to the works in Egypt; and those under seventeen years of age were sold as slaves: but so little care was taken of them, that eleven thousand perished for want. And, at a subsequent period, after their last overthrow by Adrian, many thousands of them were sold while those, who from their inferior quality would fetch no price, were transported into Egypt, where they either perished through famine and shipwreck or were barbarously massacred by the inhabitants.*

(9.) The prophecy finally declares, that the dispersed Jews should become an astonishment, a proverb, and a by-word, among all nations, whither the Lord should lead them.

Of this unhappy people, such has now been notoriously the condition during the space of many centu ries. That Christians should have viewed them with detestation, as the murderers of the promised Messiah, may not perhaps be a matter of much wonder. But there is no particular natural reason, why, among the intolerant Mohammedans, they should be more a proverb and a by-word than any other unbelievers in the Koran; and it is wholly unaccountable on common principles, why they should be viewed in the very same degraded light by pagan nations. Yet so it has ever been: and so, in a great degree, it still is. How should we expect, by any reasoning a priori, that they would be trodden down of the heathen world, who never heard of the Saviour? Behold the Hindoo, at this day, punishing the Jew, without knowing the crime of which he has been guilty.†

2. Such has been the accomplishment of a prophecy, delivered fifteen centuries before the commencement of the predicted desolation: and, in connection with it, we shall find it not uninteresting to

* Joseph de bell. Jud. lib. vi. c. 9. § 2. p. 1291. Hieron. in Zachar. c. xi. vol. iii. p. 1774, cited by Bp. Newton.

Buchanan's Christian Researches in Asia, p. 297, 298.

hear the sentiments of the Jews themselves respecting their present depressed condition.

"Soon after the establishment of Christianity," says one of their writers, "the Jewish nation, dispersed since the second destruction of its temple, had totally disappeared. By the light of the flames which devoured the monuments of its ancient splendour, the conquerors beheld a million of victims dead or expiring on their ruins. The hatred of the enemies of that unfortunate nation raged longer than the fire which had consumed its temple: active and relentless, it still pursues and oppresses them in every part of the globe over which they are scattered. Their persecutors delight in their torments too much to seal their doom by a general decree of proscription, which would at once put an end to their burdensome and painful existence. It seems as if they were allowed to survive the destruction of their country, only to see the most odious and calumnious imputations laid to their charge, to stand as the constant object of the grossest and most shocking injustice, to be as a mark for the insulting finger of scorn, and as a sport to the most inveterate hatred: it seems as if their doom was incessantly to suit all the dark and bloody purposes, which can be suggested by human malignity, supported by ignorance and fanaticism. Weighed down by taxes, and forced to contribute more than Christians for the support of society, they had hardly any of the rights which it gives. If a destructive scourge happened to spread havoc among the inhabitants of a country, the Jews had poisoned the springs; or those men, cursed by heaven, had nevertheless, incensed it by their prayers, against the nation which they were supposed to hate. Did sovereigns want pecuniary assistance to carry on their wars? The Jews were compelled to give up those riches, in which they sought some consolation against the oppressing sense of their abject condition as a reward

for their sacrifices, they were expelled from the state which they had supported, and afterwards recalled to be stripped again. Compelled to wear exteriorly the badges of their abject state, they were every where exposed to the insults of the vilest populace. When from his solitary retreat an enthusiastic hermit had preached the crusades to the nations of Europe, and when a part of its inhabitants left their country, to moisten with their blood the plains of Palestine; the knell of promiscuous massacre tolled before the alarm bell of war. Millions of Jews were then murdered, to glut the, pious rage of the crusaders. It was by tearing the entrails of their brethren, that these warriors sought to deserve the protection of heaven. Skulls of men and bleeding hearts were offered as holocausts, on the altars of that God, who has no pleasure even in the blood of the innocent lamb and ministers of peace were thrown into a holy enthusiasm by these bloody sacrifices. thus, that Basil, Treves, Coblentz, and Cologne, became human shambles. It is thus, that upwards of 400,000 victims of all ages and of both sexes, lost their lives at Cesarea and Alexandria.

