JOSEPHUS'S ACCOUNT OF THE SIEGE OF JERUSALEM.

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But, calamitous as was the general state of things abroad, it was in the devoted city during the siege that the most unparalleled distress was experienced. "There shall be great tribulation," says the prophecy, "such as was not since the beginning of the world to this time; no, nor ever shall be." But strong as this language is the following quotation from Josephus seems to justify it :-" In my opinion," says he, "all the calamities which were ever endured, since the beginning of the world, were inferior to those which the Jews now suffered.Never was any city more wicked, and never did any city receive such punishment. Without was the Roman army, surrounding their walls, crucifying thousands before their eyes, and laying waste their country: within, were the most violent contentions among the besieged: frequent bloody battles between different parties; rapine, fire, and the extremity of famine. Many of the Jews prayed for the success of the Romans, as the only method of delivering them from a more dreadful calamity, the atrocious violence of their civil dissensions."

I shall only detain you further, on this subject, by noticing one other circumstance, and that respects the shortening of the siege. Josephus computes that there fell during the siege, by the hands of the Romans, 1,100,000 Jews: had the siege continued long, the whole nation must have perished. But the Lord shortened the days for the elect's sake; and the manner in which the days were shortened is most worthy of remark. Vespasian committed the management of the siege to his son Titus, then a young man, impatient of resistance, jealous of the honour of the Roman army, and in haste to return from the conquest of an obscure province to the capital of the empire. He prosecuted the siege with vigour-he invited the besieged to yield, by offering them peace—and he tried to intimidate them, by using, contrary to his nature, every species of cruelty against those who fell into his hands. But all his vigour, and all his artifice, would have been fruitless, had it not been for the madness of the Jews within the city. They fought with one another; they furiously burned magazines of provisions, which were sufficient for many years' supply; and they deserted, with a foolish confidence, strong holds, out of which no enemy could have dragged them. After they had thus delivered the city into

the hands of the Romans, Titus, on a survey of the place, exclaimed, "God has been on our side: neither the hands, nor the machinery of men, could have been of any avail against these towers: but God has dragged the Jews out of them that he might give them to us." It was impossible for Titus to restrain the soldiers, who were irritated by an obstinate resistance, from executing their fury against the besieged; but his native clemency spared the Jews in other places. He would not allow the senate of Antioch to expel the Jews; for "where," said he, "shall these people go, now that we have destroyed their city?" But Titus was the servant of God, to execute his vengeance on Jerusalem; and, when the measure of that vengeance was fulfilled, the compassion of this amiable prince was employed to restrain the wrath of man :-" the Lord shortened the days.” And now let us pause and contemplate the relation which all these events bore to the profession of Christianity. By the destruction of the temple and city of Jerusalem an end was put to the old covenant-that covenant which God had entered into with the natural desendants of Abraham at Mount Sinai. That covenant had formed a wall of partition between the Jews and the Gentiles, and had then been in existence for fifteen hundred years, but it now came to an end. The legal dispensation was abolished, and the Gospel state of things took place of it. True indeed it is that the old covenant, with all its appendages, was virtually abrogated by the death of Christ--for then the veil of the temple was rent in twain, and the glory departed from between the cherubim. But we know that the Mosaic ritual continued in some way to be observed from the period of the death of Christ to the destruction of their city and temple, when the Providence of God concurred with his word to put an actual end to it. There was now no longer any temple, altar, sacrifice, or priest with his incense; no high priest with his Urim and Thummim-his breast-plate and his robes: all these things now gave place to a better dispensation. And this is intimated to us in our Lord's prophecy, Matt. xxiv. 29, in these words :-"Immediately after the tribulation of those days shall the sun be darkened, and the moon shall not give her light, and the stars shall fall from heaven, and the powers of the heavens shall be shaken -and then shall appear the sign of the Son of Man in heaven."

ABROGATION OF THE HEBREW RITUAL.

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This symbolical language, which is in the true spirit of eastern imagery, is very naturally introduced by the Messiah of the Jews in foretelling the dissolution of their church state; and all that he says was fulfilled, according to the appropriated use of that language, immediately after the siege. For the city was desolated, the temple was burnt, the Sanhedrim no longer assembled, the office of high priest could no more be exercised according to the commandment of God; every privilege which distinguished the Jewish people ceased: the sceptre, in appearance as well as in reality, departed from Judah; and the very forms of the dispensation given by Moses came to an end. It was unquestionably the most important revolution that had then taken place in the world, and made subservient in various ways to the extension of the Redeemer's kingdom in the earth.

