be given to man. All its features express a principle totally distinct from that of its predecessor. Its Law was delivered, not in thunders, but in the voice of man. Among the first declarations of that law was, " Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy ; " the name of its Lord was Jesus ("the Saviour "). He announced, that He came, " not to condemn, but to save." The ancient "yoke" of ceremonial was broken away; and blood was seen no more upon the altar. Finally, as an unanswerable evidence to both the Christian and the Jew, that the ancient dispensation had finished its course, the Temple, in which alone its cere- monial could exist, was destroyed. And that Temple, which had been three times built, and by hands so different as those of the Jewish king, the Persian conqueror, and the Roman tributary; no impulse of ambition or zeal, no policy of monarchs, not even the undying attachment of the people, has ever been able to raise again. After eighteen centuries, a mosque stands on the summit of Mount Moriah. The necessary limits of these pages preclude the inquiry into various circumstances of remarkable interest ; for the principal events of the national history are also prophetic emblems, while the whole forms the material of the most striking analogies. The sending of the raven and the dove from the ark ; the reigns of Saul, David, and Solomon ; the three festivals of the Passover, the Pentecost, and the Tabernacles; and the sacrifice of the Atonement, are all both emblematic and prophetic : the career of the nation, from its com- mencement to its close, will be found to bear a distinct analogy to the career of human life; the succession of Judaism and Christianity, to paternal discipline ; and the history of the world itself, to the progress of crime and conversion in the soul of man. Christianity has yet to complete its course. It has been hitherto but a struggling and obscure mover on the great highway of nations ; like the patriarchs, " a pilgrim and a sojourner," waiting for the promise of a " better country, that is a heavenly." In half the globe it is almost wholly unknown. In the more intellectual portions it is deeply enfeebled by public vice, and insulted by philosophic infidelity. Thus its native character is thwarted, and it is compelled to stand among mankind rather as the rebuker than the reconciler ; rather as the prophet uttering the indignation of offended virtue, than as the angel pouring out those redundant and exulting promises, which it has brought from the Divine throne. But Inspiration declares the triumphs of the future, with a voice as firm and as distinct as that in which it ever pronounced the calamities of fallen Israel. The dawn of its unending day will be the restoration of the exiles of Judah. " If any of thine be driven out into the outmost parts of heaven, from thence will the Lord thy God gather thee, and from thence will He fetch thee : and the Lord thy God will bring thee into the land which thy fathers possessed, and thou shalt possess it. And he will do thee good, and multiply thee above thy fathers." 1 1 Deuteronomy, xxx. 4, o. ISRAEL. . 35 The Jew will be restored, but it is as the human frame will be restored ; he will return from the moral grave, with a nature fitted for a new and higher course of existence. " The kingdom will come." In what form it will come, enthusiasm alone would attempt to define. But if there is truth in Scripture, or meaning in language, that coming shall fill the whole capacity of the human mind for magnificence and power, for loveliness and joy. The dominion of Christianity shall act in a general elevation of our nature ; offering to our original thirst of knowledge, science the most boundless and sublime ; to our love of distinction, eminence before which all the prizes of human fame are dust and air ; and to our sense of religion, an enlargement of faculties, a vividness of views, and an exhaust- less succession of discoveries, wholly beyond the contemplations of this world. Then shall we see even as we are seen, and know even as we are known. Then " our light afflictions, which are but for a moment, shall work for us an exceeding weight of glory." J It is in this general, but most expressive language, that we are to trace the nature of the " manifestation of the sons of God." 2 We shall know, we shall love, we shall adore ; and all with increased intensity and magnitude of mind ; the mysteries which have perplexed us in the world shall be solved ; we shall see the use of the obscurities, the obstacles, and the sufferings of the Church, in leading to that high consummation, in which " righteousness and peace shall kiss each other," justice and mercy shall be reconciled. Then the great circle of Providence shall be complete ; and the Majesty of God, investing itself with new grandeur from the triumph over evil, shall receive the homage of all intellectual existence, and answer it with new emanations of glory. "And ms Name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, the Mighty God, the Everlasting Father, the PRINCE OF PEACE." 3 1 2 Cor. iv. 17. '* Romans, viii. 19. 3 Isaiah, ix. 6. Note. — The dates in this Introduction are taken chiefly from the volume of Jahn ; the latest, and apparently the most accurate, work on the general chronology of the Jewish nation. * Dr. Croly desires to mention, that the paragraph, in the description of the Convent of St. Catherine at Sinai, panegyrising the monks, and beginning with the words, " It is difficult to conceive a deeper devotion than that which prompts those brethren," &c., had been inserted in the original volume of the Illustrations without his know- ledge, and is totally opposed to his opinions. THE ARMORIAL ENSIGNS OF JERUSALEM, Exhibited in the vignette above, were appointed by the chiefs of the first Crusade, after the capture of the city on July 15th, 1099, to be borne by the Christian king then elected. The device upon the shield was an adaptation of that used for the same metropolis three centuries before, as it was wrought upon the banner sent by Thomas the Patriarch, with other relics, to Charlemagne before his coronation, in the year 800. This Gonfanon, or Standard of Jerusalem, consisted of a square piece of white silk, to be displayed in the usual manner of a church-ensign, and on the banner was wrought a cross-potent, between four smaller plain crosses, all red, to signify the five wounds of our Lord. On assigning these arms to Godfrey of Bouillon and his successors, the leaders of the Crusade changed the colour of the crosses to gold ; advisedly disregarding the well-known heraldic rule, if indeed it existed at the period, that colour shall not be placed upon colour, nor metal upon metal. An old manuscript, cited by Andre Favine, states the reason to be, that Godfrey should have arms given to him differing from the common rule of others ; " to the end that when any should see them, thinking them to be false, they should be moved to make inquiry wherefore so noble a king should bear those arms, and thus become further THE ARMORIAL ENSIGNS OF JERUSALEM. informed of the conquest of the Holy Land." Favine quaintly conjectures, that the real reason for thus placing the charges of gold on a field of white or silver, is to be found in Psalm lxviii. 