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"received the testimony of his integrity for a reward; and was moreover esteemed a person of credit as to futurities also." He was regarded as a man high in the imperial favour, and secure of rising by means of that effectual helping hand that kings can give their creatures.

At this distance of time, with no contemporaneous testimony to throw additional light on what he has thought proper to reveal, we cannot undertake to judge the Jewish historian; but it is impossible to avoid remarking, that had he accompanied Vespasian to Rome, his fame would have worn a brighter aspect, his conduct have admitted of a more favourable interpretation, than either can bear under the circumstances of his continuing with Titus, to aid and abet that heathen and his host in the destruction of the Holy City. When to this we again add the fact of his having penned his history under the eye of this imperial pair, father and son, subject to the keen remarks of those who had destroyed the Lord's vineyard, and laid waste His heritage; when we trace in it, as we cannot fail to do, an identification of feeling and interests with those whose hands, whose march, the very streets of whose haughty city, werę still reeking with the warm life blood of Judah, we cannot, we will not

take the word of this recreant and apostate Jew for any particulars calculated to blacken the darkness of Jerusalem in that day of her unprecedented anguish. Desolate, in captivity, moving to and fro with fettered hands and bleeding feet, and a scourge, yea, a sword ever suspended over their lacerated shoulders, the Jews could not sit down to pen a refutation of what their treacherous brother, clad in soft clothing and feasted at Cæsar's table, securely recorded against them. Away, then, with his testimony in all that concerns the enormities committed within the city: there is no warrant in the prophetic scriptures, no evidence in credible history, no analogy in nature itself, for the atrocities that he charges upon his brethren. Rome pagan, no less than Rome papal, needed the forging of a considerable number of lying accusations, to palliate in some degree the horrors of her own diabolical barbarity against the Jewish people. She found a hand, expert and willing in the work of calumny; she made the most of it, and after ages have swallowed with unquestioning gullibility the whole incredible tale. A clearer light is now dawning on the world; and while the Lord God removes the covering from all nations, and the vail that is cast over all people, He also

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begins to take away the reproach of His own peculiar people in many particulars where a false reproach has hitherto rested on them; and soon will all reproach, by His pardoning mercy and redeeming love, be removed from them for ever.

Yet the Jews of that day were guilty, exceedingly, fearfully guilty; or such overwhelming destruction could not have fallen on them, nor would the Lord have delivered the dearly-beloved of His soul, bound and naked, into the hands of her ferocious enemies. What was the crowning sin of the nation we very well know reading by the light of man's instruction the words, the inspired words of their own holy prophets, they had overlooked the important fact of a suffering Saviour dying to redeem, and fixed their eyes exclusively on the more distant prospect of that glorious Redeemer coming to reign. To that portion of Isaiah's prediction which speaks of him as despised and rejected of men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief, smitten and afflicted; bruised for their sins, wounded for their transgressions, scourged that they might be healed; led as a sheep to the slaughter, numbered with the transgressors, entombed, and by his righteousness justifying them; to this they

closed their eyes, and opened them but to behold him coming from Edom, travelling in the greatness of his strength, and in the blood of his and their enemies, and crowned a glorious King.

When Daniel forewarned them of a time being set "to finish the transgression, and to make an end of sins, and to make reconciliation for iniquity, and to bring in everlasting righteousness, to seal up the vision and prophecy, and to anoint the most Holy," at which time, Messiah should be cut off, but not for himself; they refused to ponder the solemn message, and fixed their whole heart on the equally sure word that the same Messiah's kingdom should subsequently be established in majesty and might on the ruins of the long-continued Gentile usurpations. When Zechariah declared that for thirty pieces of silver the Lord should be bartered among them, and that they should look on Him (the context proving a divine person) whom they had pierced, and mourn for him in the deepest humiliation of contrite sorrow, they threw it aside as a sealed book, laying an eager grasp on the triumphant sequel where Israel, restored and re-established in their own land, with every ancient privilege confirmed and redoubled, should behold the nations of the earth coming

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yearly to Jerusalem to keep with them the feast of Tabernacles. In like manner, what God hath joined in the Law, the Psalms, and the Prophets, an atoning Sacrifice and a reigning Deliverer, a Prophet whom all must hear and obey on pain of destruction, a PRIEST upon his throne, they, alas! misled by blind guides, put asunder, and so filled up the measure of the sins of many generations. Then, wrath came upon them to the uttermost; the beauty was defaced, the glory departed, and Judah was cast out for a long, long pilgrimage of suffering and sorrow through the wilderness of cruel nations, whose iniquitous and impious pleasure it has been to help forward the affliction; daring the awful retribution that must follow from that unrevoked assurance given to Israel, "He that toucheth you, toucheth the apple of his eye."

This has been a long digression, but we would fain place the matter in its true light. For many generations, and in many ways, Israel had provoked the LORD; and the fact of their ultimately bringing on themselves a dispersion so long, and sufferings so bitter, as we know them to have undergone during the last eighteen centuries, was distinctly revealed to, and with terrible ex