themselves to retouch or erase; and in coming to the name Jehovah, they always wiped their pens and refilled them. When the manuscripts became at all old or injured, they reverently buried them in graves; and this is the reason why there have not hitherto been found any very old Hebrew manuscripts of the Scriptures-none earlier than A.D. 1200.

Jehoiakim felt none of this reverence. He daringly sent his page, Jehudi, to fetch the roll of the prophecy which he heard Jeremiah had written against him, from the scribe's chamber in the temple, and then he also told Jehudi to read it to him.

Jehudi, however, had read but three or four columns, when the king, who sat in his winter house with a fire burning before him, snatching it from the reader, cut it with a penknife, and cast it into the fire. Two or three of the princes around begged him not to burn it, but he would not hear them. He was then about to seize the writers, Jeremiah and Baruch, but it is said, "the Lord hid them."

*

For this crime it was decreed by God that Jehoiakim should have none to sit upon the throne of Judah, and that his dead body should be cast out in the day to the heat, and in the night to the frost, which was literally fulfilled, as recorded by Josephus in the eighth chapter of his tenth book,-"the body of the king was thrown into the fields without the walls of the city;" "his burial was as the burial of an ass, beyond the gates of Jerusalem ;" and then all the wealth of the city, its princes, its mighty men, and many thousands of captives, were carried away into captivity by Nebuchadnezzar, for seventy years, to Babylon.

*See Jeremiah xxxvi. 23.

THE TAKING OF JERUSALEM BY NEBUCHADNEZZAR.

Jehoiakim's son, Jehoiachin, was placed on the throne as a vassal prince, but retained his position only three months, and was then carried captive to Babylon; his uncle Zedekiah, governed eleven years under the same tribute to Babylon, after which, rebelling, Jerusalem was once more besieged, and finally "spoiled" by Nebuchadnezzar. "The virgin marble of the courts ran red with blood like a reeking winepress in the vintage," and the two great pillars of the temple porch-Jachin and Boaz-with the brazen sea and its twelve bulls, were broken up and carried to Babylon; after which the temple and city were set on fire, and the walls levelled with the ground, while Moab and Seir were saying "Behold, the house of Judah is like unto all the heathen" (Ezek. xxv. 8), and the house of Edom cried also "Rase it, rase it, even to the foundation thereof" (Ps. cxxxvii. 7, 9.)

THE FALL OF NINEVEH.

And sixteen years before Judah passed into captivity, 588 B.C., she had seen the fall of Nineveh-she knew the prophecies of her inspired Nahum and she knew how well the prophet's words had been fulfilled.

The "cedar,' "" "whose root was by great waters, whom all the trees of Eden envied," his branches were fallen, his boughs were broken, and it was written

"All the people of the earth are gone down from his shadow, and have left him." (verse 12.)

The destruction of Nineveh and the extinction of the empire took place between the time of Zephaniah and that of Ezekiel, about 606 B.C. The city

never rose again from its ruins. The total disappearance of Nineveh is fully confirmed by the records of profane history. Herodotus speaks of the Tigris as

the river on which the town of Nineveh formerly stood." An extraordinary rise of the Tigris, which swept away a portion of the city wall, gave admittance to the enemy. The Assyrian monarch, considering further resistance to be vain, fired his palace, and destroyed himself, and Cyaxares completed the ruin by razing the walls and delivering the whole city to the flames; the elements of water and fire combining to fulfil the prophecy of Nahum

"The gates of the rivers shall be opened, and the palace shall be dissolved." (Nahum ii. 6.)

"The gates of thy land shall be set wide open unto thine enemies; the fire shall devour thy bars." (Nahum iii. 13.)

The other royal palaces of the region show equal traces of fire with those of Nineveh; and calcined alabaster, masses of charred wood and charcoal, colossal statues split through with the heat; all that composed the royal palaces and temples went down together into ruins and heaps, to be forgotten for twice twelve hundred years. The winds of age after age piled the sands of the desert over their tomb, and they became the grass-grown sites of Arab villages, and were thus preserved of God to come up as a sign from heaven to us who live in the nineteenth century after Christ.

Those ancient enemies, the Assyrians, had perished from the region, but the remnant of Israel still remains there-brought low and humbled, but still

"the beloved of the Lord."

"I often watched the Chaldeans or Nestorians," says Mr. Layard, "as they reverently knelt, their heads uncovered, under the great Bulls, celebrating

the praises of Him whose temples the worshippers of those frowning idols had destroyed."

And surely the Lord beheld "His people," and the children of Abraham His friend, and had brought them, and none other, to bow down before Him at this fresh entrance to the crumbling halls of the Assyrian kings.

There were priests and deacons of that ancient Chaldean Church among the workmen.

A FAMILY OF THE MODERN KALDANI OR NESTORIANS, EMPLOYED BY MR. LAYARD IN THE EXCAVATIONS AT NINEVEH.

The picture at the commencement of this chapter is of the Koordish Mountains, which form a part of Ancient Assyria, to which the Nestorian Christians betook themselves centuries ago, for safety from persecutions as bloody as those which beset the Waldenses of Piedmont. The American missionaries (the venerated Dr. Perkins and his colleagues), who have rekindled the lamp of God's Word for the sheep of these forgotten folds, have with their native helpers scaled these peaks and threaded these gorges,

to point them to Jesus Christ the Good Shepherd. We have had letters from Nestorian Bible-women dwelling with their missionary husbands in such lonely glens.

In the interim between this and the Day of Pentecost their race have been the "salt" of the Eastern world during the "dark ages" of Europe. The Tablet of Segnanfoo cries out in witness that they had penetrated with their Bible even to China.

"When the Day of Pentecost was fully come, and the Holy Spirit spake by the disciples in the "own language" of "every nation under heaven" to the foreign dwellers at Jerusalem, who, besides the devout Jews, first understood the utterance of "the wonderful works of God"? Who but the Parthians (the modern Kurds or Chaldeans), Medes and Elamites (Assyrians and Persians), and the dwellers in Mesopotamia? The blood of Israel in their long captivities was mingled with those old nationalities, and only the two tribes had returned to Jerusalem under Ezra. The inspired men of Palestine now took their ancient brethren captive with the truth-the truth that "all the house of Israel might know assuredly that God had made that same Jesus whom Judah had crucified, both Lord and Christ." (Acts ii. 36.)

There seems no reason to doubt that at this era, the era of their baptism and receiving of the gift of the Holy Ghost (see Acts ii. 38, 39), that Chaldean Church of Christ took rise which has ever since called itself the "Beni Israel." At this hour their forlorn remnant is completing its almost 4000 years' history, the children of Abraham by divine choice, of Abraham who himself was called of God out of Ur of the Chaldees.