reckoning already referred to, it is certainly possible that the end may be much nearer than the dates we have found. No one can say at just what hour "the trumpet shall sound," and the Lord appear. As in all the past ages so now the purposes of God as to the end are just so far revealed and so far concealed as to give weighty and solemn emphasis to Christ's words to his disciples: "WATCH THEREFORE: FOR YE KNOW NOT WHEN THE LORD OF THE HOUSE COMETH, WHETHER AT EVEN, OR AT MIDNIGHT, OR AT COCKCROWING, OR IN THE MORNING; LEST COMING SUDDENLY HE FIND YOU SLEEPING. AND WHAT I SAY UNTO YOU I SAY UNTO ALL, WATCH."

CHAPTER III.

GOD'S ANCIENT PEOPLE IN THE NEW ERA.

Gen. 10:25. Deut. 32:8-10.

Isa. 11:11-16.
Jer. 16:14-21; 33: 9.

Joel 3:1, 2. Isa. 24:22, 23. Micah 5:7-9; 7:15-17. Zech. 10:5 @
Ez. 36:23, 24. Isa. 25:6-8; 27:6; 14:1, 2.

THE

HE history of the Hebrews is full of sublimity. It is the key to the history of the world. Without this key all is confusion. With it all comes into a beautiful order. For Israel occupied a central place in the divine scheme, and the history of other nations can never be understood without studying theirs.

Early in Genesis we find the remarkable statement that in the days of Peleg, great-great-grandson of Shem, God divided the earth. And the meaning of the declaration is made plain by a celebrated passage, in the Book of Deuteronomy, which says: "When the Most High divided to the nations their inheritance, when He separated the sons of Adam, He set the bounds of the people, according to the number of the children of Israel. For the Lord's portion is His people: Jacob is the lot of His inheritance." Thus it appears that full two centuries before the call of Abraham, God assigned to Israel a central position, and arranged all other nations with a view to this fact. In a word, to Israel was given, at the very dawn of history, the leadership of the world. No wonder that all her subsequent history was marked by

elements of grandeur. It was only thus that it could be worthy of so remarkable a beginning, and so lofty a destiny.

The sojourn in Egypt and the exodus from bondage amid the downpour of mighty judgments from heaven, and the parting of the sea under the lifted rod of Moses, was a sublime and unheardof experience.

The pillar of fire and of cloud, the fierce flames and bellowing thunders that played round Sinai's mount, and the righteous law, so far in advance of the age written by God's finger on tablets of stone, were full of sublimity.

The anger of God at their unbelief and the terrific doom of forty years' wandering and final death in the howling wilderness, had a touch of sublimity in the very terror of its retributive sternness.

The sudden uprising of the nation under Joshua and their irresistible rush into Canaan was sublime, from the crossing of the divided Jordan to the fall of Jericho at the blast of the seventh trump and the halting of the sun and moon over the gory field of Beth-horon.

The four hundred years' period of the nation's happy child. hood, when it had no king but the invisible Jehovah, who came down to their help in such mighty interpositions as the victories of Deborah, Gideon and Jephthah, was also sublime.

And so was the rise of the prophetic order, and the swift advance of the nation to supreme power and glory under David and Solomon. All peoples around gazed with awe and astonish ment upon the spectacle, and owned it unparalleled.

And when their final apostasy drew down the judgment of heaven, their very downfall gained dignity from the grandeur of its circumstances.

The very glory of God (as already mentioned), that luminous cloud that had filled the temple at its dedication, and taken up its abode in the holy of holies - the shekinah of His presence, was seen to come forth, linger a moment upon the threshold of the sanctuary, as if loath to depart, and then soar slowly away to the mountains of the East; and the supremacy of Israel ended in the overthrow of the capital, the burning of the temple, and the carrying away of the very nation itself bodily into distant Babylonia.

The return of the fifty thousand, their march through the desert, their tears and sacrifices, their seven weeks of toil at the broken wall without change of raiment except for washing, their preservation amid the terrific wars of Alexander, their triumph over Antiochus under the Maccabees, were all among the grandest scenes of history.

And the last indescribable struggle, in the Roman Era, which all historians speak of with unfeigned astonishment as the most striking and affecting instance of vain heroism and useless sacrifice in the annals of time, when a million of Jews perished, and Jerusalem was ploughed as a field, and the blood of their rejected Messiah was required at their hands-was an event whose awful sublimity has never yet been surpassed since the world began.

It is indeed true-and let not familiarity blind us to the factthat this is an unparalleled history. No other nation has anything approaching to it in its annals. It is but the baldest truth which the Psalmist utters when he says, "He hath not dealt so with any nation"; and the question of the great lawgiver is unanswerable when he exclaims: "ASK NOW OF THE DAYS THAT ARE

PAST, WHICH WERE BEFORE THEE, SINCE THE DAY THAT GOD CREATED MAN UPON THE EARTH, AND FROM THE ONE END OF HEAVEN UNTO THE OTHER, WHETHER THERE HATH BEEN ANY SUCH THING AS THIS GREAT THING IS, OR HATH BEEN HEARD LIKE IT? DID EVER PEOPLE HEAR THE VOICE OF GOD SPEAKING OUT OF THE MIDST OF THE FIRE, as THOU HAST HEARD, AND LIVE? OR HATH GOD ASSAYED TO GO AND TAKE HIM A NATION FROM THE MIDST OF ANOTHER NATION, BY TEMPTATIONS, BY SIGNS, AND BY WONDERS, AND BY WAR, AND BY A MIGHTY HAND, AND BY A STRETCHED OUT ARM, AND BY GREAT TERRORS, ACCORDING TO ALL THAT THE LORD your God did FOR YOU IN EGYPT BEFORE YOUR EYES?"

Nor have these wonders ceased. Even in their calamities there has been a touch of grandeur, from the greatness and weight of the misfortunes with which they have been overwhelmed. The fall of Jerusalem, equaled in no other nation, has been almost paralleled again and again in their own gloomy history since that event.

Sixty-five years after that occurrence a false Christ appeared. He called himself Bar-Cochha, Son of a Star, in reference to that prophecy which speaks of the Messiah as the "Star that shall come out of Jacob." The Jews, who had again become numerous in Palestine, followed the false light, the standard of rebellion against Rome was once more raised, and a terrible war broke out, which raged for four years, and ended in the utter destruction of the rebels. The whole land was covered with smoking ruins. Palestine was like a desert. Fifty fortresses and nine hundred and eighty-five towns and villages were leveled with the ground, the very name of Jerusalem was changed (to Elia Capitolina) and the final dispersion of the Jews was ac complished. They fled to every land, only to meet in every land new enemies and new sorrows.