eat them for want of all things secretly in the siege. and straitness, wherewith thine enemy shall distress thee in thy gates-

"Then the Lord will make thy plagues wonderful and the plagues of thy seed, even great plagues and of long continuance, and sore sicknesses and of long continuance

"And 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 from the land, whither thou goest to pos

sess it.

"And the Lord shall scatter thee among all people, from the one end of the earth even to the other

"And among these nations shalt thou find no ease, neither shall the sole of thy foot have rest: but the Lord shall give thee there a trembling heart, and failing of eyes, and sorrow of mind: and thy life shall hang in doubt before thee: and thou shalt fear day and night, and shalt have none assurance of thy life. In the morning thou shalt say, Would God it were even! and at even thou shalt say, Would God it were morning! for the fear of thine heart wherewith thou shalt fear, and for the sight of thine eyes which thou shalt see.

"And the Lord shall bring thee into Egypt again with ships, by the way whereof I spake unto thee, Thou shalt see it no more again: and there ye shall be sold unto your enemies for bond-men and bond-women, and no man shall buy you

"And thou shalt become an astonishment, a proverb, and a by-word, among all nations, whither the Lord shall lead thee

"So that the generation to come of your children that shall rise up after you, and the stranger that shall come from a far land, shall say;-What meaneth the heat of this great anger? Then men shall say; Because they have forsaken the covenant of the Lord God of their fathers, which he made with them when he brought them forth out of the land of Egypt:-the Lord rooted them out of their land in anger and in wrath and in great indignation, and cast them into another land, as it is this day*."

11. Thus runs the prophecy: a prophecy, which cannot be said to be dark and obscure and ambiguous and unintelligible; but which is delivered in terms, plain, simple, and perspicuous to the meanest intellect.

1. Its minute accomplishment in every particular, however that accomplishment is to be accounted for, is not a matter of doubt or dispute or speculation: on the contrary, it is a naked matter of fact, which is recorded by his tory, and which even at the present day we be◄ hold with our own eyes. Familiarly does it meet us, wherever we direct our steps: and, extraordinary as it is in itself, the very circum stance of its familiarity, like the periodical rising and setting of the sun, causes it to produce the less vivid effect upon our imagination and the less forcibly to arrest our languid attention. Among the heedless and the inconsiderate, even the notoriety of the fact tends to diminish its impressiveness.

Yet, while the general accomplishment of the

Deut. xxviii. xxix,

prophecy is seen and acknowledged, its minute accomplishment in a great variety of particulars is not always equally attended to; though such is eminently the matter, which best serves for the basis of an invincibly conclusive argument. That the full weight of this remarkable circumstance may be felt and perceived, let us consider the prediction in all its leading points, article by article.

(1.) Moses begins with foretelling, that the threatened curses, when they overtake the wretched Israelites, shall be religiously viewed as a sign and a wonder: and he concludes with declaring, that, when men should behold their strange and unparalleled condition, they would be stirred up by curiosity to inqure into the grounds and reasons of it; intimating at the same time, that the never failing answer would be, that these calamities were judicial. The Lord rooted them out of their land in anger and in wrath and in great indignation; and cast them into another land, as it is this day.

Such, accordingly, is the precise aspect, under which these curses are now beheld by all nations: such is the invariable solution, which is given of the phenomenon. It is universally taught and believed, that the Jews labour under the special curse of God. Their troubles are not viewed as a matter of ordinary occurrence, which may reasonably deserve and attract little attention: but they are considered as something out of the common course of nature; and they are contemplated, as an awful indication of the divine displeasure. According to the prophecy, this opinion, whether justly founded as the Christian

I

believes, or unjustly founded as the infidel imagines; yet, at all events, as a simple fact, this opinion is to be generally entertained: and, in the accomplishment of the prophecy, this opinion always has been entertained.

(2.) The agent, that in the first instance inflicts these troubles upon the Jews, is described, as a nation of a fierce countenance, a nation distant in point of locality from Palestine, a nation whose language should be unintelligible to the sufferers: and this agent is represented, as besieging them in a fortified town of extraordinary strength, and as completely succeeding in his enterprise notwithstanding the confidence which they should place in their lofty and well-defended

towers.

Remarkable, though perfectly familiar to every student of history, is the accomplishment of this particular also. With the several languages of their immediate neighbors, the Jews were not unacquainted; for the Hebrew, the Phenician, the Syriac, the Chaldee, and the Arabic, are all dialects of one and the same primitive tongue: but the Latin which was spoken by the Romans, and the various barbaric western languages which were spoken by their auxiliaries, were utterly unknown to the Jews as a nation. From far distant Italy came this people of a proverbially fierce countenance: and the strong fortifications of Jerusalem, in which the besieged obstinately placed their trust, and which excited the admiration even of Titus himself, were unable to defend them in the day of trouble.

(3.) The horrors of the blockade are prophetically announced to be so great, that even delicate

women, while they grudged every morsel to their husbands and adult children, should mercilessly slaughter and devour their own infants.

I need scarcely repeat the often told and well known facts recorded by the Jewish historian Josephus. Such was the scarcity produced by the siege, that the scanty morsel was greedily snatched by wives from the very mouths of their husbands, by sons from the mouths of their fathers, by mothers from the mouths of their infants.* Nor was this the worst misery, to which they were reduced: a still more dreadful portent was necessary to the accomplishment of the prophecy. That portent was the unutterable abomination of a worse than Thyestean banquet: a woman of high rank, impelled by the fury of raging hunger, slew and devoured her own sucking child +

(4.) The troubles, which should come upon the Jews, are foretold to be at once great in extent and long in continuance.

Such, accordingly, they have been. Affecting the whole nation both generally and individually, they have continued without remission for the space of more than seventeen centuries.

(5.) It is further predicted, that this extraordinary people should not only be brought to` great and lasting misery; but that they should likewise be violently plucked from the land, which, when the prophecy was delivered, they were on the point of occupying as conquerors.

Here again we cannot but observe the exact

*Joseph. de bell. Jud. lib. v c. 10. 3. p. 1245. lib. vi. c. 3. § 3. p. 1274. edit. Hudson, cited by Bp. Newton.

Ibid. lib. vi. c. 3. 4. cited by Bp. Newton.