13, — " Though ye have lien among the pots, yet shall ye be as the wings of a dove covered with silver, and her feathers with yellow gold ;" since, he argues, the arms of Jerusalem are the arms of the Catholic Church, and, in Scripture, the emblem of the Church is the dove. The words " Deus Vult!" — God wills it! — on the scroll above the shield, formed the unanimous response of the multitude to the address of Urban II. in favour of the Crusade, at the Council of Clermont, as related by William, Archbishop of Tyre. " Be those words, then," said the pontiff, " your shout of battle, for they are prompted by the Deity." The shield is surrounded by the insignia of those religious and military orders, which were instituted for the support and honour of the Crusades in Palestine, and for the defence of the sacred country. Immediately behind the escutcheon is the eight-pointed cross of the Knights Templars, established about the year 1119, by Baldwin II., King of Jerusalem. This cross was adopted about sixty years after their foundation, and was intended to indicate the eight Beatitudes. Their original device, a red patriarchal or double cross, is also shown beneath the centre of the shield, having over it the medal of the Order of the Sword of Cyprus, instituted in 1195, by the King Guy de Lusignan. On the left of the escutcheon is suspended the badge of the Knights of the Holy Sepulchre, established in 1103, by Baldwin I., consisting of the golden crosses from the arms of Jerusalem; and on the right side appears the cross of the Knights Hospitallers of St. Jolin the Baptist, instituted by the same sovereign in the year following. Above the shield is placed the diadem of the kingdom of Jerusalem ; and around the whole is a wreath of thorns in the midst of a glory. The allusion here is to the noble conduct and the words of Godfrey of Bouillon, when he placed on a crucifix the coronet offered to him as the elected sovereign, declaring, that " he would never wear a crown of gold in that city wherein the Saviour of the world had worn a crown of thorns." THE VIGNETTE ON THE TITLE-PAGE. This Vignette represents the facade of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, which is built over the spot where our Lord was presumed to have been buried. The streets leading to it are all traditionally distinguished by events connected with the crucifixion. From the Serai, the present residence of the governor, said to be on the site of Pontius Pilate's palace, a street, named the Strada Dolorosa, or " Street of Sorrow," represents, in part, the path trod by our Lord to Calvary ; another street the:i intervenes, and brings the pilgrim in front of the Church. The ground there expands into a large, open space, filled at the chief festivals, with sellers of crucifixes, rosaries, carved shells, bracelets, and other matters of the same kind, which are carried away in remembrance of the sacred soil. During Easter, the period of Mr. Roberts's visit, this court was used as a bazaar, and was crowded with pilgrims and merchants. He thinks that the building must have been extremely beautiful previous to the fire of 1808, and regards it as still bearing a close resemblance to the rich architecture of St. Mark's, at Venice. The entrance is by an arched porch, with clusters of polished marble columns, principally of the beautiful verde antique, over which another tier of arches encloses the windows ; the small building on the right is the Chapel of our Lady of Grief. The capitals of the pillars of the porch, with its frieze and cornices, are exquisitely carved, partly in the Greek stjde, and partly in what is termed the Gothic, forming as it were the link between the two, and showing that the arts at the time must have still been in a high state of excellence. ' The narrow frieze over the doorway represents the triumphant entry of our Saviour into Jerusalem. One of the doors has been walled up ; the existing one, formed of massive materials, has three locks, the keys of which are kept by the Turkish governor, and is opened only on certain days at fixed hours, in the presence of the three dragomans of the Latin, Greek, and Armenian convents. When the door is closed, the Greek Monks, who are now in possession of the Holy Sepulchre, receive their supplies by means of a basket let down from one of the windows. At the season of Easter, and during some of the great ceremonies of the holy week, the facade is hung with rich tapestry. 1 Roberts's Journal. THE DAMASCUS GATE. The walls of Jerusalem are chiefly modern and Saracenic, but are built evidently on the site of more ancient walls, raised in the time of the Crusaders, and those, not improbably, formed of the material of others still more ancient. They consist wholly of hewn stones, in general not of remarkable size, and laid in mortar. An Arabic inscription over the Yaffa Gate gives the rebuilding to Sultan Suleiman, in the year of the Hegira 948 (a.d. 1542). The walls are still stately, and, at a distance, picturesque; they have towers and battlements, the latter crowning a breastwork with loopholes. A broad walk passes along the top of the wall, protected by the breastwork, and reached by flights of steps from within. Their height varies according to the in- equalities of the ground outside from twenty to fifty feet. Jerusalem has four open gates and four walled up : which seem in general to retain the places of still older ones, and, in some instances, to be older than the walls. Of the four open gates, facing the four points of the compass, that of which the view is given looks to the north, and is called by the natives Bab-el-Amud, or " Gate of the Pillar." The "Damascus Gate" is a name given by the Europeans, from its leading to Damascus and Xabulus by the great northern road. It is more ornamented than the others, and forms a striking object to the traveller. 1 1 Roberts's Journal. Robinson, Biblical Researches, vol. i. 386. F > 111 £ S^gsgS THE GREEK CHAPEL OF THE HOLY SEPULCHRE. The Church of the Holy Sepulchre was nearly destroyed by fire in the year 1808 ; lone neglected by the Latin Christians, it was repaired by Russia, which carefully cultivates its connexion with the Asiatic Greeks ; and in consequence of this expenditure, the Greek monks have been put in possession of the most venerated parts of the edifice. In the engraving the view is directed to the screen, which, as in all the churches of the Greek ritual, separates the nave from the altar. Though sculpture is rigidly excluded, pictures and other embellishments are largely employed. This chapel is lavishly orna- mented ; and though it exhibits a barbaric mixture of styles, Greek, Gothic, and Saracenic, the general effect is rich in the extreme. The profusion of gilding, the gold and silver lamps continually burning, and the elaborate decoration of every part, render the first view overpowering. Near the centre stands a small vase, to which the Greeks attach great reverence, I'egarding it as the central spot of the earth, and call it the "Navel of the World." Mr. Roberts's Journal thus describes the scene as it met his own eye : "March 31, 1839 (Palm Sunday). — This is a great day at the Holy Sepulchre, and we witnessed the procession early in the morning. Perhaps after seeing the splendid sights of this kind in Spain, they were seen to disadvantage, still to me they were most interesting. The Latins took no part in the