LEC. VIII.]

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Who hath wrought and done—calling the generations from the beginning?

I, Jehovah, the First, and with the last; I am He."

God" hath not seen iniquity in Jacob; neither perverseness in Israel:"—not that there was none there; but, in his grace, "He hath clothed him with the robe of righteousness." He hath beheld him in the Righteous One—the multitudinous seed, in the One Seed, Christ.

In the succeeding verses, (5—9,) there is described the consternation of these countries; and their vain superstitious recourse to images, which began then to multiply in the churches —called Christian,—but from which the spirit of Christianity seems to have almost entirely vanished, at the time the Gothic race broke in upon Western Europe. This people, who had, as was prophesied, lost their name of Israel, are repeatedly pointed to their origin; and they have, also, their end, or the purpose of God with regard to them, declared. Too many of them, however, have, like Israel in Canaan, learned the way of the heathen, whom the Lord cast out before them.

rage.

So the carpenter encouraged the goldsmith, He that smootheth with the hammer, him that smote the anvil,

Saying, It is ready for the soldering;
And he fastened it with nails,--it should
not be moved.

But thou Israel,—my servant,
Jacob—whom I have chosen, the seed of
Abraham, my friend,

—Whom I have taken from the ends of the earth,

And called thee from the chief men thereof,
And said unto thee, Thou my servant;
I have chosen thee, and not cast thee away."

seed of Abraham, his friend, with whom He condescended to have familiar intercourse. He is chosen of God,—who, in opposition to all human unbelief, here emphatically declares, "I have not cast thee away." The complete supplanting of the enemy, of whose gates he has been given the possession, is then described, (verses 10—12):—

"Fear thou not; for I am with thee:
Be not dismayed; for I am thy God;
I will strengthen thee,
Yea, I will help thee,

Yea, I will uphold thee with the right hand of my righteousness.

Behold, all they that were incensed against thee,

Shall be ashamed and confounded:

They shall be as nothing;

And they that strive with thee shall perish. Thou Shalt seek them.

And shalt not find them, Them that contended with thee: They that war against thee shall be as nothing,

And as a thing of nought."

The powerful instrumentality whereby this great supplanting would be effected, is next pointed out. All difficulties would be removed, and swept away; and Israel would take root, and flourish, as was promised, (verses 13—16):—

"For I, the Lord thy God, will hold thy right hand,

Saying unto thee, Fear not; I will help thee. Fear not thou worm Jacob,—ye men of Israel:

I will help thee, saith the Lord,

And thy Redeemer—the Holy One of Israel.

Behold, I will make thee a new sharp threshing instrument, having teeth: Thou shalt thresh the mountains,

And beat—small,

And shalt make the hills as chaff.

Thou shalt fan them,

And the wind shall carry them away,
And the whirlwind shall scatter them:
But thou shalt rejoice in the Lord,
Shalt glory in the Holy One of Israel."

The Whirlwind here referred to, appears to be that described by Jeremiah, xxv. 15—33, and to which it may be as well now, for a little, to direct our attention. It describes the course of judgment around Jerusalem

once, and again, and a third time. In the first and second circuits, the north, whither Israel had been removed, is passed by; but the third circuit ends in the north; and the whirlwind spends its fury there, producing that overwhelming movement of the nations to which we adverted in our last Lecture; whereby both the Romans and the Barbarians were alike removed, and obliged to give way to Israel—to the nations that had come of Jacob, and who seemed so near being crushed between them. (Jeremiah, xxv. 15— 33):

"For thus saith the Lord God of Israel unto me, Take the wine cup of this fury at my hand, and cause all the nations, to whom I send thee, to drink it. And they shall drink, and be moved, and be mad, because of the sword that 1 will send among them.

"Then took I the cup at the hand of the Lord, and made all the nations to drink, to whom the Lord had sent me- Jerusalem, and the cities of Judah; and the kings thereof, and the princes thereof; to make them a desolation, an astonishment, an hissing, and a curse;—as, this day."

[First Circuit of the Whirlwind round
Jerusalem.]

(South) "Pharaoh, king of Egypt, and his servants; and his princes, and all his people; (East) and all the mingled people; and all the kings of the land of Uz;— (West) and all the kings of the land of the Philistines; and Ashkelon, and Azzah, and Ekron, and the remnant of Ashdod,"

[Second Circuit of the Whirlwind ] (South) "Edom, and Moab, (East) and the children of Ammon; (West) and all the kings of Tyrus, and all the kings of Zidon; and the kings of the isles which—beyond the sea."

