escape from Babylon, denounced Jeremiah as a traitor whose advocacy of non-resistance to foreign aggression was demoralising the warriors of Judah? The prophet was, however, no suborned traitor, but an honest fanatic, who, mistaking the merely human forecast of Babylonian conquest for divine revelation, attributed impending events to the decree of Jehovah; and thus finally disposed of the theory of a Chosen Race by depicting the national God as the author of national ruin.

The inhabitants of Judah were at length carried captive into Babylon, where under a stable government they developed those habits of enterprise and industry so conspicuous in their modern descendants, and attained a material prosperity which rendered them quite as unwilling to return to the Holy Land as their brethren of Israel, who had been already absorbed within the national life of Gentile civilisation. When, therefore, the prophets of the Captivity proclaimed a new exodus, the opulent Hebrews remained with their possessions, and witnessed the departure of their poorer brethren devoted to the hopeless task of, some day, restoring the empire of Solomon through supernatural assistance.

The entire body of Hebrew emigrants consisted of about forty-two thousand. At a remote period of their history, at least two millions of the children of Israel set out from Egypt with the same design of obtaining possession of the Promised Land; and now, after the lapse of nearly a thousand years, the national roll-call of a people, who were to have counted as the sands of the sea-shore, could only assemble numbers equivalent to the population of a modern country town.

If the prophecy of Jeremiah respecting the return

from Babylon within seventy years be not a vaticinium ex eventu, then the prediction produced its own fulfilment. Daniel declares that he learned the predestined period of the Captivity from the writings of Jeremiah.1 In due time, therefore, the Jews who were desirous of restoring Jerusalem brought before Cyrus the alleged prophecies of Isaiah, in which the Hebrew Deity addresses that monarch by name nearly two hundred years before his birth: I am the Lord, that saith of Cyrus he is my shepherd, and shall perform all my pleasure even saying to Jerusalem, Thou shalt be built, and to the temple, Thy foundation shall be laid.' And again Thus saith the Lord to his anointed, to Cyrus, whose right hand I have holden, to subdue nations before him, I will go before thee, and give thee hidden treasures, that thou mayest know that I the Lord which call thee by thy name am the God of Israel.' The obvious inconsistency of this predictive accuracy with the customary vagueness of Hebrew oracles, discloses the presence of pious fraud, interpolating Isaiah to win the co-operation of Cyrus in the patriotic design of rebuilding the temple at Jerusalem.

On this subject we hold the independent testimony of Josephus, already cited in Chapter VII. of this work, according to which the fulfilment of Hebrew prophecy meant the study of ancient bards and the deliberate accomplishment of their supposed predictions. How marvellous that the candid admissions of the Hebrew historian have not, long since, revealed to Christian theologians the vanity of prophetic pretensions to the miraculous!

1 Dan, ix. 2,

Under what divine covenant did the Jews return to the Holy Land? Thus speaketh the Lord God of Israel, write thee all the words that I have spoken unto thee in a book. For lo, the days come that I will bring again the captivity of my people Israel and Judah ; and I will cause them to return to the land that I gave to their fathers, and they shall possess it. And I will bring Israel again to his habitation, and he shall feed on Carmel and Bashan, and his soul shall be satisfied upon Mount Ephraim and Gilead. In those days, and in that time, saith the Lord, the iniquity of Israel shall be sought for, and there shall be none, and the sins of Judah, and they shall not be found: for I will pardon them whom I reserve." Again: For thus saith the Lord, David shall never want a man to sit upon the throne of the house of Israel. Neither shall the priests of the Levites want a man before me to offer burnt offerings, and to kindle meat offerings, and to sacrifice continually. As the host of heaven cannot be numbered, neither the sand of the sea measured, so will I multiply the seed of David my servant, and the Levites that minister unto me." Does the subsequent history of the Jews authenticate the inspiration of the prophet, by recording the fulfilment of the promises of Jehovah ?

For two centuries after the return from Babylon the Jews remained subject to Persia. On the conquest of that empire by the Macedonians, and the death of Alexander the Great, rival generals fought for the possession of Judæa, which eventually became the prize of Ptolemy Lagus, who entered Jerusalem on the sabbath

1 Jer. 1. 19, 20.

2 Jer. xxxiii. 17, 18, 22.

without resistance, because Hebrew piety had now attained a perfection which placed the observance of Mosaic law above the duties of patriotism.

Another century witnessed the dominion of the Ptolemies in Judæa, followed by the invasion of Antiochus the Great, who defeated the Egyptian general and annexed the Holy Land, under the name of Palestine, to the kingdom of Syria.

The Jews enjoyed an interval of prosperity under their new master and his immediate successor, but Antiochus Epiphanes sold and resold the office of High Priest to rival candidates of Grecian culture, whose tumultuous conflicts summoned the Syrian monarch to Jerusalem, where he massacred forty thousand of the inhabitants, plundered the temple, defiled the sanctuary, and departed with a multitude of captives, leaving the survivors at the mercy of a Phrygian governor surpassing his master in cruelty.

Two years later Antiochus sent Apollonius to Jerusalem to revive the tragedy of rapine, slavery, and massacre, with the appalling results of thousands slain, whilst piously obeying the fourth commandment, the city plundered and burnt, its walls demolished, and hostile fortifications constructed on Mount Zion, within which the Syrian garrison retired with the captive wives and daughters of the dishonoured dead.

Still greater horrors awaited the unhappy Jews. An edict of the Syrian tyrant proclaimed catholicity of worship throughout his dominions; Mosaic rites and ceremonies were abolished; altars erected to Syrian gods; the temple reconsecrated to Olympian Jove; and the worship of Jehovah suppressed with a savage

cruelty, which terrified some into apostasy, and bestowed on others the crown of martyrdom.

Thus, in the fourth century from the Restoration, we find the unhappy descendants of the Hebrews, who had been lured from Babylon by the fatal mirage of prophecy, suffering the disastrous consequences of superstitious reliance on the supernatural. According to prophetic oracles, they were to multiply as the sands of the sea, and yet their country is depopulated by recurrent massacre. They were to live as freemen under the dynasty of David, and yet are the defenceless slaves of an alien despot. Their reconstructed city was to endure for ever,1 and yet its houses are destroyed, and its walls demolished. The priesthood was to offer unfailing sacrifices, and yet Mosaic ritualism is abolished, and its ministers slain or forced to witness the appalling sacrilege of Jehovah's altar defiled by the impious abominations of heathen worship.

There can be no pretence that these calamities are inflicted in punishment of Hebrew transgressions. The sins of their forefathers had been blotted out; and, from the Restoration to the massacres of Antiochus, the Hebrews had renounced idolatry, fulfilled the law, and worshipped Jehovah with all the piety demanded by the most zealous of the Prophets; and, if some tendency to Grecian apostasy existed among them, general loyalty to Jehovah sustained the national claim to the favour and protection of the national God. When, therefore, we find Jehovah as unmindful of his promises, and as callous to Hebrew suffering, as fourteen centuries previously, when the daughters of Israel wept

1 Jer. xxxi. 38-40.