spectacle, being shut out on account of the plague, and holding no communication with the city. " The first, therefore, in the ceremonial, were the Greeks. Entering from their con- vent by the grand entrance, they walked three times round the rotunda inclosing the Holy Sepulchre, chaunting the service, and each bearing a palm-branch. Their banners and dresses were splendid. Their two bishops wearing circular caps and sumptuous robes, were supported each by two dignitaries wearing similar robes, crimson velvet embroidered with gold. At the head of the procession was carried a representation of Christ on the Cross, which the pilgrims pressed forward to kiss. On entering the chapel, the chief bishop, ascending the steps to the central opening of the screen, gave his benediction to the multitude, holy water was sprinkled, and flowers were strewed on the steps leading to the Holy Sepulchre. The two bishops then seating themselves on gilded thrones on either side of the chapel, distributed baskets of consecrated bread. " Next followed the procession of the Armenians ; their bishop wearing a mitre and a robe still more glittering than those of the Greeks, being covered with pearls and precious stones on a ground of crimson velvet. The Copts and Syrians joined this procession, being too few to form a separate one. The Copts carried a representation of Christ on the Cross and banners. But their appearance was poor, and their bishop bore but a staff of ivory, while those of the Greeks and Armenians were of chased gold set with gems." 1 The point of time in the engraving is when the Armenian bishop has taken his place in front of the altar. 1 Roberts's Journal. TOMB OF ST. JAMES. This is one of four sepulchres in the Valley of Jehoshaphat, on the east side of the Kedron. It is an excavated tomb with an ornamental portal. The facade exhibits two Doric columns, fronting the west, and raised about fifteen feet above the ground in the same ledge of rock. The cavern is fifteen feet high by ten broad, and extends back about fifty feet. The monkish opinion is, that into this cavern the Apostle James retired during the interval between the Crucifixion and the Resurrection. The other tombs are named from Jehoshaphat, Absalom, and Zachariah. There is no authority for those names. The mixture of the Greek style with the massive Egyptian shows, that they belong to a late period of art, and especially of art as adopted in the Oriental provinces of the Roman empire. They may be even of the age of Hadrian. 1 1 Robinson, Biblical Researches, vol. i. p. 517. JERUSALEM, FROM THE ROAD LEADING TO BETHANY. Jerusalem lies near the summit of a broad mountain ridge. This ridge, which is every- where not less than from twenty to twenty-five miles broad, is in fact a high irregular table land. The surface of the elevated promontory on which the city stands sinks somewhat steeply towards the east, terminating in the Valley of Jehoshaphat. The breadth of the whole site of Jerusalem from the Valley of Hinnom to the Valley of Jehoshaphat is about 1020 yards, or half a geographical mile. The siuTounding country is of the limestone formation. The region is dreary, and the soil seems sterile ; yet the olive thrives, and corn is grown in the levels and valleys. The vine and fig-tree flourish no longer on the hills, but the latter grows in the sheltered spots, and is frequent near Bethlehem. The city is called by the Arabs, El-Kuds (the Holy); and also by Arabian writers, Bek El-Mukaddas (the Sanctuary). 1 The spectator is presumed to be standing on the Mount of Olives, looking towards the Mosque of Omar, which stands on the central point of the view. On its left is the Mosque El Aksa. The space within which those edifices stand, is inclosed by a wall of great thickness, formed of stones of remarkable size, some of them thirty feet, and with great probability supposed to have formed part of the original wall of the platform, on which stood the temple built by Herod. This inclosure is the summit of Mount Moriah, on which no Christian or Jew was once permitted to set his foot (though of late years, the prohibition is occasionally relaxed). Beyond, and rising above it, is Mount Sion, the site of the city of David. Its northern part is now the most dilapidated portion of Jerusalem, and is chiefly inhabited by Jews, in a state of poverty. On the summit are seen the towers of the citadel. To the left is the Armenian convent : still farther to the left, and outside the walls, is the Muslim Tomb of David ; and near it a small Greek Church built on the spot assigned by tradition as the place where the "Last Supper" was solemnized. Farther on the right is Acra, the third hill, on whose ridge stands the Church of the Holy Sepulchre ; the ridge is separated from Zion by the Tyropa2on. And still farther to the right, and also within the walls, is the fourth hill, now covered with hovels. The summit commands a fine view of the city ; and the monks have chosen to assign it as the site of a palace of Herod Agrippa, Its position would certainly accord with the taste and policy of a race, who so strikingly united ' Robinson, vol. i. p. 380. the pomp of royalty with the vigilance of despotism. Beyond this hill and the walls lies the Tomb of the Kings. At the foot of the spectator is the Valley of Jehoshaphat, through which flows the brook Kedron. Immediately under the Gate of St. Stephen is a small church traditionally standing over the burial-place of the Virgin Mary. Close to it is the memorable Garden of Gethsemane. To the right of the garden is the Pillar of Absalom, and lower down are the disputed "pools of Siloam." 1 1 Robinson, vol. i. p. 391. ENTRANCE TO THE TOMB OF THE KINGS. This remarkable sepulchre, strongly resembling those of the Egyptian Thebes, is the finest relic of the kind in the neighbourhood of Jerusalem. Its present name has been long given by the Europeans, from a vague conception of its being the burial-place of some of the Jewish monarchs. From the elegance of its front and the general beauty of its sculpture, it has been compared with the sepulchres of Petra, and thence conjectured to have been the work of Herod, whose descent was Idumaean. But the weight of evidence inclines to its being the tomb of Helena, Queen of Adiabene, who had become a convert to Judaism. x The sepulchre lies to the north of the Damascus Gate, and at a short distance from it, on the slope to the Valley of Jehoshaphat. The portal was originally twenty-seven feet long, but it is now much broken away. The sides of this portal were ornamented with columns or pilasters ; and there were two intermediate columns, now broken down, which divided the front into nearly three equal parts. The rock above is richly sculptured in the later Roman style. The sepulchre consists of a large square pit sunk in the solid rock. In the western wall of this sunken court is a hall also excavated in the rock, thirty- nine feet long by seventeen wide, and fifteen high. To this belongs the portal just mentioned. Within this hall is the entrance to an ante-chamber, and within this again are tlu - ee large and two smaller chambers containing the fragments of marble sarcophagi. 