Of them(the Jews) God thus spake
hundreds of years before the destruction of Jerusalem: "I will scatter you
among the heathen:" "Thou shalt become an astonishment, a proverb,
and a byword, among the all nations, whither the Lord shall lead thee:"
"Among these nations shalt thou find no ease, neither shall the sole of
thy foot have rest."
Jerusalem has been "trodden
under foot," literally and terribly, till now, by the iron heels of
western Christians, who deluged it with blood, by the hoofs of Arab and Moslem
horsemen, and by the bare feet of Greek, and Roman, and Armenian monks. Each sect spared its rival in order to crush
the Jew. To plunder and maltreat the Jew
was regarded as the expression of a piety singularly acceptable to God. No experience of man can explain this. The Jew is a living mystery, which prophecy
alone clears up.
Many other predictions, intimate the
destinies of this mysterious race till Christ come. All nations have homes in Jerusalem, - the
Jew has none. They have been sifted
through all nations, and have taken root in none. They
are the subjects of every dynasty - the victims of every tyranny - the
scoff of the infidel - the scorn of the great.
From the Thames to the Tiber, and from the Tiber to the Ganges, and from
the Ganges to the Missouri - from "Greenland's icy mountains to India's
coral strand" - they are found insulated from the sympathies of all men,
indicating affinities with something above and before, but with nothing
around. That once great nation has been
poured down upon the earth like quicksilver - it has split into innumerable
scattered and disintegrated globules, which the Great Proprietor will yet
collect, and form into a mighty mass that shall glow with imperishable splendor
and reflect his glory. Many thousand
years ago, God in prophecy pronounced the future dispersion and doom of the
Jews, and God in history has kept them like the bush on Horeb - burning and not
consumed - till that day come when the glory shall return from between the
cherubim, and the dry bones rush together from a thousand lands, and the groans
of creation, and the oppression of the Jew, and the travail of the Christian,
cease together. Do we not hear every
morning a deep-toned voice in our streets? It is the echo of the voice of God
in prophecy - evidence to a skeptic world that God's word is truth. No man can read the history of the Jews, and
the prophecy of which that history is the shadow projected into many years and
lands, and not conclude that the prescience of God pronounced the prediction,
and that the presence of God in history superintends its fulfillment.
John
Cumming
