of an army presumed to be invincible, opening his mouth in blasphemy against God, and already rioting in the fancied possession and spoil of the holy city. But the time was not yet come. A prince

filled the throne who knew where to have recourse for assistance, and how to engage Heaven on his side. Therefore the virgin, the daughter of Zion, de"spised" the tyrant, "and laughed him to scorn; "the daughter of Jerusalem shook her head at him." Suddenly, in the dark and silent hour of midnight, without noise or violence, the flower of the Assyrian army is cut off at a stroke. The Almighty puts his hook in the nose, his bridle in the lips of the blaspheming infidel, and leads him back disarmed like a wild beast taken in the toils, the contempt and hissing of those nations, who had so lately trembled at his power and majesty.

But at length Judah's hour came. The transgressions of her kings, of her priests, and of her people, which had made the whole head sick and the whole heart faint, required a strong and efficacious medicine. Her corruptions were become such as could not be purged away but by the spirit of judgement and the spirit of burning, and she was to drink deep of the cup of the Lord's fury. The haughty and terrible Nebuchadnezzar was the person appointed to administer it, and she drank it off to the dregs. Jerusalem is laid in ashes, and her children go into captivity. In the school of affliction they are taught the lesson of repentance. By the waters of Babylon they sat down and wept, wept over the miseries of the church, and the sins that caused them; yea, they

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wept when they remembered Zion, when they remembered what she had been, and saw what she was. Desolate and forlorn, she now sits upon the ground, who was once exalted above all the earth, and calls to the whole world to see if ever there was sorrow like her sorrow, and to receive instruction by her fall. Her lamentations by the mouth of Jeremiah are recorded for the use of all who may find themselves in the like circumstances, if they prove not sufficient to prevent men from falling into them. Yet even here God left not himself without witness, nor his church without honour. The irresistible monarch, whose pride made him ready to propose him. self as an object of worship to all people, and nations, and languages, falls down at the feet of a Jew; Daniel is made first of the presidents, and a prophet rules in the province of Babylon; while the abasement of that prince, by the judgement of God, even to the condition of the beasts of the field, seemed to prognosticate the fall of the empire, which came to pass in the days of his grandson.

For now, Babylon, the glory of kingdoms, the beauty of the Chaldees' excellency, having performed the task allotted her, was to be overthrown as Sodom and Gomorrah; the staff wherewith the Lord had smitten so many nations, the hammer which had broken the whole earth to pieces, was to be itself cut asunder and broken, and the sceptre of the world transferred to the second great monarchy, that of the MEDES and PERSIANS. To this end we see raised up a prince with a disposition calculated to conciliate the affections of all nations, improved

and trained up in a discipline which has been the admiration of every age since, reducing to practice all the maxims of political wisdom which he had been taught, and prosperous in all his undertakings, until by the taking of Babylon he had brought down to the ground, and laid low in the dust, that insolent spirit which characterized the Chaldean empire. This transaction profane history relates at large. But the drift of Providence in it had never been known, if the Scriptures had not opened to us, through the divine economy in this affair, a prospect terminated by the restoration of the church of God, who saith of Cyrus, many hundred years before his birth, "He is my "shepherd, and shall perform all my pleasure, even

saying to Jerusalem, Thou shalt be built, and to "the temple, Thy foundations shall be laid. I have "raised him up in righteousness, and I will direct "all his ways: he shall build my city, and he shall "let go my captives, not for price nor reward, saith "the Lord of hosts. For Jacob my servant's sake, "and for Israel mine elect, I have even called thee

by thy name: I have surnamed thee, though thou "hast not known me." Accordingly, in the very "first year of his reign," after having been showed, as we must suppose, by Daniel, whom he found in the court of Babylon, these prophecies of Isaiah concerning himself, "he made a proclamation through"out all his kingdom, and put it also in writing, "saying, Thus saith Cyrus, king of Persia, All the "kingdoms of the earth hath the Lord God of heaven given me, and he hath charged me to build "him an house in Jerusalem which is in Judah:

"Who is there among you of all his people? The "Lord his God be with him, and let him go up.' For this cause, therefore, was the Persian monarchy suffered to be erected, because Jehovah was become gracious unto his land, and had determined to make Cyrus his instrument in bringing back the captivity of Jacob.

But in process of time this empire having begun, under the tyrant Ochus, to persecute the church which it had till then protected, was not long after broken in pieces by the king of GRECIA, or Alexander the Great, the founder of the third monarchy, whose fury against Jerusalem, for refusing the succours he demanded, was on a sudden, at the sight of the high priest coming forth in his vestments at the head of a procession to meet him, turned into a reverence for the temple, and an admiration of the prophecies; in which seeing himself plainly portrayed, he marched on against Darius to certain victory; and having thus performed the work for the execution of which God had raised him up, was thrown aside as a withered rod, dying at Babylon in the 33d year of his age. The carrying away of the Jews to the number of 100,000 into Egypt under Ptolemy Lagos, one of his successors, and the cruelties of Antiochus Epiphanes, a descendant of another of them, served only, the former to diffuse the knowledge of the God of Israel among the nations, preparatory to their conversion by the Gospel; the latter to manifest the power of that God, and to call forth the glories of the Asmonean family a.

* See VITRINGA in Zach. p. 205.0

In their days, as we find by the book of Maccabees, the first league was made with the ROMAN power, which was ere long to constitute the fourth and last monarchy, and was now grown strong enough to protect the church against the kings of Syria, as it did for many years. But when the Jews had forsaken the God of their fathers to go after their own traditions, and had at length filled up the measure of their iniquities by rejecting their Messiah, after he had accomplished all their prophecies, crucifying the Lord of glory, and persecuting his apostles; the spirit of life passed from the law into the Gospel, and left their religion a breathless carcass: directed by Heaven, the Roman eagles flew to the prey, and Jerusalem was destroyed with a destruction which astonished the soul of Titus himself, and hath made the ears of every one that hath heard it to tingle, from that day to this. The Roman empire, which, by uniting all nations under its government, prepared the way for the universality of the true religion, having thus been by turns the protector and exterminator of the Jewish, the persecutor and the defender of the Christian church, was itself, like all the empires that had gone before it, broken in pieces, first by its division into Eastern and Western; then by an inundation of the barbarians subdividing it into these

The Gospel, receiving strength from every successive persecution, at length conquered the conquerors of the world; the despised and ignominious cross of the poor afflicted Galilean was engraved upon the foreheads of princes, and became the great or nament and glory of the imperial diadem.

Causes of the Full of the Roman Empire. BossUET, ii. 184.

VOL. III.

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