2 1 Jcsephus, B. J. v. 4. i. Robinson, vol. i. p. o2b. - MHfc HI Hi THE MOSQUE OF OMAR, ON THE ANCIENT SITE OF THE TEMPLE. This fine monument of the style of building under the Caliphate stands on Mount Moriah. It is recorded by the Arab historian, Seid Eben Batrik, that when the Caliph Omar took Jerusalem, the conqueror inquired of the Patriarch Sophronius, which would be the most fitting site for a mosque. The patriarch, by a choice which it is now difficult to under- stand, led him to the ruins of the Temple. Successive caliphs enlarged and adorned the mosque. At the capture of Jerusalem by the Crusaders it was consecrated as a Christian Church, but on falling into the hands of Saladin, it became a mosque again. The lively narrative of Dr. Richardson, who had contrived to evade Mahometan vigilance, gives us the best notice of the structure. Enveloped in a black robe to avoid observation, and attended by an interpreter, he ascended the southern hope of Mount Moriah, and entered the Haram Schereef, (or " noble Retirement for Devotion,") an inclosure of 1489 feet by 995, in the centre of which stands the Sakhara, (or " Shut Up,") the Mosque of Omar. " After viewing the building, we then," the narrative proceeds, " hied out of the Gate of Paradise (Bab-el-Jenne), passed by the ' Judgment-Seat of Solomon,' and descended into the inclosure. Here we put on our shoes, and walked through the trees, to a house adjoining the wall of the inclosure, in which is said to be the throne of Solomon. From this we ascended by a stair to the top of the wall, and sat upon the stone on which Mahomet is to sit at the day of judgment, to judge the re-embodied spirits assembled beneath him in the Valley of Jehoshaphat. Descending from this seat of tremendous anticipation, we walked along the front of El Aksa, the other mosque, which occupies the side of the inclosure." A visit in daylight, in which he was accompanied by some Turks of rank, enabled him to enjoy a still more accurate view. The ground is verdurous, and scattered over with orange, olive, cypress, and other trees. " In the sacred retirement of this spot, the followers of the Prophet delight to saunter or repose, and arrayed in the gorgeous costume of the East, add much to the beauty and interest of the scene, which they seem unwilling to quit either in going to, or returning from, the place of prayer. Round the edge of the Stoa-Sakhara, or platform of the mosque, are many small houses, for private prayer, and other purposes connected with the principal building ; but the Sakhara itself is the chief ornament of the whole. It is a regular octagon of about sixty feet a side. It is entered by four gates, and the walls are faced to a certain height with marble ; the sides are panelled, and the upper story of this elegant building is faced with small tiles eight or nine inches square, and painted white, yellow, green, and blue. On each side there are seven well-proportioned windows, except where the front interferes. The whole is extremely light and beautiful, and from the mixture of the soft colours above, and the blue and white tinge of the marble below," says the Doctor, " I was more delighted with it than any building I ever saw." It is now, however, much defaced, and, like most of the Mahometan structures in Palestine, is sinking into decay. The front group consists of Greek Christians, pilgrims to Jerusalem and praying towards the Holy Sepulchre. They stand on a terrace of the dilapidated Church of St. Anna, which is built over the grotto shown as the birth-place of the Virgin. The Mount of Olives is partially seen on the left. In the same direction is the principal entrance to the mosque, which no Christian is allowed to pass. The view is taken from the terrace, looking down to the Pool of Bethesda ; the lower portion of the walls is ancient, (the upper part Saracenic,) and may have formed part of the Tower of Antonia. 1 Roberts's Journal. Robinson, Biblical Researches, vol. i. p. 415, &c. THE TOMB OF ZECHARIAH. There are four monumental structures in the Valley of Jehoshaphat, on the east side of the Kedron, and opposite to the south-east corner of the Grand Mosque. Those have received from monks and travellers the names of the Tombs of Jehoshaphat, St. James, Absalom, and Zechariah. The two latter are real monuments of rock, the two former are only excavated tombs with ornamented portals. The Tomb of Zechariah is so called in allusion to him who was " slain between the temple and the altar." It is a square block, of about twenty feet on each side, the rock having been cut away round it, so as to form an area in which it stands isolated. The body of the tomb is about eighteen or twenty feet high, and apparently solid. The sides are decorated each with two columns, and two half columns, the latter adjacent to square pillars at the corners, and all having capitals of the Ionic order. Round the cornice is an ornament of acanthus leaves, about three feet high, and above this the top is formed by an obtuse pyramid ten or twelve feet in height. The whole monument has thus an elevation of about thirty feet, and, with all its ornaments, is wholly cut out of the solid rock. ' It exhibits a singular mixture of the styles of Greece and Egypt ; somewhat of the classic elegance of the former, with the massiveness of the latter. 1 Robinson, Biblical Researches, vol. i. p. 518. %-J. "; Bk*'^ ■ S&Ugt ; ~i dfLs^i : r> ■ .$» ^^^^f°^k'' * j-)tffi -/ flii ^ *3 ii * Sfir^ --«T'v-' ^fe^ JERUSALEM FROM THE SOUTH. Jerusalem was founded by Melchizedec, 1 in the forty-sixth year of Abraham, 2107 years before the nativity of our Lord, and 2177 before its siege by Titus. It was even then named Salem (peace), doubtless with prophetic reference to its future purposes, as the centre of pure religion in the world. Yet, in an historical point of view, no name could seem more unsuited to its fortunes, for no other city of the earth has ever undergone so constant and so terrible a succession of sufferings. After the general conquest of Canaan under Joshua, it fell into the hands of the Jebusites, by whom it was fortified, and from the strength of its position, it was probably impregnable to the rude science of those early times; but David 2 had the daring to attack, and the skill to master it, by entering through an aqueduct, from which he ascended into the city. On its capture he made it the capital of the kingdom, and on the Hill of Zion erected a palace for himself with other buildings. Solomon next levelled the summit of Mount Moriah, and on it built the Temple. Our space prohibits the detail of the calamities which so soon overshadowed its splendours. Josephus sums them up in one expressive record : " Jerusalem was taken six times, but desolated only twice. The several captures were by Sesac, the Babylonians, Antiochus, Pompey, Herod, and Titus ; its desolations were by the Babylonians and by the Romans under Titus." 