SIGNS OF THE TIMES.

PART II.

I.

THE JEW, HIS RUIN AND RESTORATION. THE prophecies in the Gospels relating to the Jews are signs in every century of this dispensation. But the hopes that begin to bud from every branch of this withered fig-tree are indications of its returning vitality, and of our arrival at the eve of a new dispensation. We have said something about the recent movement among the Jews in the first Lecture. Let us retrace their ruin, so soon to end in their restoration. Jesus said, eighteen hundred years ago, "And they shall fall by the edge of the sword, and shall be led away captive into all nations: and Jerusalem shall be trodden down of the Gentiles, until the times of the Gentiles be fulfilled." Luke xxi. 24.

There is here stated the prophecy of the utter dispersion, degradation, and protracted suffering of the Jew in all the nations and countries of the earth. There is also predicted no less clearly

B

what has been actually fulfilled,—the entire desolation of their illustrious capital, the overthrow of their holy temple, and so far the removal of that central column, the glory and rallying-place of the Jew, to which, with unfaltering fidelity, he still looks from every land, and along every age of the world.

Let us study the prediction of the utter downfal of the illustrious capital, its sacred temple, and all the glory of that place that was once the joy of the whole earth. The destruction of Jerusalem took place, as predicted in the sacred page, and recorded in the annals of the Jewish historian, eighteen hundred years ago. Titus, the Roman general, pitched his camp amid the ruins of the temple, on the very spot where the mercy-seat and the ark, and the glory and the cherubim were, in the year of our Lord 70; and of all the worshippers that were wont to congregate under the roof of that magnificent fane, Josephus states that there were left on its site, in his days, a handful of old and venerable rabbis, who wept, and prayed, and kissed the very stones and ruins of their loved and now lost temple. In the year of our Lord 138, by order of the Roman emperor Adrian, there was set up, in order to insult the Jews, a marble hog, the unclean animal always thought by the Gentiles most obnoxious to the Jews; and in

order effectually to disperse the Jews, as if he undertook to fulfil the prophecy, and leave them not the least discernible trace of the site of their city, he ordered it to be again ploughed up, and another city to be built upon its ruins called by another name. For a great many years the very name Jerusalem was not applied to the town that stood upon the ruins of the ancient city and royal home of David. It is even

doubtful at this moment if the walls and houses in Jerusalem contain, in a single instance, a solitary fragment of the ancient walls and houses of Salem. The only remains that we can trace, as probably a part of its ancient glory, are the deep foundations of a temple, near where a Christian sanctuary is built, consisting of huge stones of enormous dimensions buried in the débris; the corners of which are literally worn and wasted by the lips of the rabbis, that come on pilgrimage to Jerusalem and still kiss the stones of their ancient temple. In their deepest degradation "her people take pleasure in her stones; her very dust to them is dear." The mosque of Omar was subsequently erected by the Mahometans, on what they supposed the site of the ancient temple: and during the Crusades, when the nations that denied a living Christ rushed to rescue the tomb of a dead Christ, the streets of Jerusalem were literally deluged with

blood; and since that day the hoofs of the Arab's steed, the Mameluke cavalry, and the bare feet of the Greek and Roman monk have continued to tread the streets of Jerusalem, and to desecrate the dust of Abraham and Sarah beneath the oaks of Mamre; and the bones of Joseph resting in the hopes of a sure and a certain resurrection. And whilst all these insults have been inflicted on Jerusalem for a very long course of years, the Jew has not been suffered to live in it: in his own city the Jew is now literally the stranger. All religions-Greek, Roman, and Mahometan-have united for eighteen hundred years in keeping the Jew out of Jerusalem, as predicted in the prophets; and the Jews at this day present the spectacle of a people without a home-a nation without a country. It has only been during the last thirty years (and here is the budding of the fig-tree) that any number of Jews have been allowed to live in Jerusalem, and to begin to find homes and raise houses in the midst of it, and to walk again the streets consecrated by the feet of illustrious pilgrims, and to breathe the air that Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and the world's grey fathers breathed many thousand years before.

Not only has their capital been thus destroyed, but in every country to which the Jew has been driven, he continues a sufferer. In Switzerland,