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prevent many Jews from openly avowing their change of mind.*

There are, doubtless, many difficulties still to be overcome; many Canaanites who must be exterminated. The Talmud is a Goliah in the way of the Christian's progress, in the work of Jewish conversion. Besides, the worldly and interested Rabbi; the scandalous manner in which professing Christians, on the continent, are seen by the Jews to profane their own Sabbaths, and otherwise to dishonour the holy. religion, which they profess to believe and practise; the binding together which subsists between Jew and Jew, both by worldly interests, and national and family connexions, so strong, that we are unable to form any just conception of it; the undeniable fact, that Rabbinists regard Christian nations as typified by Edom and Babylon, and that they are looking with confidence for the outpouring of the Divine wrath upon them; the false impression made on the mind of a Jew by beholding Popish and Greek idolatry; the denial of the divinity of Christ by many Protestant divines on the continent, together with the chilling effect produced on the Jews by some Christians contesting their future and glorious re-establishment in the land of Judea; the disrespect frequently cast on all exertion, in the minds both of Christians and Jews,

* An anecdote was told me a short time ago, for the truth of which I think I may vouch, being persuaded of the veracity of my informant. A pious Protestant gentleman, still alive in the north of Scotland, travelled lately on the Continent, for some hundred miles, in company with a Jew. One evening, he said to his Jewish companion, that he thought it sinful for them to be so much together without acting on Joshua's declaration, " As for me, and my house, we will serve the Lord." The Jew expressed no objection; but before kneeling, he bound the Christian that he would say nothing in his prayer against the Jewish religion, and that he would be equally silent on the subject of his own Messiah; to both of which the latter assented. After having been on their knees for a moment in silence, the Christian all at once turned round, and asked the Jew this question: "Where is your temple, and priest, and altar, and sacrifice? Christ in heaven is my all in all; but how can you pray without those necessary things?" The Jew started instantly to his feet, confessed that he was in error, that he had long believed in the Messiah as come, that such was the faith of many of his brethren, but that they would not acknowledge it till they should be restored as a nation.

by pretended conversions; above all, the shameful manner in which, for centuries, the Jews have been treated by professing Christians, and the unhappy tendency in the Jewish mind to trace all their calamities up to Christ, and their rejection of him; these are some of the Hittites, and Amorites, and Hivites, and Jebusites, who must be driven out before the sword of the Spirit of our ascended Redeemer, to make way for the ancient people of the Lord.

Notwithstanding all these discouragements, there is, in the aspect of the times, much to gladden the heart which is longing for the bringing back of the captivity of Israel. "Why is his chariot so long in coming? why tarry the wheels of his chariot ?"

The hope of restoration to their own land, which has been always cherished by the Jew in every part of the world, and in every period of his history, is now openly expressed. "In Poland, several thousand Jews," says a son of Israel,* "have recently bound themselves by an oath, that as soon as the way is open for them to go up to Jerusalem, they will immediately go thither, and there spend their time in fasting and praying unto the Lord, until he shall send the Messiah." Already the Jewish population in Palestine has been greatly increased; thirty years ago, not more than two thousand Jews resided there, and now the number is said to be forty thousand. Every traveller tells us that he meets multitudes of the sons of Israel, who, when asked the reason of their pilgrimage to Judea, say, that they are going to die in the land of their fathers, like Joseph, when "he gave commandment concerning his bones." They are to be seen in crowds, according to Stephens, a very recent American traveller,† praying through

* Herschell.

We give his own words at length. "The following is a tradition," says he, "serving to illustrate the devoted constancy with which the Israelites adhere to the externals of their faith. One morning, they took me to what they call a part of the wall of Solomon's temple, It forms part of the Southern wall of the Mosque of Omar, and is evidently older than the rest, the stones being much larger, measuring nine or ten feet long; and I saw, that day, as travellers may still see every Friday in the year, all the Jews in Jeru

the cracks and crevices of an old wall, which forms part of a mosque in Jerusalem, but which they believe to have belonged to Solomon's temple; and with their faces towards the wall, and the Bible in their hands, they are to be heard, old and young together, singing, another tells us, in strains which are waxing more and more plaintive, the Psalms of David, and the Song of Solomon, in the language in which they were written.

