his rabble of zealots into an army of solid troops, capable of meeting and repelling the royal hosts commanded by generals who had been trained in the Macedonian school of arms.

Judas met Apollonius, the Greek general commanding Samaria, and overthrew him. Next, he defeated Seron, general of Cœle-Syria, in the great battle of Beth-horon, the Morgarten of Jewry. Afterwards Lysias, assailing him in the still greater battle of Emmaus, the Sempach of Jewry, suffered a magnificent repulse; on which the victor marched into Jerusalem, cleansed that city of idols, purified the Temple hill, re-established Circumcision and the Sabbath, and solemnly dedicated the Holy of Holies to the living God. But his toils were not ended; for a new king of Syria sent fresh armies, under Nicanor, against the patriots. Judas met and overthrew Nicanor in the terrible field of Adasa. Then came a cloud from another side, and the Lion of Judah fell fighting against enemies, outnumbering his forces twenty to one, and was buried with his father on this Modin mound. Jonathan and Simon, his heroic brothers, his equals in genius and address, if not in the fiery quality of his blood, succeeded to his command, and their sons became kings and high priests of the country which he had saved.

Yakoub stands near the horses, while Ishmael leads the way by a quiet lane to the summit; a wide space covered with ruins, perhaps of a palace, certainly of a tomb; from which a magnificent view of the broad plain, and of the bold valley of Ajalon, rewards the climber for his toil. Far off, the sea is

shining in the dawn, but unlike our English waters, is without a sail. Near us, in our front, rise the mountains into which Mattathias fled with his sons; vast, rugged, dark, abrupt. We could fire a shot into Bab el Wady at their feet. Above, to the left, perched high among the clouds, is Beth-horon; four miles from this place stood Adasa; and in the plain, here at our feet, beyond the camel path, lies the village of Amwâs, on the site of Emmaus. The country bristles with battle-fields, and the whole aspect of the land is heroic.

Modin is one of the centres of Jewish thought and action; for the Maccabees were priests as well as kings; and a man who overlooks its story, will be apt to stray when he comes to study the events of a later and more sacred drama than a national

war.

Nobler servants than the Maccabees it would be hard to find in Israel; larger service than they rendered to their country it would be impossible to find. It is not enough to say that they found the Jews enslaved, and that they left them free. In a political sense, they made the country. When Mattathias struck down the pagan altar on Modin, putting his life, and the lives of all his sons, upon the issue of that daring act, Judah and Israel had become things of history, and the Israelite faith had been abolished by laws in which the people appeared to have acquiesced. The Temple was profaned; the usual reading of the law was prohibited; circumcision had ceased; Sabbath observance was

forbidden on pain of death; the succession of high priests was broken, Onias, the true pontiff, having fled away to the great Jewish community at Memphis on the Nile. Not one man in a thousand Jews could speak Hebrew; in its place the people made love and money in Chaldaic, Syriac, and Greek. Out of this prostrate misery, the genius, daring, and devotion of one splendid family raised the nation to a height of power recalling the glories of David's reign.

But, on the other side, the very qualities which enabled these princes to serve their country in a political sense, caused them to ruin it in a dogmatic sense. The Maccabees were men of the world; soldiers, orators, statesmen, rather than priests of God. In the course of their fiery struggle against the Gentile power they came to look upon religion as a part of their system of government, a branch of their policy, and a sign of their peculiar cause. Descending from the Babylonian Exiles, they belonged to the new class of men the party of nationality and reform. Being able and daring men, whom no fear could restrain and no power could resist, when the public service seemed to demand a great concentration of public powers, they felt no scruple in seizing into their own hands offices incompatible with each other.

In short, the Maccabees led Israel away from the Mosaic theory of a divine government into the adoption of a worldly principle of nationality; a position in which the Jew lost his birthright of a uni

versal priesthood; to which birthright he was not recalled until John went forth into the wilderness and began to baptize his countrymen back into the kingdom of God.

CHAPTER VII.

The Great Separation.

In a slight lay work, aiming no higher than to sketch some facts and sceneries which may assist in framing the sacred story, it will be sufficient to describe in a few words the points on which the Maccabean policy appears to have differed from that of the Written Law.

Moses had set the Spiritual Powers apart from the Temporal Powers; not as to persons only, but as to families and tribes; so that for thirteen hundred years of Hebrew life, no priest had ever been made a king. This first Mosaic principle was vitiated by the Maccabees, when a priest of Modin was raised to the throne of David, and the whole of his kinsmen were elevated to princely rank.

Moses had consecrated the line of Eleäzar the son of Aaron to the High Priesthood for ever. This second Mosaic principle was set aside by the Maccabees; Jonathan, the youngest son of Mattathias, a man who had no pretensions to the sacred office beyond those of power and opportunity, seizing the pontifical robes, going up to the Temple, and performing the holy rites.

Moses had given a Written Law to his people; a law which he had engraved on stone, and placed for safety in the ark; a law from which men were