3 The horrors of the Roman siege, as narrated by Josephus, proverbially form the most overwhelming collection of the images of suffering by famine, popular fury, and national despair, that were ever combined to make the fall of a people fearful to its own age and memorable to every age to come. The siege, in all its parts, distinctly exhibits a supernatural influence, controlling human circumstances into the means of more consummate destruction. It was pressed at the Passover, the last period at which military prudence would have attempted the attack. But as almost the whole male population of middle age were assembled in the city, the havoc must have been thus only the more sweeping. The singular tardiness, and even incertitude of design, exhibited by the Roman army in its first attempts, so inconsistent with the habitual daring and decision of the Roman system of war, unquestionably had the effect of deluding the city into a more continued resistance, and thus inflicting a more irrecoverable ruin. The destruction of the Temple was wholly opposed to the policy of Rome, which prided itself on its indifference to the worship of its conquests ; and it was even directly opposed to the commands of Titus, who naturally wished to preserve its plunder for his triumph, and who must have looked on the Temple as the noblest trophy ever won by a conqueror. But a mightier power was there, and all perished. 1 Joseph. B. Jud. vi. 10. ' 2 Sara. v. 6. 3 Bell. Jud. vi. 10. The prophecy of our Lord, " Verily, I say unto you, There shall not be left one stone upon another," was literally fulfilled : the Temple was utterly ruined and has never been restored. In the sixth century Justinian built a superb church to the Virgin Mary, which stood on the site of the present Mosque El-Aksa. A hundred years after, the Khalif Omar took Jerusalem (a.d. 636), and was the founder of the mosque standing on the site of the Temple, and wliieh still bears his name. In 1099, the Crusaders took the city by storm. The mosque was then consecrated as a Christian church ; but on the capture of this most unfortunate city again by the Saracens (a.d. 1187), the crescent was restored. Jerusalem has since fallen successively into the hands of the Turks and the Egyptians, and is now a Turkish possession. But the eyes of Europe have been directed to it in our day, with an interest unfelt since the age of the Crusades, and founded on higher principles than those of worldly ambition. At this hour, the whole Christian world, by a new and nobler impulse, " prays for the peace of Jerusalem." THE EXTERIOR OF THE HOLY SEPULCHRE. The first and most interesting object within the walls of the Holy City, the spot to which every pilgrim first directs his steps, is the Holy Sepulchre : but the traveller finds his expectation strangely disappointed when, approaching the hallowed tomb, he sees around him the tottering houses of a ruined city, and is conducted to the door of a gigantic church. Though the handsome cupola is visible from most parts of the town, yet, there being no peristyle, the access to this, the principal monument of the piety of the Empress Helena, is difficult, being neai - ly surrounded by buildings which at various periods have been allowed to be run up against it. It can be entered only from the south. With the exception of the fagade (represented in the vignette title-page), there is nothing remarkable in the external architecture or decoration of this mass of buildings, which is necessarily irregular from an attempt to bring under one roof the events of the Gospel history — the Golgotha and the Tomb, now shown in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. The ruined tower to the left was anciently the belfry. K w ■ < - THE POOL OF BETHESDA. The eagerness of the early monks to give Scriptural names to every prominent feature of Jerusalem, has affixed the title of the "Pool of Bethesda" to the reservoir on the north of the Great Mosque. In the opinion of Robinson, this reservoir merely formed a part of the fosse of the " Acropolis," or Fortress of Antonia. Its dimensions certainly seem altogether incompatible with the purposes of the Bethesda of Scripture, whether those were the bathing of the sick, or the washing of sheep preparatory to their sacrifice in the Temple ; for it measures 360 feet in length by 130 in breadth, and is 75 deep, even now, though there is evidently a great accumulation of earth at the bottom. There can be, however, no doubt of its having been used as a reservoir, for its sides have been cased with small stones, and those again have been covered with plaster ; but this portion of the work wants the completeness of ancient skill. 1 The western end is built up like the rest, except at the south-west corner, where two lofty arched vaults extend imder the houses which cover that quarter. The northern one of those arches is nineteen feet broad, and it has been penetrated to the extent of a hundred feet, and apparently extends farther. The other is twelve feet in breadth, but both are heaped with earth. It is conjectured that the trench, of which this excavation forms a part, was filled up by Titus in the siege, when, hi order to cany on his works for the assault of the Temple, he levelled the Fortress of Antonia. Eusebius and Jerome speak of a piscina probatica, shown in their day as Bethesda, a double pool, one part filled by rums, and the other tinged of a reddish dye, as if mixed with blood ; but they give it no locality. The name in later times was applied, apparently, from the neighbourhood of the reservoir to the St. Stephen's Gate, which was mistaken for the sheep-gate. The bottom is generally dry, though at the time of the Artist's visit, in April, there was some water stagnating in it. It contains shrubs, and a few trees not tall enough to reach above the level of the street. The view is taken from the street leading to the Great Mosque. The characteristic feature of Jewish architecture is exhibited in the domes, which form the roof of every house, a result of the costliness of timber; but, from its wanting the lightness of the Oriental dome, in general the effect is poor and monotonous. The tower on the right is the minaret standing in the inclosure of the mosque, and the ruins beneath are conceived to be the remnants of the Tower of Antonia. 2 ' Biblical Researches, vol. i. p. 434. a Roberts's Journal. THE TOWER OF DAVID. Tht citadel of modern Jerusalem, an irregular ass _e of square towers, lies on the north-western pan S to the s uth of the Yaffa gate. It has on the outer side a deep fosse. A solid sloping bulwark, rising from the bottom of the fosse, at an angle of i forty-five degrees, protects the towers. This bulwark bears evident marks of remote antiquity, and by Robinson 1 is thought - ... . Had.riaTi. At the capture • A.n. 1099 i. this was d _ • . and here the garrison made their last stand. When the walls were thrown down by the Moslen - this fortress was preserved, and bore the name of the Tower or Citadel of David until tbe nth century, when it . . ally called the Castle of the Pisans, from h.. once rebuilt by • - thai The north-eastern tower, now es I T wer of Darin. - nonce by e and antiquity : for though the upper part is modern, tbe lower is formed of a, wrought in the manner of the ancient masonry, and. in all probability, a remnant wer Hippicus, built by Herod, and left standing by Titus when be destroyed the other defences. * Some of the stones are twelve feet long by three feet five inches broad. The height of tbe ancient portion is about fifty feet. 4 1 Biblical Researches, vol i. 454. * Pisanorum Castrvm. Adrichonius, 156, quoted by Robinson. 3 Josephus. Jewish War, vii 1.1. .mal 2 -"• : '-"- — ■-:-■;■ --v. -'""■■ --V"-- ■ .-■--,..-■•---■ < s ;.-.