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drawn, no force or vividness can be added by the strongest coloring of the imagination. In the delineation of the lingering torture, with which he represents them as consumed; he converts us from readers into spectators. While he invokes them, by the most passionate apostrophes to implore for mercy, he addresses our sympathies with an effect, which is not to be attained by the detail of merely fictitious sorrows. Arise, cry out in the night;" are his affecting words, “in the beginning of the watches, pour out thine heart before the face of the Lord; lift up thy hands towards him for the life of thy young children, that faint for hunger, at the top of every street.... The young and the old lie on the ground in the streets: the virgins and young men are fallen by the sword: thou hast slain them in the day of thine anger; thou hast killed and not pitied."* If the afflicting scenes which the prophet describes, with the impressive fidelity of an eye-witness, be calculated to strike us with horror in the detail ; with what agonizing effects must the dreadful reality have been attended upon those who survived the departed glory of Zion! For the description of affliction proceeds," The tongue of the sucking child cleaveth to the roof of his mouth for thirst; the young children ask bread, and no man breaketh it unto them. They that

*Lam. ii. 19-21.

did feed delicately are desolate in the streets : they that were brought up in scarlet embrace dunghills.... Their visage is blacker than a coal; they are not known in the streets: their skin cleaveth to their bones; it is withered, it is become like a stick. They that be slain with the sword are better than they that be slain with hunger for these pine away, stricken through for want of the fruits of the field. The hands of the pitiful women have sodden their own children: they were their meat in the destruction of the daughter of my people. The Lord hath accomplished his fury; he hath poured out his fierce anger, and hath kindled a fire in Zion, and it hath devoured the foundations thereof.'

While we deduce from this unparalleled example of the retributive justice of God, the salutary lesson which it is intended to inculcate; let it not be forgotten, that in thus giving up Judah to the fury of an implacable enemy, the Lord merely withdrew from her that providence, which she blindly refused to acknowledge, or had contumaciously rejected and despised: and that to the last unavoidable result, of withdrawing his protection, and resigning her to the resources in which she put her trust, he had not recourse, until all consistent means had been beneficently tried, to obviate the consequences which follow

* Lam. iv. 4, 5, 8—11.

ed. Before the angel of destruction proceeded on the work of desolation, or the phials of divine wrath were poured out, the prophet's warning voice was heard to proclaim the day of retribution and vengeance. It may be indeed averred, that no consequence ensued, until the sufferer was prepared for its approach by solemn and repeated warnings. In the prediction of Ezekiel, which fixed the period alike of the iniquity of Israel and Judah, the siege of Jerusalem is not only foretold, but the number of the days consumed in it is clearly intimated. However dreadful and appalling, beyond all that had been experienced and conceived, the calamities finally proved, which Jerusalem witnessed, in the hour of retribution; they could not have come, unexpectedly and by surprise, upon those to whom the menace had been conveyed through the prophet, eleven years before it was carried into execution. 66 I will do in thee that which I have not done, and whereunto I will not do any more the like, because of all thine abominations. Therefore the fathers shall eat the sons in the midst of thee, and the sons shall eat their fathers: and I will execute judgments in thee, and the whole remnant of thee will I scatter to the winds.... A third part of thee shall die with the pestilence, and with famine shall they be consumed in the midst of thee: and a third part shall fall by the sword round about thee, and

I will scatter a third part unto all the winds, and I will draw a sword after thee. Thus shall mine anger be accomplished: and they shall know that I the Lord have spoken it in my zeal, when I have accomplished my fury in them."

* Ezek. v. 8, 9, 12, 13.

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LECTURE IV.

2 CHRON. XXXVI. 20, 21.

"Them that had escaped from the sword carried he away to

Babylon; where they were servants to him and his sons, until the reign of the king of Persia: to fulfil the word of the Lord by the mouth of Jeremiah, until the land had enjoyed her sabbaths: for as long as she lay desolate she kept sabbath, to fulfil threescore and ten years."

IN following the course of the Jewish history, during the period of seventy years, by which the events of the captivity and the restoration of Israel are here connected; the sacred author describes the method observed by Divine Providence, in controlling the destinies of that people, as pursuing its accustomed tenor. We discover in them, the usual characters, which distinguish the extraordinary interpositions, from the ordinary dispensations of the Almighty; which prophecy asserts, and establishes by the certainty of its accomplishment.

In the great national revolutions, to which the inspired historian alludes in the text; not merely in announcing the return of the captive people