were the dynasties of Syria and Egypt, men of renown, superb sovereigns, but bloody destroyers : knowing no law but force; of immense power; giants in evil.

The personal history of the Syrian and Egyptian monarchies is one of the darkest pages of man. It had all the violence of barbarism, but of barbarism armed and envenomed with all the skill and subtlety of civilization. With some flashes of heroic gallantry, and royal munificence, all the rest was ferocity and fraud. Ambition was the only impulse the universal result was gore shed in torrents; the rapid change of dominion from hand to hand; domestic treachery performing tragedies of horror in every palace; hideous feuds rousing the populace of the cities into indiscriminate vengeance; kings, and chiefs of high military name, meeting in perpetual collision, and leaving behind nothing but famine and death Judæa the field of battle of them all.

The national historian describes this dreadful era with simple but strong expression. "The Jews resembled a ship tossed by a hurricane, and buffetted on both sides by the waves, while they lay in the midst of contending seas'."

Still, the Church, though almost expiring, survived. The seven thousand who had not bowed the knee to Baal, were left; the valour and suc

cesses of the Maccabees vindicated the ancient faith, and not seldom recalled the memory of the days, when Heaven fought for the chosen people. But the national degeneracy was an antagonist more powerful than the Syrian sword and buckler. The supremacy of Judah was never to return. She was now to be given into the hand of that great empire, which was unconsciously to prepare the way for an empire, before whose existence all human dominion is but the creature of an hour. In the sixty-third year before the advent of our Lord, the Roman army under Pompey made Judæa tributary. The warning trumpet was now sounded for the great procession to begin, in which all the glories of Judah were successively to follow to the grave. In that grave the whole polity, power, and worship, of the land sleep at this moment; and shall sleep, until they are summoned again, in a convulsion, like that in which they went down; but shaking all nations, felt alike by the living and the dead, and regenerating the moral and physical constitution of the world.

CHAPTER XXXVIII.

CHRISTIANITY.

THE period from the accession of Herod the Great to the fall of Jerusalem, comprehends a hundred years, crowded with events of the most incalculable importance to mankind. The preparatives for the coming of our Lord; the re-building of that temple which was thus to be more honoured than by the Glory from heaven; the visions and predictions of those who looked for the great coming, day and night watching in the temple; the solemn and startling denunciations of the Baptist; the visible presence of the ETERNAL in the flesh; His mission; His power over nature, the human heart, and the Evil Spirit; His death for human sin; His rising again for human justification; His visible ascent to the throne of Heaven; the overwhelming miracle by which fortitude, knowledge, faith, and the power of communicating them all, were inspired into the peasants of Galilee; form an unspeakable display of light

and wisdom, an illustration of Providence which, through all the clouds of time and things, still fixes the eye on that spot above, where the Sun of the Spirit shall break forth at last, and the full aspect of the heavens be shown to man.

The true conception of Christianity is, not that of a new religion, but of an old receiving a more perfect form;-the seed planted in the day of Abraham; shut up, but maturing, in the day of Judah; and shooting above the earth in the day of Christ; the primal faith, buried in weakness, to be raised in power; the body laid in the grave with the patriarchal dispensation; the spirit existing, but separate and viewless, in the Mosaic; the spirit and body re-united, with more vivid attributes, a nobler shape, and a perpetual existence, in the Christian.

The apostles continually declare this identity of principle with the religion of Abraham. They claim expressly under the Abrahamic covenant. St. Paul, alternately astonished at the dulness, and indignant at the prejudice, which could doubt that he himself was a champion of the true national religion, cries out, "for the hope of Israel am I bound with this chain." He unhesitatingly accounts for the reluctance of the Jews to adopt Christianity, not on the ground that they were wedded to the religion of Abraham, but that they had substituted another in its place; and loftily denies their claim to the' very title of

Israelite1, "All are not Israel that are of Israel." Peter, like the preachers of righteousness in the days before the flood, warns the Jews of the ruin which is the inevitable consequence of their apostasy from the primal faith; and our Lord himself, in the most distinct, detailed, and impressive, declaration of Divine wrath ever given, first charges the people with revolt from the spirit of this faith; and then pronounces the coming of that deluge of fire and sword which was to extirpate the being of the nation, as the result of the crime'.

The deluge had overwhelmed alike the two divisions of mankind, the few and feeble Sethites, and the countless and powerful multitudes of

1

Woe unto you Scribes and Pharisees; ye serpents, ye generation of vipers, how can you escape. Upon you shall come all the righteous blood shed upon the earth. All those things shall come upon this generation. (Matt. xxiii. 27, &c.) Then shall be great tribulation, such as was not since the beginning of the world. (xxiv. 21.)

2 It was evidently in a great degree from this view of Christianity, as a consummation of the church of Abraham, merely relieved from the restrictions of the Mosaic Law, (which were professedly temporary,) that the first disciples were so slow in comprehending their mission to the Gentiles. For this reason too, among others, the mission was first limited to the Jews, as peculiarly entitled to the first benefits of the religion of their ancestor in its active and improved state. Even the name of Christian was not known till A.D. 42, at Antioch, and even then was not chosen by the converts, but fastened on them by strangers. (Diss. by Wetstein. Kuinoel; Bloomfield's notes, &c.)