The whirlwind having thus swept around Jerusalem once and again, the north being still comparatively passed over; it then takes a wider compass eastward. It comes round by Elam, and enters the north at last, by Media, whereby Israel had entered it: when the whole multitude of the nations there, far and near, one with another, even from the borders of China, to the extreme west, are set in motion; and the effect is felt over all the world.

[Third Circuit of the Whirlwind.] (South) "Dedan, and Tema, and Buz, and—all in the utmost corners. (East) And

[LEC. VIII.

all the kings of Arabia; and all the kings of the mingled people that dwell in the desert, and all the kings of Zimri; and all the kings of Elam, (North) and all the kings of the Medes, and all the kings of the north, far and near, one with another; and all the kingdoms of the world, which are upon the face of the earth; and the king of Sheshach shall drink after them."

The great nations then fall, and rise no more, whilst Israel, who had been small, is lifted up, and made to ride upon the high places of the earth. They are carried forward in the great movement, and set down in the place which the God of their fathers had, from old time, appointed; where they were to renew their strength; and thence spread abroad, to the encompassing of all nations.

"Therefore thou shalt say unto them, Thus saith the Lord of Hosts, the God of Israel, Drink ye, and be drunken, and spue, and fall, and rise no more, because of the sword which I will send among you.

And it shall be, if they refuse to take the cup at thine hand to drink, then thou shalt say unto them, Thus saith the Lord of Hosts, ye shall certainly drink.

For, lo, I begin to bring evil on the city which is called by my name, and should ye be utterly unpunished? Ye shall not be unpunished; for I will call for a sword upon all the inhabitants of the earth, saith the Lord of Hosts."

"Therefore prophesy thou against them all these words, and say unto them, The Lord shall roar from on high, and utter his voice from his holy habitation; He shall mightily roar upon his habitation, he shall give a shout as they that tread against all the inhabitants of the earth. A noise shall come to the ends of the earth; for the Lord hath a controversy with the nations; he will plead with all flesh; He will give the wicked to the sword, saith the Lord.

Thus saith the Lord of hosts, Behold, evil shall go forth from nation to nation, and a great whirlwind shall be raised up from the coasts of the earth. And the slain of the Lord shall be at that day from one end of the earth even unto the other end of the earth: They shall not be lamented, neither gathered, nor buried; they shall be dung upon the ground."

The truth of the foregoing prophecy may, perhaps, best be illustrated by the following account of the attack of the Romans, upon what were called the barbarous nations in the north of Europe; and next of the ample revenge which the latter took of that

great beast, and strong exceedingly, that brake in pieces the whole earth. This account of one of the Roman invasions, is partly by the Emperor himself, under whose conduct it took place.

"After the assassination of Alexander Severas, the ferocious Maximin assumed the contaminated purple, and announced his accession to the north of Germany, in a series of victorious slaughter and unrelenting devastation. So irresistible was the tempest, that unless, says the historian, the Germans had escaped by then- rivers, marshes, and woods, he would have reduced all Germany into subjection. His haughty letters to the senate display the exultation and ferocity of his mind. We cannot relate to you,' says he, 'how much we have done. For the space of four hundred miles we have burnt the German towns; we have brought away their flocks, enslaved their inhabitants, and slain the armed. We should have assailed their woods, if the depth of their marshes had permitted us to pass.'

"This destructive invasion, like many other evils, generated, by the greatness of the necessity, a proportionate benefit. A modern writer has very happily ascribed to it the formation of that important confederation, which, under the name of Franks, withstood the Roman army, and preserved the liberties of Germany.' Turner's Anglo-Saxons, Vol. I, page 138, fifth edition.

The Breaker thus came up before Israel; nor was it long before they passed through the gate, and went out by it, to the encompassing, as they now do, the world.

The further progress of the Whirlwind, the irruption of the northern, or rather north-eastern nations, into the south and west of Europe, and of the settlement herein of the Gothic and Saxon race, is given in the words of the distinguished historian, Robertson, a writer of great authority; Still, we must make allowance for mistakes, occasioned by the writer being anxious to assign a cause for every thing,— without being acquainted with the true theory according to which the phenomena might be rightly explained.

