mercies and judgments that they ever experienced ; for by means of it they were cured of their idolatrous propensities ; and never have yielded to them any more, even to the present hour.
After seventy years God delivered them from thence also, as he had before delivered them from Egypt ; and re-established them, to a certain degree, in their former prosperity. In the fulness of time, he, according to his promise, sent them his only- begotten Son, to establish among them that kingdom of righteousness and peace, which had been sha- dowed forth among them from the time that they became a nation. But on their destroying him, he determined to cast them off; and accordingly he gave them into the hands of the Romans, who executed upon them such judgments as never had been inflicted on any nation under heaven. But neither was this dispensation unmixed with mercy: for, blinded as they were by prejudice, they never would have renounced their errors, or embraced the Gospel, if they had been able still to satisfy their minds with the rites and ceremonies of their own Church. But as God drove our first parents from Paradise, and precluded them from all access to the tree of life, which was no more to be a sacramental pledge of life to them now in their fallen state ; and as he thereby prevented them from deluding their souls with false hopes, and shut them up unto that mercy, which he had revealed to them through the seed of the woman ; so now has he cut off the Jews from all possibility of observing the rites and cere- monies of the Mosaic law, in order that they may be constrained to seek for mercy through the Messiah whom they have crucified.
At the same time that God has ordered this dis- pensation with an ultimate view to the good of his once-favoured people, he has consulted in it the good of the whole world ; for, when he cut them off from the stock on which they grew, he took a people from among the Gentiles, and en- grafted them as scions upon the Jewish stock, and