though feeble, will end at last in the matured growth and verdure of the cedar of Lebanon.

There is indeed in this people at present, the mind and the experience of much slavery. That condition of society is unfavourable to the growth of great qualities. In them the extremes of baseness and nobility are to be found. There is all the violence of strong passion, and the lofty feelings of the highest rank. Alternately princes in wealth, and pedlars on the highway, the same families are at times possessed of all the refinements of luxurious prosperity, and compelled in other years to scrape together their sordid earnings for a piece of bread. Fierce passion, fiery thoughts, heroic resolutions, debased and exalted natures, the loveliest and most repulsive forms, the most passionate and loving hearts, and the meanest and most cheating practices, exist among them. They are in all extremes of nature; and how should it not be so, when they are a branded people, degraded, morally and socially enslaved, and yet in all their traffic of woe, they have borne within their nature that indestructible complexity of thought which elevated while it depressed, and has rendered them obstinate in their own belief, and proud in resisting the conviction of the truth of any other creed. Royal virtues and slavish feelings, are singularly in contrast in different individuals amid this people.

Their degradation has been increased, by the almost exclusively commercial character of their pursuits. They have traded until the acuteness of the intellect has become chicanery, and its greatness a stock-jobbing speculation. Money has hitherto absorbed all their faculties, and has contracted though it has sharpened

Ezek. xx.

32-35.

13.

their intellects. They have sought it, nay, have worshipped it as their chief good, because from their uncertain footing amid the nations, the Jew has not been able to calculate how long he might be permitted to remain in the country of his present pilgrimage; and money and jewels are commodities of small compass and easily removed.

Their mind however is not dead. It exists in possession of great power under intense pressure. The endurance of the world's scorn, the calamity of heaven's wrath, the persecutions of eighteen centuries, the mysterious greatness of a dreadful imprecation, the melancholy sense of an enormous ancestral crime, and the implacable resistance of an obdurate nature, have depressed and loaded the Jew with a repulsiveness that most nations feel. He is loved but by few, and then not so much loved personally as nationally by some Christians, because they look in spiritual thought beyond the present to the future. They contemplate him as a man of a nation, destined to vindicate the honour and glory of the divine name by his coming fortunes and restoration. These Christians deplore their degradation, and love the people. The Jew could not be otherwise than what he is, for he has borne a charmed life, indestructible, inconvertible, sealed up for generations of suffering, and at times he has been "mad" from the stern necessities of trial that beset him on every side. "For

Ch. xi. 5 that which came into their mind shall not be at all, that ye say, we will be as the heathen, as the families of the countries." They have therefore lived apart in their own peculiarities, and this exclusiveness has made them too often hateful to the eyes of the world, and

has concealed the real nobility and strong affections of their character.

Second in sublimity and interest only to the fall of man, is the rise, the progress, preservation, and future prospects of the Jewish nation. As a people, it is a solitary and colossal figure presented to our minds, amid whirlwinds of change, and the smoke and dust of falling thrones and departing nations. It is not inferior in interest to the Deluge and the destruction of a world. That is an easy conception, when the might and mastery of omnipotent power are recognized, and the supremacy of a will no opposition can arrest, and no force impede. But the power of preservation in a long succession of national minds, the careful guardianship of human liberty, the argument carried on for three thousand years of mind with mind, of thought with thought, fierce passion in the human creature with calm reasoning and imperative will in the Creator; the multiplicity of transactions with other nations involved in the progress of their dispensation, the extraordinary historical spectacles in the varying fortunes of that people, their unity in one body as a mental miracle, and their dispersion everywhere in fragmental parts, without co-operation, and in open resistance to the divine will preserved in possession of an obstinate faith, and retaining the punishment as well as the glory of being the least repentant people, and yet the most elevated supporters of the divine will and laws this great spectacle is inferior to none yet brought forward before the universe of mental reflections on the stage of this world, since the fall of man and his expulsion from paradise.

But one closing act in this great dramatic history of an extraordinary people is yet wanting to complete the whole.

THEIR RESTORATION is predicted and demanded. Who will stretch out his hand to move the scene and call forth the actors? An empire is to be awakened. A kingdom is to be constructed. Generations stir the dust of long-forgotten vallies and plains, a country in desolation groans, and calls for its children. Shall not Britain arise and extend to them a helping hand, for they are prepared to accept her aid? Sound Policy, scriptural Faith, the best interests of our Country, and the ready practieal compliance with the divine will of so many ardent minds in our country, make some hopeful, that now amid the shock and clamour of Dan. xii. 1. "nation rising against nation," the time may be coming for one "to stand up; that great prince which standeth for the children of the Jewish people—and this people shall be delivered."

APPENDIX I.

THE COMPUTATION OF DANIEL'S SEVENTY WEEKS.

THIS is a subject of great interest, and various explanations have been given of its fulfilment by Chronologists and the great standard Writers on Prophecy. A few remarks only are admissible with my space in these Dissertations.

The time of four hundred and ninety years having been so clearly fixed by the Prophet for the coming of Messiah, and this period being limited in the beginning of its computation to the commencement of the First Restoration, under Ezra and Nehemiah, the Jewish Rabbis and learned men have been at considerable pains to explain it away, or to diminish Daniel's authority as a Prophet. The argument for the advent of Messiah having been completed, it will be perceived, is irresistible. For at whatever period you fix the commencement of the seventy weeks of years, whether at Ezra i. 1., in the first year of Cyrus; or at Ezra vi. 1,-Haggai xi., in the second of Darius; or at Ezra vii. 7., in the seventh of Artaxerxes; or at Nehemiah i. 2., in the twentieth of Artaxerxes ;-either of these four periods will bring the termination of four hundred and ninety years within the limits of the first century after the birth of Christ. And thus we have his birth, and cutting off, and the destruction of Jerusalem and the Jewish polity, falling out before the end of A. D. 100.

In the words of Prophetic Truth, Messiah had come, and was gone then. How therefore can the Jew now look for his appearing? If the word of God is believed, Messiah's advent is over-and whereever he was-he has been "cut off" as an innocent person, (" not

N