When the fierce barbarians in the

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north of Europe, and of Asia, fell upon the Roman empire, wherever they marched, their route was marked with blood. They ravaged or destroyed all around them. They made no distinction between what was sacred and what was profane. They respected no age, or sex, or rank. What escaped the fury of the first inundation, perished in those which followed it. The most fertile and populous provinces were converted into deserts, in which were scattered the ruins of villages and cities, that afforded shelter to a few miserable inhabitants, whom chance had preserved, or the sword of the enemy, wearied with destroying, had spared. The conquerors who first settled in the countries which they had wasted, were expelled or exterminated by new invaders, who, coming from regions farther removed from the civilized parts of the world, were still more fierce and rapacious. This brought fresh calamities upon mankind, which did not cease, until the north, by pouring forth successive swarms, was drained of people, and could no longer furnish instruments of destruction. Famine, and pestilence, which always march in the train of war, when it ravages with such inconsiderate cruelty, raged in every part of Europe, and completed its sufferings. If a man were called on to fix upon the period in the history of the world, during which the condition of the human race was most calamitous and afflicted, he would, without hesitation, name that which elapsed from the death of Theodosius the Great, to the establishment of the Lombards in Italy. The contemporary authors, who beheld that scene of desolation, labour, and are at a loss, for expressions to describe the horror of it. The Scourge of God, the Destroyer of Nations, are the dreadful epithets by which they distinguish the most noted of the barbarous leaders; and they compare the ruin which they had brought on the world, to the havoc occasioned by earthquakes, conflagrations, or deluges,— the most formidable calamities which the imagination of man can conceive.

"But no expressions can convey so perfect an idea of the destructive progress of the Barbarians, as that which must strike an attentive observer, when he contemplates the total change which he will discover in the state of Europe, after it began to recover some degree of tranquillity, towards the close of the sixth century. The Saxons were, by that time, masters of the southern and more fertile provinces of Britain; the Franks, of Gaul; the Huns,

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of Pannonia; the Goths, of Spain; the Goths and Lombards, of Italy and the adjacent provinces. Very faint vestiges of the Roman policy, jurisprudence, arts, or literature, remained. New forms of government, new laws, new manners, new dresses, new languages, new names of men and countries, were every where introduced. To make a great or sudden alteration with respect to any of these, unless where the ancient inhabitants of a country have been almost totally exterminated, has proved an undertaking beyond the power of the greatest conquerors. The great change which the settlement of the barbarous nations occasioned in the state of Europe, may therefore be considered as a more decisive proof than even the testimony of contemporary historians, of the destructive violence with which these invaders carried on their conquests, and of the havoc which they had made from one extremity of this quarter of the globe to the other."—View of the Slate of Europe, sec. 1.

The immense Increase of these northern nations has been acknowledged, on all hands; and different theories have been formed to account for it, and, also, for how they could have been contained in the north, from which they seemed to issue in such myriads. If they had, in truth, been produced and sustained solely in the north, this would have been no less a miracle than the feeding of their fathers in the wilderness of Sinai, previous to their being given possession of the land of Canaan. But we plead for no such miracle. There is no necessity for this, when we allow them the position we have pointed out, in the east of Europe, immediately behind that great wall of empires, by which the way of Israel was so long hedged up, that she could not find her paths.

Sir William Temple supposes these nations had increased by an indiscriminate commerce of the sexes, or by a plurality of wives; whilst directly the contrary of all this was the case, -these people being remarkable for chastity in their own homes; and with regard to polygamy, we see that, as in the case of the Turks, this may rather tend to the decrease of the population. He supposes that men will increase

faster as barbarians, than as being civilized; which, facts seem abundantly to disprove. Look, for example, to the case of the red and white races in America: the former are rapidly melting away before the latter, and that whether they be at war with each other, or living in peace. It may be said that the North Americans, if not at war with the Whites, are busy destroying each other; but so also were the northern nations, and yet they continued to increase. It may again be said, that the North Americans are destroyed by an excessive use of ardent spirits; hut this excess also existed among these northern nations in Europe, so that " a drunken Dane" came to be a common expression; and yet they continued to increase, and overflow all around them. Nor is it true, that they have now ceased to increase. Their increase is indeed more peaceable: hut still it is onward, and even much greater than before; only, now they do not require to break through the bounds of others, in order to obtain room in which to dwell. Having reached these maritime parts, they spread abroad in every direction, and plant themselves on every shore; and colonize the globe. Their case, either before taking possession of the foreground of Europe, or since, cannot be accounted for, except upon the supposition, that the Lord "had a favour for them," and that they are "the seed which the Lord hath blessed." That they are indeed the very people we are in search of, will still farther appear, if we consider the aspect of society in Europe, after the Roman Empire had been entirely subverted; and when the genius of this new people had got full time to become developed. The face of society was entirely changed. Let us see whether the character of these great changes be fully consistent with the idea that the people who produced them were the children of those fathers whose training we have traced. We shall now briefly advert to a few of the more general outlines; and afterwards exemplify the truth of our proposition,