-. THE SHRINE OF THE HOLY SEPULCHRE. Eastee is the chief period of pilgrimages to Jerusalem, and the number of pilgrims frequently amounts to 20,000. The Church of the Holy Sepulchre is opened hut on fixed days, and on those, at this season, the pressure is enormous. The first aspect of the exterior is striking. It is a vast and splendid monument, solemn, imposing, and rich for the time at which it was erected. It is true, that it is not the Church built by the mother of Constantine ; but in its rebuilding by the Christian kings of Jerusalem, the ornaments of the Byzantine architecture have been preserved, and, with those of the Greek and Eastern, form a noble and most picturesque temple. But the multitude offer a vivid and still more picturesque scene. There are displayed costumes and countenances from all parts of the world ; the splendid robes and dark visages of the Asiatic, the powerful features of the Greek, the Italian monk, the Syrian mountaineer, the Christian of India, some countenances wild and barbarian, some brilliant and civilised; some which give the impression of every sterner practice and passion of desert life ; others which a Titian or a Raphael might have taken as models of the saint or martyr, calm, lofty, and intellectual : a vast congregation gathered by one powerful impulse to do homage to the most awful place of recollection on the globe. But the gate is at last opened, generally after a delay which produces many a murmur, and the multitude, with the rush and roar of a torrent, burst in. On entering the vestibule, the keeper of the porch, a Turk, is seen sitting, frequently with a group of Turks, on his richly-covered divan, smoking, and with coffee before him. But none pause there ; the crowd pass on, struggling, pressing, and clamouring. But, at the instant of their entering the grand dome, all is hushed ; in front of them lies the " Stone of Unction," the crowd fling themselves on their knees round it, weep, pray, and attempt to touch it with their foreheads ; hands are seen everywhere clasped in prayer, or hiding their faces as if the object were too sacred to be gazed at ; tears are rolling down cheeks, and sobs are heard that seem to come from hearts overwhelmed with reverence and sorrow. The Church is a lofty circular building, surmounted with a dome, and surrounded by tall square pillars supporting a gallery. The general effect is bold and stately. Immediately under the dome stands the shrine, an oblong building, twenty feet long and twelve feet high, circular at the back, but square and finished with a platform in front, and with a cornice and cupola of marble. The style of this structure is fantastic and poor, the work of a nameless builder employed by the Greek monks in 1817. But who can regard such trivialities in the midst of such a scene ? That building covers the Holy Sepulchre ! It is perfectly known that the site of our Lord's tomb, of the crucifixion, and all the other leading events of his glorious Passion, have formed the topics of learned dispute. But into those discussions we have no wish to enter. The heart, and the understanding too, may rest fully contented with the fact, that whether within or without this dome, here trod our Lord; within the circuit of the city standing at this hour were wrought his miracles ; were heard those lips " which spake as never man spake ;" were uttered those fearful denunciations which condemned Judah to bondage ; and with not less authority, those infallible and illustrious promises which declare that she shall yet break her chain, and see her King in triumph, as she saw him in humiliation. Under such feelings, all minute doubts disappear ; the mind takes no interest in minor localities ; all Jerusalem is one magnificent locality. Through these streets the Saviour passed ; on that height he taught in the courts of the Temple ; from that Mount of Olives he looked upon the golden domes, and sculptured towers, and marble walls of Jerusalem ! Those facts are known beyond all doubt ; those are sufficient for the heart ; and fallen as the City of David is, Christendom bears in sacred memory, that " her stones were laid in holiness," and longs for the coming of the day when a splendour, not borrowed from sun or star, shall fill her courts with new-born glory. THE GOLDEN GATE. This is a massive structure, a double gateway, projecting from the eastern wall into the area of the Harem-esh-Sherif (the Noble Sanctuary), in which stands the Great Mosque. Its floor is several feet below the level of the area. After the second revolt and total ruin of the Jewish people, Hadrian (a.d. 136) built a new city, which he called iElia; and, for the purpose of offering the last insult to an unhappy nation, he raised a temple to Jupiter on the site of the Temple of Solomon. The style of the Golden Gate appears to refer it to this period; the external front and arches are unquestionably of Roman origin ; and of the interior it is evident, that " a central row of noble Corinthian columns and a groined roof, had once formed a stately portico of Roman workmanship." 1 The name " Porta Aurea" cannot be followed higher than the tenth century. This gate was found walled up in the time of the Crusades, but was then opened once a-year, on Palm Sunday, from a tradition that through it our Lord made his entry into Jerusalem as king ; a tradition probably arising from the stateliness of its architecture. By the Moslem, however, it is kept constantly walled up from a singular dread, that through it a king shall enter, who is to make himself master not only of Jerusalem, but of the globe. And that their vigilance, at least, may not be wanting to avert the conquest, they keep a sentinel constantly on duty in a tower flanking the gateway. 2 1 Bononi and Catherwood, referred to by Robinson, Biblical Researches, vol. i. p. 438. a Stephens, p. 94. THE CHURCH OF THE PURIFICATION. An inquiry has been long on foot among the intelligent investigators of the Holy Land, for the site of the great Church built by Justinian, in honour of the Virgin Mary, in the sixth century. Procopius, in his description of the imperial works, 1 states it to have been erected on the loftiest hill of the city; adding, that as there was not space enough for its intended magnitude, the architect was compelled to raise a wall with arched vaults from the valley to support the south-east part of the edifice. The only fabric whose site corresponds with this description is the Mosque El-Aksa, at the southern extremity of the hiclosure of the Harem-esh-Sherif. It stands adjacent to the southern wall, where the latter is about one hundred feet above the foundation of the parallel city wall. The mosque is 280 feet in length from north to south by 190 broad. It is universally regarded by the Oriental and Western Christians as an ancient Christian Church, once dedicated to the Virgin, and the latter give it the name of the Church of the Purification or Presentation. c The interior retains exactly the appearance of an ancient Basilica. 