* Though it be very possible, and agreeable to the symbolical use of language by the prophets, to find a meaning for the various expressions here used, in the dissolution of the Jewish state, in the general publication of the gospel after that event, and the great accession of converts which it contributed to bring to Christianity; yet we know that these are the very expressions by which our Lord and his apostles have described the period of the final consummation of all things-that day, when all the human race shall stand before the Judgment seat of Christ. Accordingly, several. commentators have been of opinion that there is here, in addition to the prophecy of the destruction of Jerusalem, a direct prophecy of the day of judgment; but the limitation of the time of fulfilment to the existence of the generation then alive, is an unanswerable objection to this opinion; and I, therefore, consider the latter part of this prediction as a specimen of the double sense of prophecy, of which we have many instances in the Scriptures. Thus the Jewish economy in church and state was a prefiguration of Christ's church and kingdom. The sacrifices of the law were a shadow of good things to come, and so were set aside by the sacrifice of Christ. The kingdom of David was a type of the kingdom of the Messiah; and so David and Solomon, who sat on the throne of Jehovah over Israel, were set up as types of him in his regal character. It is upon this principle that the Messiah is so frequently called David in prophecy, as in Jer. xxx, 9; Ezek. xxxiv. 22, 24; Hos. iii. 5. Thus, also David, in describing his own sufferings, introduces expressions which literally describe the sufferings of the Messiah, and are so applied by the evangelists and the words in which he paints the peaceful reign of Solomon received a literal accomplishment in the kingdom of the Prince of Peace. So here, the Messiah, who frequently copies the manners and refers to the words of the ancient prophets, while he is immediately foretelling the destruction of Jerusalem, looks forward to the day of judgment, and expresses himself in language which, though by the established practice of the prophets it is applicable in a figurative sense to the fall of a city and the dissolution of a state, yet, in its true, literal, precise meaning, applies to that day in which all cities and states are equally interested.

So long as the temple and its ritual were in existence, the zealots of Judaism could never want a plea for enforcing upon the converts to Christianity a strict adherence to the law of Moses. "It were impious," said they," to forsake an institution confessedly of divine original”—adding that "no subsequent revelation could diminish the sanctity of a temple built under divine direction, or abolish the offerings which he had required to be presented there." This reasoning had been ably combated by the apostle Paul in his epistles to the Hebrews and Galatians; but the arguments of the apostle were in themselves insufficient to countervail the influence of the Judaizing teachers. Some signal interposition of providence was necessary to disjoin Christianity from the carnal ordinances of the law of Moses and to free the consciences of the Hebrew converts from their attachment to that law. The destruction of Jerusalem was that interposition: the service of the temple could no longer continue, when one stone of the temple was not left upon another: the tribes could no longer assemble at Jerusalem after the city was laid in ruins; and that bondage, under which the Judaizers desired to bring the Christians, ceased when the Jews were scattered over the face of the whole earth.

Before I take a final leave of this subject, permit me to appeal to you whether it does not present us with an irrefragable argument for the truth of the Messiahship of the Lord Jesus Christ, and consequently for the divine origin of Christianity.

Who that attentively reads the twenty-fourth chapter of Matthew, and compares with it the account which Josephus has given us of the siege of Jerusalem, can be so blinded as not to find in it a proof of the Saviour's perfect knowledge of future events—a knowledge which belongs solely to God, and to those to whom he is pleased to communicate it; but, this admitted, it establishes in the clearest manner the divine mission of Christ and the divine origin of his religion. The truth is that this prophecy has always been considered by every impartial person as one of the most powerful arguments in favour of Christianity, and is admitted by some of the most competent judges in the science of evidence to be absolutely irresistible. Let it then be improved by us in the way of strengthening our faith against the cavils of infidelity, and encouraging us to look forward with confidence to the ac

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NERO'S PERSECUTION OF THE CHRISTIANS. 169 complishment of all the good things promised in the Gospel to Christ's faithful followers.

The influence which this astonishing event must have had in extending the Christian profession throughout the nations has been already adverted to; but the various ways in which it contributed to do this deserves an incidental mention, though we cannot dwell upon it.

In the bosom of the prediction concerning the destruction of Jerusalem, the Saviour had given instructions to the Christians in that city, by attending to which they would insure their own safety, ver. 15-28; and the Providence of God overruled events so as to bring this about. Eusebius tells us that "the people of the church in Jerusalem, by revelation, left the city before the siege, and dwelt in a city of Perea, the name of which is Pella." Hist. iii. 5. Thus they were secured from the impending evil. And, now that this dreadful catastrophe had taken place, what a new field was opened to the apostles and their fellow-labourers for spreading abroad the savour of the knowledge of Christ in every country under heaven, and with additional evidence of its divine authority! Wherever the heralds of salvation went, they could produce the prophecy in the writings of three of the evangelists now published, and point their hearers to its accomplishment in the events which had taken place before their own eyes. No longer was it required of men to go up to Jerusalem to worship-the time was come when the true worshippers should worship the Father in spirit and in truth. The effect of the event, thus interpreted by the prophecy, was powerful and instantaneIt furnished the friends of Christianity with an unanswerable argument against the Judaizing teachers; it solved the doubts of those who were stumbled by their reasonings; it removed an objection which the Gentiles had to the Gospel; and, when the middle wall of partition was thus removed, the word of the Lord had free course and was glorified, in turning men from idols to serve the living and true God.

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We have seen in a former lecture how the great apostle of the Gentiles carried the glad tidings of salvation "from Jerusalem round about unto Illyricum"-planting churches in every city, and giving them the ordinances of public worship to observe; and though we have not the same authenticated account of the