it shall come to pass, that as the Lord rejoiced over you to do you good, and to multiply you, so the Lord will rejoice over you to destroy you, and to bring you to nought. And ye shall be plucked off from the land whither thou goest to possess it. And the Lord shall scatter thee among all people, from the one end of the earth, even unto the other; and there thou shalt serve other gods, which neither thou, nor thy fathers have known, even wood and stone.* And among these nations shalt thou find no ease, neither shall the sole of thy foot have rest; but the Lord shall give thee a

* This appears more remarkable than any other part of this prophecy, as it fixes the persecution of the jews, to compel them to image worship, to a period of time subsequent to their last dispersion and captivity by the romans. Gods of wood and stone they had known too well, and had been at all times notoriously addicted to the worship of them, until they were recovered out of this infatuation by their captivity at Babylon. That first captivity cannot therefore deserve this characteristic mark. For there were but two or three weak upon their conattempts made by their enemies to put a force sciences in regard to religion at Babylon, &c. which did not succeed. But their sufferings on this account in most popish countries, and the frequent feigned conversions of jews, to

trembling heart, and failing of eyes, and sor row of mind.".

The unhappy jews will not become converts to christianity itself, but by a degeneracy suitable to their depravity in all other respects; they are forced to feign conversion to popery, and worship the images of gods unknown to purer times. With so much truth and justice did our blessed Lord reproach their fathers with their unbelief of Moses, when they pleaded against him the words of that great prophet.

"If ye had believed Moses, ye would have be lieved me, for he spake of me."

Of the total overthrow and extinction of their religious and civil polity by the power

escape the dreadful gripe of the Inquisition, are notoriously known. By this singular and previously unknown species of idolatry, to which they should in remote times, and far distant countries be compelled to submit, the prophet must mean the same strange god which Daniel describes, as worshipped in the bosom of a church calling itself christian. (Daniel xi. 39.) See Philo's embassy, in Josephus, 1. 18, c. 11. Leslie's short method with the Jews, p. 59. folio edition.

of the romans, there is a beautiful prophetic description in the fourth chapter of Jeremiah. "I beheld the earth, and lo! it was without form and void; and the heavens, and they had no light. I beheld the mountains, and lo! they trembled, and all the bills moved lightly. I beheld, and lo! there was no man, and all the birds of the heavens were fled. I beheld, and lo! the fruitful place was a wilderness, and all the cities thereof were broken down, at the presence of the Lord,* and by his fierce anger. For thus bath the Lord said,-The whole land shall be desolate ;—yet will I not make a full end,"—It had been declared by our Saviour, that the heavy and collected wrath of heaven should "come upon that generation," for the sins of their fathers as well as for their own, by which they were then about to overcharge the full measure of iniquity. And God had sent the same ill tidings of their approaching abandonment, by the prophet Jeremiah, whose hard fortune it was to be a messenger of ill news, to his great regret, and at the

* The Lord Jesus Christ,

eminent peril of his life.

"This is a nation

that obeyeth not the voice of the Lord, their God, nor receiveth correction: truth is perished, and is cut off from their mouth. Cut off thine bair, O Jerusalem, and cast it away, and take up a lamentation in high places, for the Lord hath REJECTED and forsaken the generation of hIS WRATH." (Jer. vii. 29.)

The hard hearted and malicious jews followed the meek and unresenting Jesus to the place of execution, with reproaches and insults, although his innocence of any thing worthy of death had been publicly proclaimed from the bench by his judge. And as if

even his blood could not satiate their vengeance, they reviled him in his expiring agonies upon the cross. The female part of that turbulent people, seem indeed to have been touched with a more becoming sense of his undeserved and cruel fate, and Jesus returned the compassion which they shewed for him by their unavailing tears, with as great a compassion on his part for the afflictions they were shortly to be exposed to. Daughters

I

of Jerusalem, said he, weep not for me, but weep for yourselves, and for your children! for bebold, the days are coming, in the which they shall say, blessed are the barren, and the wombs that never bare, and the paps which never gave suck. Then shall they begin to say to the mountains, fall on us; and to the bills, cover us. For if they do these things in the green tree, what shall be done in the dry?"-if the innocent must upon occasion be partakers of affliction, what have not the guilty and impenitent to expect?xxiii. 28.)

-(Luke

In St. Matthew (xxiv.) we find Jesus describing that fatal period as a time of GREAT TRIBULATION, "such as was not since the beginning of the world to that time," and such as never should be again, for the intenseness of the heat of the divine wrath, and the accumulation of human miseries. But by the special providence of God, and the judicial infatuation of the jews,* in destroying their own resources, and drawing their swords against

Quem Deus vult perdere, prius dementat.