3 In researches like these, the reader must be warned of the extreme difficulty of verify- ing points of topography much more important than the sites of imperial labours. Until the beginning of the fourth century Jerusalem was in Roman hands, deprived of all rights but those which cannot be refused even to the slave, and almost forgotten by the world. The establishment of Christianity on the imperial throne once more turned the general eye to Jerusalem, yet less as the seat of Jewish grandeur than as the memorial of Christian sacrifice. Invention became busy, and perhaps unscrupulous. Whatever the mother of the Emperor sought for, she was sure to find. Where the site was unknown to authentic record, tradition was read}', or where even tradition failed, all difficulty vanished before a dream. Thus Helena ascertained all the chief localities of the life of our Lord in Jeru- salem. During the three following centuries Jerusalem became a place of pilgrimage to the pious, the curious, and the superstitious. The pilgrims adopted the legends of the past, or made legends of their own ; until every spot of the sacred region was partitioned among rival fables. But this visionary age received a sudden and formidable check ; the Saracen came, overspreading the land like a flood, and the pilgrim and the fable perished together. The Crusades were a bold and brilliant effort to restore the fallen honours of Jerusalem ; but, while the Saracen scimitar was still glittering from the Nile to Lebanon, the knio-hts were too amply employed in guarding their feeble sovereignty, to revive controversies, which probably their martial habits taught them to disdain. On the revival of letters in Europe, Jerusalem became once more that object of interest, which it has continued to the present day. But the eager acquiescence with which the first travellers listened to the authority of the Conventuals, was suddenly changed into almost total doubt ; and a species of calm scepticism as to every locality became the tone of the 1 Procop. de JEdificiis, Justin, v. 6. 2 The title of the Purification is rejected by Quaresmius. 3 Bononi, quoted in Bib. Researches, vol. i. p. 439. European traveller. 1 This, too, has had its period, and a more rational spirit has succeeded. But Jerusalem is already assuming in the European eye a higher rank than belongs to historic recollections. For to what other spot of earth was language like this ever spoken ? " It shall come to pass in the last days, that the mountain of the Lord's house shall be established in the top of the mountains. " And many people shall go and say, Come ye, and let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob . . . for out of Sion shall go forth the law, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem. " O house of Jacob, come ye, and let us walk in the light of the Lord." 2 1 Rauwolf, Korte, and Cotovicus, were among the chief doubters ; until the visit of Clarke, who doubts everything. Robinson, who has been adopted as our chief authority in these descriptions, evidently deserves respect for his judgment, diligence, and learning. 2 Isaiah, ii. 2, 3, 5. THE UPPER FOUNTAIN OF SILOAM. Siloam consists of two basins or fountains, the upper one of which is a fissure in the solid rock. A flight of steps leads down on the inside to the water, and close at hand, on the outside, is the reservoir. 1 This seems to be generally acknowledged as " Siloa's brook that flowed Fast by the oracle of God." The drawing of the water from Siloam in the Feast of Tabernacles (though no direction on the subject is to be found in the Mosaic Law) became a remarkable ceremonial in the latter ages of Judea. The priest with his attendants received it from the fountain in a golden vessel, and then, returning to the Temple, mingled it with wine, and poured it on the altar. The origin of the custom has been the subject of much discussion among the rabbins, but it is generally supposed to have originated in the verse of Isaiah (xii. 3), " With joy shall ye draw water out of the wells of salvation." Much exhibition of popular rejoicing, with sounding of trumpets and horns, accompanied this ceremony. The whole Feast of Taber- nacles was peculiarly a display of popular exultation, as it occurred in the finest season of the year, after the gathering of all the harvests ; was under tents and bowers, reminding the people of the happiest scenes of the national life ; and was typical of the period when earth is to be paradise again, and Israel is to be restored for ever. The water from Siloam was drawn on every day of the seven during which the feast continued. But the most solemn outpouring was on the last, the chief day of this memorable celebration. Our Lord refers to it, as prefiguring the outpouring of the Holy Spirit (John, vii. 39.) ' Robinson, Biblical Researches, vol. i. p. 497. ' JERUSALEM, FROM THE MOUNT OF OLIVES. Olitet is a name connected with the most solemn remembrances of religion. The credulity of pilgrims or the artifices of monks may have done dishonour to the sanctity of Jerusalem ; fiction has too often found sites for miracles, and legend has largely usurped the place of history ; but nature remains : all the gi*eat features of the scene are unchange- able ; and he who now explores the valleys or climbs the hills of this illustrious region, is secure that there, at least, he cannot be deceived. Every outline of those hills, every undulation of those valleys, has the matchless influence of reality. He feels, that he is traversing the very ground which was traversed by those great agents of Providence, whose memory has given a character and an impulse to every succeeding period of man- kind ; that he stands where they taught, and suffered, and triumphed ; that he looks on the landscape on which they so often gazed ; and that he sees the same grandeur and beauty, the same wild majesty or cultured loveliness, which so often lifted their hearts in strains of holy exultation to the God and Father of nature and man. Olivet is memorable in the national annals as the first resting-place of David, when he fled from the rebellion of Absalom. " And David went up by the ascent of Mount Olivet, and wept as he went up, and had his head covered, and he went barefoot ; and all the people that was with him covered every man his head, and they went up, weeping as they went up." 1 But, to us, it has still more solemn recollections. No portion of Palestine was more hallowed by the frequency of our Lord's presence, and the events of his closing life, than the region of Olivet. To meditate, to pray, and to prophesy, He " went, as he was wont, to the Mount of Olives." From its slope He uttered the great prediction of the calamities of the siege, and the fall of the people ; there He underwent that most fearful and profound sorrow which commenced his sufferings ; there, finally, He met his disciples before He ascended to heaven ; and there, if the prophecy is to be literally interpreted, the world shall yet see a still more awful and astonishing scene. " His feet shall stand in that day upon the Mount of Olives, which is before Jerusalem on the east ; and the Mount of Olives shall cleave hi the midst thereof toward the east and toward the west, and there shall be a very great valley : and half of the mountain shall remove toward the north, and half of it toward the south. And ye shall flee to the valley of the mountains; . . . and the Lord my God shall come, and all the saints with thee." 2 At the foot of the Mount, and between it and the brook Kedron, is the " Garden of Gethsemane." General consent adopts this as the scene of the " Agony." It is still an olive-ground, with many neglected trees widely scattered over the slope of the hill ; but the spot especially sacred in the estimation of the pilgrims, is a space of fifty-seven yards 1 2 Samuel, xv. 30. 