It is

And is it after they have experienced such treatment, that they are reproached with their vices? Is it, after being for eighteen centuries the sport of contempt, that they are reproached with being no longer alive to it? Is it, after having so often glutted with their blood the thirst of their persecutors, that they are held out as enemies to other nations? Is it, when they have been bereft of all means to mollify the hearts of their tyrants, that indignation is roused, if now and then they cast a mournful look towards the ruins of their temple, towards their country, where formerly happiness crowned their peaceful days, free from the cares of ambition and of riches?

Since the light of philosophy began to dawn over Europe, our enemies have ceased to satisfy their

with the sacrifice of our lives. Jews are no revenge longer seen, who generously refusing to bend under the yoke of intolerance, were led with solemn pomp to the fatal pile. But, although the times of these barbarous executions are past long ago, although the hearts of sovereigns are now strangers to this cruelty; yet slavery itself and prejudices are still the same. By what crimes have we then deserved this furious intolerance? What is our guilt? Is it in that generous constancy which we have manifested in defending the laws of our fathers? But this constancy ought to have entitled us to the admiration of all nations, and it has only sharpened against us the daggers of persecution. Braving all kinds of torments, the pangs of death, the still more terrible pangs of life, we long have withstood the impetuous torrent of time, sweeping indiscriminately in its course nations, religions, and countries. What is become of those celebrated empires, whose very name still excites our admiration, by the ideas of splendid greatness attached to them, and whose power embraced the whole surface of the known globe? They are only remembered as monuments of the vanity of human greatness. Rome and Greece are no more: their descendants, mixed with other nations, have lost even the traces of their origin; while a population of a few millions of men, so often subjugated, stands the test of thirty revolving centuries, and the fiery ordeal of thirteen centuries of persecution! We still preserve laws which were given to us in the first days of the world, in the infancy of nature! The last followers of a religion which had embraced the universe, have disappeared these fifteen centuries; and our temples are still standing! We alone have been spared by the indiscriminating hand of time, like a column left standing amidst the wreck of worlds and the ruins of nature! The history of this people connects present times with the first ages of the world, by the testi

mony which it bears of the existence of those early periods; it begins at the cradle of mankind, and its remnants are likely to be preserved to the very day of universal destruction. All men, whatever may be their opinions and the party which they have adopted: whether they suppose, that the will of God is to maintain the people, which he has chosen : whether they consider that constancy which characterizes the Jews, as a reprehensible obstinacy; or, lastly, if they believe in a God, who, regarding all religions with equal complacency, needs no other wonders to exemplify his greatness, but the incessant and magnificent display of the beauties of nature: all, if their minds are susceptible of appreciating virtue and tried firmness, will not refuse their just admiration to that unshaken constancy unparalleled in the annals of any nation."*

III. We have now seen both the prophecy and its minute accomplishment: we have next to consider the train of reasoning, which obviously and naturally springs from them.

On the one hand then, we have a very ancient prophecy, not couched in dark and ambiguous terms, but perfectly plain and intelligible: a prophecy, which is contained in the sacred books of the Jews, though it explicitly sets forth their own condemnation; a prophecy, universally believed by them, from generation to generation, to have been uttered by their great legislator Moses, more than fourteen centuries before the Christian era; a prophecy, which on every sound principle of historical evidence, the infidel himself cannot but allow to have been in existence long anterior to the dispersion of the Jews first by Titus and afterwards by Adrian.†

*An appeal to the justice of kings and nations, cited in Transactions of the Parisian Sanhedrim, p. 64.

It may be briefly remarked, that the Samaritan Pentateuch and the Greek version of the Seventy afford a collateral evidence to the genuineness and high antiquity of the prophecy of Moses: but, in truth, I know not, that any infidel writer has ever ventured to deny its priority to its accomplishment.