had refused to listen when the Son of God had preached to them the gospel of peace, and had even shed his blood upon Calvary. But more: the destruction of Jerusalem was absolutely necessary for the complete development of that gospel. It represented a past dispensation, when the knowledge of the true God was confined to one single and exclusive people. It had been for centuries the metropolis of the worshippers of Jehovah. But now a new era was dawning on humanity. The happy time was come when "neither in Jerusalem nor on the mountain of Gerizim was the revelation of God to be circumscribed. It was to spread abroad over all the earth like an ever-advancing wave of light. But as long as the Temple on Mount Moriah remained—we are now using Dean Milman's eloquent words-as long as the Temple on Mount Moriah remained, hallowed by the reverence of ages, sanctified, according to the general belief, for perpetuity, by the especial command of God as his peculiar dwelling-place; so long, among the Jews at least, and even among other nations, the true principle of Christian worship might be counteracted by the notion of the inalienable sanctity of this one place. Judaism could scarcely be entirely annulled so long as the Temple rose in its original majesty and veneration (John iv. 21, 24; Mark xvi. 15).

For the same reason, the destruction of the city, of which that Temple was the pride and ornament, was also

a necessity. So long as Jerusalem remained intact in all its splendour, so long would the Jews cherish their proud dreams of a coming era when it would prevail as the capital of the entire world. And thus there arose a close moral connection between the fall of the great Jewish city and the death of Christ. Both events, so different in themselves, originated in the same causes, and tended, humanly speaking, to the same end. The destruction of Jerusalem was, as we have said, a stage in the development of the faith which Christ came to reveal unto mankind. And to quote again from the historian of Christianity—it was the same national temperament, the same characteristic disposition of the people, which prevented them "from knowing the things belonging to their peace," that committed them, forty years afterwards, in their ruinous and deadly struggle with the Roman masters of the world. Christianity alone could have subdued or softened that stubborn fanaticism which drove them at length to their desperate collision with the arms of Imperial Rome. As Christians, the Jewish people might have subsided into peaceful subjects of the Universal Empire. They might have lived, as the Christians did, with the high and inalienable consolations of faith and hope under the heaviest oppressions, and calmly awaited the time when their holier and more beneficent ambition might be gratified by the submission of the lords of the world to the religious dominion founded by Christ and his apostles.

The Fall of Jerusalem, then-whose sad and impressive story we shall sketch in the following pages—was a turning-point in the world's history, and was marked by memorable circumstances, such as never before or since attended the ruin of any city. It was not merely the destruction of a grand and splendid capital-for such, too, were Babylon, Nineveh, and. Thebes; nor the fulfilment of an ancient prophecy-for the downfall of other cities had been foretold by God's chosen ministers; nor the punishment of national wickedness-for Sodom and Gomorrah fell on account of their iniquities; but it was the sign of the end of the Old Dispensation, and of the promulgation to all mankind of a knowledge of the true God. The earthly Jerusalem was swept away, and thenceforth the longing gaze of the believer was fixed on the New Jerusalem-that great and holy city, which has no temple therein, for the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are the temple of it! (Rev. xxi. 2, 10, 22.)