wicked reigns of all the successors of him who made Israel to sin, there is scarcely a solitary spot in the gloomy review upon which the mind can rest with pleasure. God, indeed, all along strove against their idolatry and desperate wickedness, their revolt from him, and determined resolution to destroy themselves. He sent prophet after prophet to warn and instruct them; humbled them by invasion, and defeat, and famine, and manifest judgment; and again interposed for their deliverance, when every, the slightest hope of defence or resistance on their own part was completely gone. In the worst

of days, indeed, in the reign of the abandoned Ahab, when, to the anxiously-inquiring eye of the zealous Elijah, he, of all the servants of the true God, seemed to be left alone to maintain the cause of truth and of pure worship-the omniscience of Jehovah cheered the heart of the desponding prophet, by assuring him, that even then there were seven thousand who had not bowed the knee to Baal. For the sake of such were the ten tribes spared through these many years of probation, and time and opportunity were given them to repent. But at last, when all this discipline of severity and goodness was applied in vain, punishment was brought down upon them without restraint they were carried captive by Shalmanezer, and have ever since remained at a distance from the land of their fathers.

Now contrast with this the fortune of the kingdom of Judah, which, in every respect but one, we would have thought less able to resist foreign invasion and conquest than the stronger and more populous sister kingdom. In truth, when they did, in their folly, encounter each other in the field of unfraternal and mortal strife, Judah was generally defeated. But these were wars of unnatural and Cain-like hostility, and neither nation could expect good to result from the most complete and deadly conquest. But look from this woful wasting of judgments and final extermination which the Israelites brought upon themselves, to the better and comparatively happier fate of Judah, and examine even most slightly into the causes. They also had indeed fallen from their high dignity and sacred peculiarity, as a people altogether holy to God. The true vine had become a degenerate plant-the wild boar of the forest had broken down the fences, and defaced the beauty and order of that garden of the Lord: other gods than Jehovah had also had dominion over them; they had often renounced their allegiance to their holy and eternal king, who had chosen them as his own, to bow down to stocks and stones, to wor

ship the idol abominations of error of the heathen around. Still the worship of God was regularly maintained in the temple; the Levite tribe, and the righteous of Israel, on the defection of the tribes under Jeroboam, had resorted to Jerusalem, and had found refuge and home in Judah, and the means of worshipping aright the God of their fathers. David's successors upon the throne, with some exceptions, were kings who endeavoured to walk worthily in the steps of the man according to God's own heart. Idolatry, indeed, often introduced its poisonous influence, and the polluted and licentious groves of Astarte, and the mountain temples of Baalim, towered toward heaven, and insulted the sole sovereignty of God. But time after time they were rooted out and thrown down by kings, zealous for his service and honour; and means were taken by Jehoshaphat and Josiah to disseminate effectually the knowledge of the truth throughout the whole body of the people. Such means did keep alive, for a long time, the embers of dying devotion, and fanned and fed the dimming and nearly expiring flame of the divine doctrines in the land. Humbled, indeed, they occasionally were, and chastised by warning judgments; still they were effectually guarded by the protection of their eternal king, as by an impregnable wall of iron, upon which the pride and the tumult of hostile nations often broke in vain, like the waves of the ocean on the everlasting rocks. Threatened destruction from the north, and east, and south, often passed by them on its march of resistless desolation; and even to the very last of their first term of probation, when the mighty host of Sennacherib made the walls of Jerusalem tremble, and he proudly insulted and defied Jehovah, the Eternal King of Judah showed his people that the breath of his nostrils could wither in a moment the triumphant strength and exulting pride of the invincible and unresisted hosts of mortal warriors.

In this way were they long defended by the buckler of him whose almighty arm bears up the pillars of the heavens, watched over with fatherly affection and care by that eye which neither slumbers nor sleeps, kept safe in the land of their fathers, under the shelter of the Almighty's wings, for nearly a century and a half after the foot of the heathen stranger had trampled down all the land-marks of the other ten tribes. But it became evident to Josiah, and to the best and holiest of the land, that the charter of their divine kingdom must stand that the awful denunciations of the law could not remain for ever a dead letter, or an unavailing threat: the warning voice of prophets was lifted louder, and more terrible, and more

frequent, denouncing sin, and proclaiming speedy and certain judgment.

Judah was at last, therefore, also carried captive-the temple of Jerusalem, the glory of all lands was thrown down-the only dwelling-place of Jehovah was removed from among men, and every visible monument of his footsteps, and favour to man upon earth, was obliterated. By the inexcusable wickedness of his own favoured people, he seems to be finally driven, in implacable displeasure, from his last and only throne of mercy upon earth, and, with his disappearance, faith, and hope, and deliverance, to have vanished from that guilty and ungrateful world, who had so little prized the celestial boon. It is, indeed, melancholy, but deeply instructive, to contemplate the awful proneness of mankind to error and falsehood-to idolatry and wickedness. This divine history of sinful humanity, which we are considering, would seem to be nothing but a grand and deeply-affecting tragical drama of the effects of the first transgression and fall. In the course of our observations, we have witnessed many a shifting of the scene, and at every turn, new agencies, all of mighty and divine energy, and all bearing directly upon one point, all speaking one great truth. That truth is, the sinfulness and utter helplessness of man, and the unchangeable holiness of God. This great point is, to bring men to trust in the divine mercy, which is equally infinite, to put faith in a remedy which he had revealed, and promised yet to manifest to the anxious hopes of the world. From the first revelation of that offer of mercy, till the time at which we have arrived, that spirit of anxious hope and inquiry could always find a spot, and a family, or people, upon earth, where a God of mercy was ever to be found, and his truth discovered, to cheer and support the doubting soul; but now the chosen home of mercy is left desolate, and the depositaries of its promises driven from the presence of their king, and, to all appearance, rejected for ever by their king, whom they had first rejected.

