Darius was most favourable to the Jews. The great mountain did indeed become a plain; the opposition, so formidable as it appeared, issued in a renewal of the decree of Cyrus: the provincial governors shewed no indisposition to give effect to the royal edict, and the work prospered accordingly ".

Meanwhile, although the short commission of Haggai had run its course, the prophetic spirit continued to operate in Zechariah, and the announcements of the promised Messiah assumed a more definite form than ever before, as new revelations were made in visions and by typical representations of the natures and character, the offices and personal attributes of "the Man whose name is the BRANCH," the "Fellow of the Lord of hosts," who should "sit and rule upon His throne, and be a priest upon His throne;" appointed to build a spiritual temple to the Lord, of living stones, as a true Joshua; coming with jubilation to Sion and Jerusalem; "just, and having salvation; lowly, and riding upon an ass, and upon a colt the foal of an ass;" wounded in the hands in "Ezra vi. 1-13.

the house of His friends; prised of them at thirty pieces of silver; opening to the house of David and to the inhabitants of Jerusalem a fountain for sin and for uncleanness *.

Under such auspices was the work prosecuted, and amid such anticipations was the Temple at length completed and dedicated, at the end of twenty years.

It has been well and truly said, that "the faith can receive no real injury except from its defenders. Against its assailants, those who wish to be safe, God protects y." This remark is strikingly illustrated in the narrative which has now been reviewed. The real adversaries of Judah, the real hinderers of the house of God, were not the Samaritans, nor the pagan Persian governors: the half-hearted, lukewarm, selfindulgent Jews themselves were the real obstacle. Their miserable indifference was the heaviest discouragement to the pious zeal of their faithful and true-hearted leaders and it is well worthy of remark that, while the

See Zech. iii. 8; vi. 9—13; ix. 9; xiii. 6, 7; xi. 12, 13; xiii. 1.

Dr. Pusey, Daniel the Prophet, Preface, p. xxv.

open opposition of the adversaries is wholly passed over by the prophets as a consideration of no moment, they denounce in terms of indignant reprobation and remonstrance the ready acquiescence of their countrymen in the delays and difficulties which might have been at once removed and overcome, as in the end they were, by ever so little constancy and perseverance.

So has it ever been in the history of the Christian Church. In all its manifold encounters with the powers of evil, its greatest danger has ever been in the vacillating, compromising, professedly safe but really cowardly policy of its nominal friends and adherents. Many of its truest champions, by whose agency Christ has made good His promise of the indefectibility of His Church, have been regarded as impracticable, obstinate, narrow-minded bigots; and if, as God grant, the Faith is to triumph again over its new assailants, it must owe its victory, under God, to those who will not shrink from the reproach of a St. Athanasius or a St. Cyril.

Tracts for the Christian Seasons.

TWENTY-FIFTH SUNDAY AFTER TRINITY.

JERUSALEM RESTORED.

THERE is perhaps no passage of Holy Scripture so replete with warning and instruction to those who are at this day engaged in the arduous but most blessed task of maintaining God's truth against the oppositions of modern scepticism, and in promoting and extending—if it may be-the influence of the Church of Christ, as the narrative contained in the Book of Nehemiah of the trials and difficulties which he and his worthy associate Ezra had to encounter in completing the work which had been undertaken by Jeshua the son of Jozadak the priest, and Zerubbabel the son of Shealtiel the prince, aided by the prophets Haggai and Zechariah, after the first return of the Jewish captives from Babylon.

No. 78. THIRD SERIES.

4 I

1597

If there is much in the circumstances of these times remarkably parallel to the actual state of the Jewish commonwealth at the time of Ezra's commission, there is still more in the incidents of Nehemiah's narrative suggestive of the distresses and discouragements of these days, and of the spirit in which it becomes the servants of "the God of heaven" to encounter and overcome them.

Fifty-seven years had elapsed since the completion of the Temple, and all who had taken an active part in that work must have been gathered to their fathers, when Ezra, a ready scribe in the Law of Moses, as he describes himself, obtained at his own request from Artaxerxes the king, permission to go up to Jerusalem for the purpose of setting in order what was wanting in the particulars of the Divine service and the ordinances of the Law; armed, moreover, with a royal commission even more ample in its terms than that which Cyrus had granted in the first year of his reign. This decree, like that, gave full and free permission to all who were minded of their