in ,Tndah the persecutor was for the time at least successful (J ei•. ii. 30; Zeph. iii. 41; nnd it may be doubted whether the prophets eye1· regained their former position. They appear 110 more in the history of this long reign. But the truths· to which they had borne witness, both in life and in den,th, were eternal and could not lose their power. And this horrible period, equal in its abominations and cruelties t-0 the reign of a Caligula or a Nero, forced home two truths upon the few who in sorrow and indignation remained true to Jehovah; (1) that the Messianio hope, the salt of the kiogdom of Judah, must now be transferred to a remote future; (2) that there must be a reward hereafter for those who had suffered so. terribly for the truth in this life; their bodies might perish, but their souls ·were indestructible : if in this life only they had hope in Jehovah, they were of all. men most miserable (1 Cor. xv. 19). They saw, however, tha,t even in this life Manasseh's wickedness brought its proper punishment. Esarhaddon's army found Jerusalem so weakened by the tyl'Rnt's enormities that it could make no resistance, and Manasseh was carried away to repent in the prisons of Babylon. When he_ was allowed to return, there was a great change for the better in his government:. the altar of Jehovah was restored, and foreign idolatry was to some extent put away, although not the forbidden worship in the "high places." But the evil had eaten too deeply into the heaJ-t and intellect of the people to be cured by a partial_ reform of this kind, or even by the more seaJ·ching reformation under Josiah. The bright gleam which is again shed over Jerusalem during the reign of this young reformer extended even to the inhabitants of the northern kingdom. His orders for the extirpation of idolatry were obeyed tln·oughout Palestine, and it might even appear as if the time were coming when the whole land should be once more under the rule of one king, a righteous prince of the house of David. These bright hopes, were quenched by the untimely death of the virtuous king: the random arrow of an Egyptian ended the life of the best-beloved sovereign that had reigned since David. His loss was bewailed with the profoundest lamentations by bis heart- lii-oken people. The eye finds nothing pleasing to rest upon in the reigns of his four miserable mcceasors. Their faithlessness and imbecility placed them at the mercy of the Assyrians, who never wanted a fair pretext for attacking them or an excellent prospect of success. Troop after troop of captives was carried away (2 Kings xviii. 13; xxiv, 14; xxv. 11; 2 Chron. xxxvi. 20; Jer. lii. 28, 29; Dan. i. 2, 3). The final hlow fell when Zedekiah, the last king of Judah, was led away, childless and sight: less, to Babylon, when the walls were broken down, the temple laid in ruins, ancl all but a scanty remnant of the surviving population carried into captivity. It was the sad fate of J eremiab to witness the ·complete fulfilment of his darkest pro- phecies. He survived the city whose o,·erthrow he bad predicted; survived .to lament oYer it in elegies which for pathos and beauty are perhaps without an equal in literature. They remind us of David's lament over Saul and Jonathan; but with this gre::! clifference ; that whereas David finds comfort in the fonner glory of the fallen, this to Jeremiah is but an aggravation of his sorrow, so full is his mind with every detail of the unspeakable calamity that has fallen upon the guilty city. King and people, temple and priest, were involved in a common ruin ; and the worst feature of all was that the ruin was more than deserved. It was but the inevitable outcome of a long series of royal and national and sacerdotal sins. If the miserable apostasy and consequent overthrow of the two kingdoms of Israel and Judah might lead us to question whether after all this renegade Wld JOSHUA TO NEHEMIAH
ruined nation was tho Chosen People of Jehovah, the history of the .Jewish exileR in Bctby Jou might reassure us of the fact. It is marvellous that the Jews still retained their nationttlity ; still more marvellous that they continued to cherish hopes of a return and of a happy future under the promised Messiah. Their removal to a strange lancl, amiel strange people and strange rites, the knowledge that their city was a ruin, their king a captive, their kinsmen slaughtered, failed to destroy either the one or the other. Even in the hour of His wrath Jehovah would still remember His covenant with Abraham and David. This they believed; and He alone could have kept alive such a belief under conditions which seemed emphatically to wve the lie to it. They had one great assurance that their DiviP-e King had not entirely deserted them. In this hour of their sorest need the voice of prophecy, so far from being silenceel, was heard all the more clearly. Of the four " Great Prophets," three fall within the period of the exile. From Egypt, during the firlrl period of the Captivity, Jeremiah continued the strong warnings anel protests which had been the forerunners of the city's fall. In the land of exile itself Ezekiel anel Daniel con- tinued to make known the judgm.ents of Goel to the captives and their conquerors. This alone slifficed to prove that Jehovah had not utterly forsaken His people. Moreover, their conquerors were movetl to treat them kindly. They became not slaves but colonists ; they were alloweel to preserve their own laws anel customs, their distinctions of rank and family ; they might even rise, as Daniel dicl, to high office in the state. Lastly, there was a conspicuous contrast between their fate and that of the nations round about ifudah, who had exulted over the downfall of their hereditary foe, Edom, Ammon, and Moab. These also, before long, felt the heavy hand of Nebuchadnezzar, and it crushed them utterly. As Jeremiah had foretold even before the destruction of. Jerusalem: "Fear thou not, 0 Jacob my servant, saith Jehovah, for I am with thee : for I will make a full end of all the nations whither I have· driven thee: but I will not make a full end of thee, but correct thee according to justice.; but I cannot leave thee wholly unpunished" (Jer. xlvi. 28). These words of Jeremiah, and others like them, would be in the minds of the Jews when they saw the armies of Cyrus pouring through the streets of Babylon; and it must have been with hope and pride that they noticed how, amidst all the changes of sovereigns, it was still a Jew. who was foremost among the statesmen at their court. Under Nebuchadnezzar, Belshazzar, Darius the Mede, and Cyrus, Daniel is constantly prominent and always prosperous; and we may confidently attribute it to his influence that one of the first acts of Cyrus, when he began to reign alone in Babylon (B.C. 536), was to issue a decree for the restoration of the Jews to their native Janel. and for the rebuilding of tho temple.