had foreshown to them its imminent destruction and desolation. Its people had rejected Him who came to save them; and had even imprecated the curse on themselves, when they cried out for his crucifixion, "His blood be on us and on our children." And when yet again, after that the Spirit had been poured out from on high, and that the apostles, with all its signs and mighty wonders to attest the truth of their mission, had preached and pressed upon them with all earnestness, both at Jerusalem and throughout the provinces, the Gospel of his salvation, (it was their Lord's last charge to them to do so,3)-when that unhappy people for twenty, thirty, forty years had still rejected, pertinaciously rejected, this witness of the Spirit, and last offers of mercy, then at length the Almighty's protection was withdrawn; and wrath came on them to the uttermost.

2

Not without providential warnings loud and many did it fall upon them. The predicted preliminary signs appeared in course,-of earthquakes and famines and pestilences, of wars and rumours of wars, of false Christs, and fearful sights, sounds, and wonders, in heaven above and the earth beneath, yea, and even within the solemn recesses of the sanctuary; 6-signs appointed

To the disciples, Matt. xxiv. 2, Luke xix. 41-44, xxi. 24, &c; to the people themselves, Matt. xxi. 40, 41, 43, xxiii. 35-38, Luke xxiii. 28, &c.

The manner in which St. Paul, in the fulfilment of his mission among the Gentiles, always sought out the Jewish synagogue and the Jews, to whom first to preach the gospel of Jesus Christ, is very remarkable.

3 Luke xxiv. 47; "

Beginning at Jerusalem."

4 Might not what is said, Matt. xii. 31, of the sin against the Holy Ghost, have had some reference to this rejection by the Jews of the dispensation of the Spirit?

5 See Bishop Newton's or Lardner's (vi. 402, &c.) historical illustrations of these several points in Christ's famous prophecy of the destruction of Jerusalem.

Josephus' report (B. J. vi. 5, 3) of the voice, just before the taking of the city, from within the temple, "Let us depart hence," is known to all. Let me add a singular Jewish tradition of a similar sign said by the Rabbies to have occurred forty years before, or just at the time of the rejection and crucifixion of Christ by their nation. It is given in Kimchi's Comment on Zech. xi. 1-3, Open thy doors, Lebanon," &c. Says he: "Our Rabbies of blessed memory have interpreted this chapter of the desolation of the second Temple, for Lebanon is the Holy Temple. They say that forty years before the destruction of the Temple, the doors of the sanctuary opened of themselves. Rabban Johanan ben Zakkai reproved them, and said, O sanctuary, sanctuary, how long wilt thou terrify thyself? I know that thy end is to be left desolate; for Zechariah has prophesied against thee long since, Open thy doors, Lebanon." On which pas

as if to force the attention of the Jews, if so it might be, or, if not, of Christians at least, and perhaps of the heathen world itself, to the coming judgments as from heaven. And just after Paul in his Epistle to the Hebrews, and James too in his Epistle, had uttered their last warning voice in vain,' first, the war, and then, a year or two after, the siege began; and with it those unparalleled horrors that had been foretold by Jesus, when He looked on the city and wept over it. The sad story of the catastrophe was but too fresh in St. John's remembrance: the fulfilment of the predicted horrors too complete and notorious. No Christian eye indeed had beheld them in their progress. Warned by their Lord, the Christians had quitted the devoted city when first they saw the vanguard of the Roman army plant its idolatrous ensigns, the predicted" abomination that was to make desolate, in the holy precincts of the Holy City. But many a wretched outcast Jew had since wandered into Asia; a living monument of his country's ruin, and bearing, like Cain, God's mark of reprobation on his brow. The learned and noble Jew, (alas, not Christian Jew) Flavius Josephus, had recounted in his lately published History all the details of the siege in all their horrors, and Titus himself authenticated the narrative. Moreover the Christian disciples, alike in Rome and in Judea, spoke of memorials of the catastrophe, now visible in either place, a spectacle for the world :-in the one, the Arch of Titus, exhibiting in its nicely chiselled sculptures the captured furniture of the once Holy Place, the table

3

sage see Dr. M'Caul's Note, who says that the tradition is found in the Babylonian Talmud, Treatise Yoma, fol. 39. And compare the fact of the rending of the veil of the temple at that precise time.

1 The date of each of these Epistles is fixed by Macknight and other commentators at about A.D. 62; only three or four years before the war broke out. Compare the warnings in Heb. x. 37, and James v. 8, on the imminence of the coming destruction of the Jewish polity, if not of the world.

2 See Bishop Newton, ibid.

3 So the Author of the Quæst. et Respons. ad Orthodox. appended to Justin Martyr's Works, (Ed. Colon), Quæst. 108 respecting the Jews: Oi de vvv Tw Χριστῳ απειθούντες αυτών, της μεν οικείας πατρίδος απελαθέντες εις πασαν την γην ελικμήθησαν, τοις δε εθνεσιν εις δουλειαν εξεδόθησαν ατιμον, ὡς τα πραγματα στηλης βοᾷ περιφανεστερον.

4 Χαραξας τη εαυτου χειρι τα βιβλια, says Josephus. Vit. § 65.

for shew-bread, the book of the law, and the sevenbranched candlestick; in the other, the City itself, desolate and in heaps; its ruins still stained with blood, and black with fire; and of its Temple especially (just as Jesus had predicted) not one stone left upon another, because the people knew not the time of their visitation.2

Thus Jerusalem was no more; and, as its temple, so the ritual, polity, and dispensation essentially associated with it, overthrown. But meanwhile a better dispensation had been striking its roots far and wide in the world; with a better temple, better worship, better polity, and better hopes and promises attached to it :its temple the heavenly presence, now opened by the blood of Jesus; 3-its worship a spiritual worship, with Christ Himself the Lamb of God for its high priest and sacrifice;-its polity one constituted by community in a heavenly citizenship; the members thereof being God's election of grace, now in process of gathering from out of an apostate world, and at present scattered, despised, persecuted, but after a little while to be manifested complete in glory, number and union, even at their Lord's coming.-Mighty had been the power of the world, mightier still the malice and the subtlety of Satan, the Prince of this world, to arrest its progress, and stop the promulgation of its doctrine by the Christian disciples. But in vain. In number few, so as that an upper room might almost contain them, at the time when charged by their risen Lord with the commission

5

6

1 See the engraving in Calmet.—He gives a well-known medal too, struck on the occasion, representing Judah as a woman-captive seated under a palm-tree, and a Roman soldier standing by; with the legend Judæa capta. What an illustration to the eye itself of the fulfilment of Isaiah's prophecy, "And she being desolate shall sit upon the ground." Isa. iii. 26.

2 When the Romans had taken Jerusalem, Titus ordered the soldiers, says Josephus, to dig up the foundation both of the city and of the temple:" TNV TE πολιν και τον νεων κατασκαπτειν. De B. J. vii. 1. I.

3 Heb. ix. 24, x. 19, &c.

Phil. iii. 20: "Our citizenship (woλITEVμa) is in heaven."-So the beautiful description of Christians in the Epistle to Diognetus, written some eighty or ninety years probably after the Apocalypse, Επι γης διατριβουσι, αλλ' εν ουρανῳ πολιτεύονται, Lardner, ii. 142.

EKKλnola; lit. an assembly, or gathering, called out of; i. e. out of the world. It is to be regretted that our word church should so little convey an idea of the primitive meaning of the original. 6 John xx. 19, Acts i. 13.