This fondly cherished hope of the Jew is thus streaming forth and mingling with the desires of the Christian; the point of convergence is reached by long separated hearts; and while Palestine, the object of hope to both, is as it were in a state of vibration between the possession of the Sultan and the Pacha, the Jew, encouraged by the Christian, appears in the attitude of holding out the hand of faith, and claiming that which was made over to his fathers and their seed, by the unchanging promises of Jehovah. The page of Providence is at present sublimely interesting in reference to the coming in of Israel, and a world's regeneration. When we think that, in Germany, the Jews are quivering between infidelity and Judaism, as if Christianity were invited to step in between them; that Rabbinism is every where more salem clothed in their best raiment, winding through the narrow streets of their quarter; and under this hallowed wall, with the sacred volume in their hands, singing in the language in which they were written, the Song of Solomon, and the Psalms of David. Whitebearded old men, and smooth-cheeked boys, were leaning over the same book; and Jewish maidens, in their long white robes, were standing with their faces against the wall, and praying through cracks and crevices. The tradition which leads them to pray through this wall is, that during the building of the temple, a cloud rested over it, so as to prevent any entrance; and Solomon stood at the door, and prayed that the cloud might be removed, and promised that the temple would be always open to men of every nation desiring to offer up prayers; whereupon the Lord removed the cloud, and promised that the prayers of all people offered up in that place would find acceptance in his sight; and now, as the Mussalman lords it over the place where the temple stood, and the Jews are not permitted to enter, they endeavour to insinuate their prayers through the crevices in the wall, that thus they may rise from the interior to the throne of grace."-Stephens' Travels in the Holy Land-1828,

or less assaulted; that the tide of interest appears to be rolling back from West to East; that this country, in September last, considered the commerce of Palestine so increasingly great, as to demand the sending out of a public functionary to Jerusalem itself;*when we think of the almost instantaneous communication between Jew and Jew throughout the world, which attracted the attention of such men as Frederick the Great, and Napoleon himself, as outstripping their quickest telegraphs, and of the progress of art and science, which have done all but annihilated distance both by sea and land; when we think of the rapidity with which the conversion of scattered Israel would leaven with the truth the mass of this earth's population, we feel as if not a nation only, but a world may be spiritually born in a day, when the gospel shall have free course and be glorified...

All the great movements in Providence seem to be pointing, naturally and silently, to the accomplishment of the prophecies respecting the ancient people of God; as the materials of the temple of Solomon were brought already prepared by king and peasant, from the most distant quarters of the earth, and "neither hammer, nor axe, nor any tool of iron, was heard in the house while it was in building;" so, in like manner, there is now a silent but magnificent procedure of events, whereby the Almighty is laying the foundation of a vast spiritual temple, in which there shall be no veil of separation, where there shall be "neither Jew nor Greek, circumcision nor uncircumcision, barbarian, Scythian, bond nor free; but Christ shall be all and in all.”.

*We may here quote the opinion of one well acquainted with the political and commercial condition of Palestine at the present day. John W. Farren, Esq., was the first to raise the British flag at Damascus, having been sent out thither by the Right Hon, the Earl of Aberdeen, so that he has had the experience of several years' residence in an official capacity. In a long paper on this very subject, published as an appendix to Lord Lindsay's Letters on the Holy Land, Mr. Farren writes thus; "I cannot but think that all things are working in that country to a great moral change, and that its mind is being prepared for the reception of the long lost influences of happiness and truth."

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Many are the inferences which might be legitimately drawn from the subject of this lecture, but the following ones are the most obvious: First, does not the present condition of the once highly favoured and illustrious people of Israel warn us to value and improve our spiritual privileges? Why have they been cast away? Why have they been given up to judicial blindness and hardness of heart? Oh! readers, the answer is a solemnizing one in regard to them, but still more deeply solemnizing in regard to ourselves. For unbelief they have been cast away. Secondly, we request you to notice, in the present condition of the Jewish people, a striking confirmation of the word of God. Like leaves, they have been scattered to the four winds of heaven; but on each of those leaves is written the accomplishment of an imperishable prophecy, that it may be read and pondered by themselves, as well as by the nations among whom they are dispersed. Lastly, in the present condition of Israel, there is much to awaken our sympathy and prayers; sympathy, because they are like melancholy ruins of some shattered tower, whose fragments remain to show the might of the hand that smote it, and to call aloud to heaven and earth for restoration; and they demand our prayers, because, in advocating the cause of Israel, we have only to plead with God the fulfilment of his promises-because they prayed for us-and because He who ever liveth to make intercession for us was by birth a Jew. "They forget," says Leighton, "a main part of the Church's glory, who pray not daily for the conversion of the Jews.' From the time of Paul, who said, "My heart's desire and prayer for Israel is, that they might be saved," down to the present day, the language of every pious soul has been, "For Zion's sake I will not hold my peace, and for Jerusalem's I will not rest, until the righteousness thereof go forth as brightness, and the salvation thereof as a lamp that burneth." The spiritually-minded Mr. Love of this century, the light of whose ministrations still lingers among us; Boston, the author of the Fourfold State, which takes precedence

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