2 Zechariah, xiv. 4, 5. square, with a low stone inclosure ; containing eight large olive-trees, apparently of great antiquity. " They are," says a recent traveller, " still in a sort of ruined cultivation ; the fences broken down and the trees decaying. Here no violence, or none that merits notice, has been done to the simplicity of the scene." 1 The view is extensive beyond the city, commanding the plain of Jericho, and, on the east, the valley of the Jordan, and a portion of the Dead Sea. On the summit of the mount is an Arab village, with a stone building in its centre, which is said to mark the spot of the " Ascension." But our Lord ascended from Bethany. 1 Jowett's Researches, p. 253. THE STONE OF UNCTION. In the description of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, it was mentioned that the " Stone of Unction" was the first object of homage which meets the pilgrims on their entrance, and that it always attracts a large concourse, who exhibit the strong extravagances of foreign feeling and gesture. It is a long slab of polished white marble ; but this is admitted to be only a covering for the true stone, to protect it from the casualties to which all relics were subject during the sway of the unbelievers. The Turks, however, looking upon the whole ceremonial as an advantageous source of revenue, and an inducement for strangers to visit the city, seldom interfere, but to prevent tumult ; and whether their toleration results from contempt or policy, it is practically complete. The monks say that the stone, of which this marble is the cover, is the one on which the body of our Lord was laid, when given to Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus, and by them anointed for sepulture. It has as largely shared the general decoration of this sump- tuous dome, as it does the homage of the pilgrims. Having at each end three enormous wax candles upwards of twenty feet high, and with the light of a number of lamps poured upon it from above, it forms a striking centre for the first gathering of those picturesque and enthusiastic groups. The lamps are silver, and some of them of rich and curious workmanship, the gifts of the Greek, Latin, and Armenian convents, or of royal and noble devotees. n THE CHAPEL OF ST. HELENA. The discovery of the Cross on which our Lord died, was one of the most memorable exploits of the mother of Constantine. From the Greek Chapel in the Great Church of the Holy Sepulchre, by. thirty broad marble steps, a large underground chamber is reached, its roof supported by four short columns, and dimly lighted. In front of those steps is an altar, and, on one side, the seat on which St. Helena, instructed by a dream where the true Cross was hidden, sat and watched while the progress of discovery was going on. Fourteen steps deeper is another chamber, still more dimly lighted, and in its centre a marble slab, covering the pit where, deeper yet, the mysterious object of search was at last found. But humiliating as are those legendary absurdities, the scenes which take place in con- nexion with them are not less humiliating. An intelligent traveller 1 supplies us with the substance of the following exhibition at the Holy Sepulchre (1821). The 21st of April is called the Day of Charity. By ten in the morning, an immense crowd were collected at the Church and round the Chapel of the Holy Sepulchre. In this assemblage was to be recognised every description of Christian Europe, with Copts, Maronites, Armenians, Syrian Arabs, &c. Their object was to see the kindling of the sacred fire in imitation of that which descended at the prayer of Elijah. " During the period when the miracle was preparing within the Shrine, what were the crowd doing ? They selected this interval for performances worthy of an Italian Carnival. They ran and dragged each other round the Church, they mounted on each other's shoulders, they built themselves up into pyramids, they tumbled like mountebanks. The shouts and shrieks from so many voices, in so many languages, sharpened with oriental shrillness, were intolerable. The uproar was rendered more discordant by the violence of the Turkish soldiers in the attempt to trancruillise fanaticism by blows." Two priests, a Greek and an Armenian, next entered the Shrine, and the door was closed after them and guarded by a body of soldiers. The crowd now rushed towards the walls of the Shrine, every one with a torch or taper ready to be lighted by the miraculous flame. But the miracle was delayed until the arrival of the Turkish governor. The gal- lery overlooking this ceremonial was filled by various groups ; Turks, who laughed at it ; Armenians, who believed in the miracle ; Lathis, who might be sceptical or not, as they pleased ; and English, who naturally looked upon it with mingled feelings of contempt and compassion. At length the governor arrived, and the miracle had permission to display itself. Every light was put out, and the multitude were left in almost total darkness ; but after some moments of anxiety a glimmer was seen through the orifices in the Shrine, it increased to a flame, and the multitude burst into a general exclamation. All now was enthusiasm, delight, and not a little danger. For the zealots fought fiercely for the honour 1 The Rev. G. Waddington : " Condition of the Greek Church." of lighting their torches and tapers at the flame itself; but those who were not fortunate enough to reach it, took it from others, and, in a few minutes, the whole area was a blaze of thousands of lights. The two priests again made their appearance, each waving a torch of " celestial flame," and with those in their hands, they were hoisted on the shoulders of the devotees, and carried in triumph out of the Church. When the display has been thus gone through, the crowd slowly retire, preserving the remainder of their tapers to melt them on strips of linen, which they intend to be sewed into their winding-sheets, as sure passports to Paradise. The whole performance, monstrous as it is, has been authenticated by every European writer who has been present during the Easter celebrations. To us, even its extravagances may furnish the important lesson of the general and dangerous tendency of human nature to superstition ; of the strange facility with which minds, even acute and intelligent on other subjects, may abandon themselves to the grossest follies in religion ; and of the wisdom of limiting our zeal to the simplicity of Scripture. THE FOUNTAIN OF JOB. This is an ancient well, situated just below the junction of the Valley of Hinnom with that of Jehoshaphat. Tradition has been busy with its name, and the legend tells us, that this was the especial spot in which the sacred fire of the Temple was preserved during the captivity, until the restoration of the Temple by Nehemiah ; the European monks, therefore, call it the Well of Nehemiah. The natives name it Byr Eyub, the Well of Job ; but until the sixteenth century it was called En-Rogel. 1 It is a very deep excavation, of an irregular quadrilateral form, walled up with large square stones, terminating above in an arch on one side, and apparently of great antiquity. There is a small rude building over it, furnished with one or two large reservoirs of stone. The well measures 125 feet in depth, and, in the rainy season, the water rises to the full hei