run with thorns and thistles, large portions of it in the possession of wild and nameless strangers, and the Samaritans raising a rival power and a rival worship. Canaan lay before her, as it lay when she first set foot within its borders; but with its beauty desolate; for the free and rejoicing millions of Joshua, marching with the pillar of fire before them, and vanquishing by miracle, Judah saw her tribes dependent on the bounty of a heathen master, broken in spirit, enfeebled in numbers, and surrounded with enemies, jealous of her rights, contemptuous of her power, and bitter against her religion. All was to be founded again; she had to fight her whole way upward, and find every step a struggle, not for dominion, but for existence.

The total dispersion of the ten Tribes, conveys a striking reply to the surmise, that there is something in the Jewish nature which forbids national extinction; a physical abhorrence of mixture with foreign habits, which preserves the Jew distinct from all other men. In the ten Tribes we see an assimilation so complete, that nearly all traces of their existence have vanished: this impracticable and unmalleable race, taking the shape of the stranger, even to the verge of identity; exile, like a vast tomb, dissolving them into the general elements of human nature, and leaving no more distinction between the Israelite and the Tartar, or the Mede, than between the dust

of the dead'. If the man of Judah survives all the changes of time and nations, a monumental man, it is by a higher cause than the operation of nature. Neither his customs, his prejudices, his sufferings, nor his blood, are sufficient to account for that ominous severance from mankind, which makes him, mingled as he is with all the transactions of earth, still belong to another state of human being; exhibit in his principles, pursuits, and countenance, the seal of two thousand years ago; and, by a fatality which follows him round the world, wear among all nations the indelible stamp of exile and misfortune. The pillar of salt, that stood for so many ages by the Dead Sea, to remind his ancestors of the guilt of "looking back," when the hand of Heaven led forward, was not a stronger testimonial than the living Jew. The force and multitude of the people had gone down with Israel; they slept, with their national crimes, under the

1

This, however, is said only with reference to the final absorption of those Jews into the mass of the Persian subjects, &c. Large bodies of them continued separate for a considerable period in Media. The Babylonian Jews constituted a community until within fifty years of the Christian era. A few settlements of "black Jews" exist in India, which have been described by Buchanan as preserving the traditions, and professing themselves to be the descendants of the ten Tribes. But such trivial exceptions make no difference in the general fate of the multitude.

waters.

Judah "looked back," in the day when the very angels of the Divine will, the leaders and ministering spirits of Christianity, were pointing to the city of refuge. The shower of wrath reached the lingerer; and there she stands, immoveable and unchangeable, until the great day when all shall change.

CHAPTER XXXIV.

THE RESTORATION OF JUDAH.

THE third period from the close of the captivity to the final fall of Jerusalem, a period exceeding the former by about a century and a half, bore a character signally different from both. The true view of Providence is, unquestionably, that of a Divine energy perpetually exerting itself to extract good out of evil. God tempts no man. He gives no impulse to the natural evil of the heart; but he lays no restraints on human liberty; If prince or people will open their ears to the tempter, their way to ruin is free.

But the triumph of the Divine benevolence is thenceforth to be won, in the consummate skill of converting the very instruments of evil into the unconscious agents of good; in subverting the adversary, by the consequence of his own acts; and even in turning the severest necessary punishments of nations into the material of happiness to mankind.

The utter extinction of the ten tribes was made

an element of preserving religion in Judæa. The Babylonish captivity had been a bitter lesson; but the human mind is elastic, and speedily forgets the wisdom of adversity with the pain. The Egyptian bondage had been a lesson of still keener severity; yet the bond-slaves had scarcely become freemen, when the whip and the dungeon were forgotten, and the Israelite danced and feasted before an idol. If the twelve tribes had returned, and filled the land once more, possession and power might have rapidly obliterated all records of a suffering, so injurious to the national pride. No human barrier could have resisted their passion for idolatry; and the sojourn in Babylon, as in Egypt, would have only added their foreign profligacy to their original licentiousness.

But the days of Jewish plenitude were past. Judah returned, less a chastised people than a humiliated remnant; less an established religion, than a tolerated sect; less bearing the port and dignity of sovereigns of the land, than as slaves, stooping under old vassalage, and ejected from the Babylonian dungeon, to wear the vestiges of the chain upon them to the end of their days. For five hundred years longer, Judah continued a trembling and subdued people, existing on the caprice, or degraded into the prize, of the heathen.

But the discipline of her idolatry was successful.