Such, most probably, was the conclusion of the heathen people around, who witnessed, or were agents in that divine chastisement-such must have been the natural thoughts and fears of that rejected people themselves, at least of those of them whose trust in the faithfulness of God's promises was not strong. His holiness and justice were pledged to this act of severest judgment, but his faithfulness was also pledged to make good the promise of eternal mercy. In confirmation of this recorded word of the divine goodness, the voice of that great body of prophets, who then arose, both immediately before the

captivity, and during its continuance, both in Judea and in Babylon, most constantly promised a definite termination to that universal mourning and gloom to the earth. The schemes and hopes of men fail or vanish into smoke, and the firmest establishments of this world wax old and are changed; but the thoughts and purposes of God remain fixed as his own celestial throne, and changeless as the light of his eternal day. The Babylonish captivity was only another shifting of the scenes of the grand drama of the destiny of mankind. That mighty monarchy itself, the most imposing that has ever overshadowed the world with its false glory, or the gloom of its despotic grandeur, had reached its own final destiny. During the course of its history, it had ever been employed in its wicked and ambitious pride, like Egypt, to chastise and punish the chosen people of God. But its hour of retribution was now come. The Persian broke through those massy and impregnable river-gates of brass, and walked peaceably under those unscaleable walls of human pride, behind which they trusted, and trampled in the dust the beautiful and heaven-defying majesty of Babylonian power. Cyrus was made to acknowledge the hand that led him, and issued a decree that the servants of the Most High God should return to the land of their fathers. The seventy years of the predicted sorrow and punishment had at last elapsed; and during the whole period that people, most unlike all other nations, had still kept separate, and had been taught, in their own more advanced experience, and by the greatly increased experience of the world, the futility of any other hope than trust in the Eternal King-than belief in that system of truth which had been revealed to them with the mighty sanction of heaven, and which had been gaining strength and clearness since the beginning of time.

With the restoration of the diminished and humbled tribes to the land of their fathers, the regular and unbroken chain of the divine history of the people closes; and closes apparently for this reason, that now authentic history began to be recorded over the civilized world around. We have seen it to be the ordinary system of God's proceedings to interfere for the maintenance of his truth, and authority over men, when no human means could have preserved that knowledge and that belief. In the closing, at this time, of the historic record of the divine government, then, we see only another instance of the same plan, adapted to the circumstances of the age. The general knowledge of that truth, and of that plan of divine government, was so deeply imprinted in the records of the history

of nations, and so indelibly in those of the Israelites, that nothing more was now requisite to prove it to be from God, nothing more to preserve it for ever.

But though we have not henceforward, from the return to Judea, a divine history to guide us with unerring certainty, in forming our opinion of the conduct of the chosen people, and of the providential dealings of God with them, we have the civil history of their own countryman Josephus, and that of the Maccabees, tos how us that idolatry was thenceforth successfully banished from their minds, and that a zeal for the law and worship of their fathers took its place. We are far from saying that this national zeal was the holy and pure spirit which animated the patriarchs of old; but, as a national feeling, it was deep and strong as death; and in the fiery persecution of Antiochus, and some of his successors, resisted to the death, and finally triumphed over all attempts for its extirpation or destruction. God also did not forget his promise, nor leave them, without his aid, to struggle against the fearful odds arrayed against them. Amid the fall and rise of dynasties all around them-amid the stormy showers of blood with which, for ages, the fierce collision of human passion drenched every quarter of the civilized world-amid the earthquake-heaving of judgments that shook all nations, they did not altogether escape, as they had not merited to escape. But while the greatest and oldest monarchies of the world were the prey ambitious warriors, and bold unprincipled adventurers-while they were bought and sold, as the unresisting tools of selfish politicians, the little nation of Judea alone retained its individuality, and fought successfully for its laws and religion amid the universal confusion, the unsparing and levelling destruction. Nor after that return to their home did God all at once leave the Jews without any farther revelation of his will. The cloud of the visible glory of divinity did not indeed rest upon the second temple, nor did he resume his present throne of judgment and mercy under the golden wings of the cherubim, and give forth his audible answer from the mercy-seat that covered the ark of his sacred laws. All these glorious and terrible manifestations of the deity, along with the Urim and Thummim of the high priest, honoured not the second temple; and the aged and sorrowing pilgrims had full reason to weep in bitterness of soul, when they looked upon the obscured and diminished glory of the new structure. To intimate, however, to the faith of his true worshippers that he, the God of their fathers, had not forgot them, and that his law and covenant

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