ISRAEL. 
9 
and it proposed the most direct, intelligible, and impressive order of human recompense for 
virtue. While the doctrine of immortality raised the individual heart to its Maker; 
temporal happiness, in all its most touching, noble, and permanent forms, filled the national 
eye with beauty. To the allegiance of the Israelite were promised immediate blessings; in 
salubrity of climate; in the richness of his corn, olive, and vine; in personal health, 
strength, and freedom; in the increase of the herd and the sheepfold; in length of life; in 
the succession and obedience of children; in the security of the land from conquest; in 
resistless triumph over all foreign hostility; in the endless duration of the national throne; 
in the boundless advance of his country in wealth, wisdom, and influence among nations; 
and, to crown all, in seeing that country the sacred central light of the earth, Palestine, the 
chosen kingdom, and Jerusalem, the glorious city, of the King of kings. 
That a people so gifted, so honoured, and so blessed, should have cast all away, and 
fallen as Israel has fallen; might make us in shame and sorrow wring our hands, and, 
with heads humbled in the dust, wonder at the unutterable weakness of man. 
At length, after the travel of forty years, the tribes approached the confines of the 
desert, and Moses was commanded to announce to them that he must give up the 
leadership to Joshua. The whole Law was then repeated, with solemn denunciations 
against the national crimes. Those were all prophecies; and they still remain before the 
world’s eye, the fiery characters of the impeachment drawn up against the most beloved 
and unhappy of nations. In language astonishing for its vividness, awful for its Divine 
indignation, and appalling for its historic reality, we see their successive sufferings; first in 
the pestilences and famines of the land , 1 then in the Captivity , 2 then in the Roman invasion 
and the horrors of the Siege , 3 and finally in the great dispersion: 4 —the whole prediction, 
like some vast picture in the skies, giving us at a glance the portraiture of those powerful 
changes and deep calamities, which for three thousand years have gone on beneath, 
realizing on the surface of the world. 
But it is equally the subject of prophecy, that this fall shall not be for ever; that 
Judah shall be restored, and restored not by the slow and encumbered processes of human 
renovation, but by means whose simplicity implies Divine suddenness, completeness, and 
power : not by a change of masters, nor of location; not by conquest, nor civil convulsion; 
but by a change of mind. 
“ And it shall come to pass, when all these things are come upon thee, the blessing 
and the curse, which I have set before thee, and thou shalt call them to mind among all 
the nations, whither the Lord thy God hath driven thee, 
“ And shalt return unto the Lord thy God. 
“That then the Lord thy God will turn thy captivity, and have compassion upon 
thee, and will return and gather thee from all the nations, whither the Lord thy God hath 
scattered thee. 
“ And the Lord thy God will bring thee into the land which thy fathers possessed, 
and thou shalt possess it; and he will do thee good, and multiply thee above tin/ 
fathers. 
Deut. xxviii. 22. 
2 Ibid. 36. 
3 Ibid. 49. 
4 Ibid. 64. 
