Captain L. lived several years after this incident, a devoted Christian, and died praising God aloud for his mercy to him at Cuba.

The impressions of childhood, how ineffaceable are they! How, amid the confusion and dissipation of later life, do they still abide, though concealed-like burning coals, smothered, but not extinguished, amid the rubbish that afterward they consume! Search the records of Christian biography, especially of the Christian ministry, and you will find that a striking proportion were the children of Christian parents, or, at least, of Christian mothers. If there are any prayers which, more than others, must prevail with God, they are those of the devoted mother pleading for her wandering child.

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66

THE JEWS.

My covenant will I not break."-Psalmist.

No people, whose annals have ever had a record in the history of the world, afford so many anomalous peculiarities as the Jews. Their history is a wonderful record of almighty providences. Descending from a single man, a venerable patriarch, and friend of God, they were multiplied like the stars of heaven, and the sands on the seashore; and from a national infancy, spent in bondage, they were led by the hand of a parental Providence through every vicissitude of national elevation and depression. At one time, guided by the Almighty in a symbolic cloud and burning pillar, they triumph over their foes, and spread the fear of their name among the nations; at another, they mourn in captivity, and hang their harps on the willows of a strange land. Once their holy city rises in splendor, with its glorious temple dignified by the attendance of monarchs, and sanctified by the services of inspired prophets and priests; and now, the ploughshare is driven through its foundations, their whole national organization broken up, their population, like the stars of heaven scattered over the fir

mament, dispersed to the boundaries of the world.

And yet this singular and inscrutable course of events, in the national history of the Jews, was described beforehand, in prophecy, with almost the same minuteness with which time itself has developed it.

By Moses it was written, "The Lord shall scatter thee among all people, from the one end of the earth even to the other; and among these nations shalt thou find no ease, neither shall the sole of thy foot rest; and thou shalt become an astonishment, a proverb, and a by-word, among all nations whither the Lord shall lead thee; and thou shalt be only oppressed and crushed alway." But yet, with all these afflictions, the Jews were to be preserved. "Yet, for all that, when they be in the land of their enemies I will not cast them away, neither will I abhor them to destroy them utterly." "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."

What a literal history, written three thousand years before the events, was this of the present condition of the Jews!

1. They were to be "scattered among all people, from one end of the earth to the other."

2. They were to find no ease nor rest to the sole of their feet.

3. They were to be persecuted with reproach: "an astonishment, and a proverb, and a by-word."

4. But not cut off: "I will not cast them away, neither will I abhor them to destroy them utterly." This prophecy, in all these respects, is now in actual exemplification on the face of the whole world.

Here we have a living and everywhere existing monument of the truth of prophecy-a perpetuated miracle, the laws of nature suspended, and the analogy of things interrupted.

While all the other nations of the ancient world have lost their national identity, and either faded from the earth or been merged in new combinations, the history of this singular people presents us with the anomaly, as observed by an able writer, not merely of a river, which, after rising from its small mountain spring, continues to flow through the ocean of waters without mingling with the general mass, but the more striking prodigy of one whose waters have become dispersed through the whole extent, and, by the vicissitudes of the tides, carried to every tributary stream, and yet each drop retaining its distinctiveness from the mass, and prepared at any time to be collected together. What, but a most

special Providence, has enabled this singular race to resist all the social affinities that mix and connect men in society; and, with a dispersion coextensive with the earth, under all climes, in all latitudes, in all longitudes, among all nations and kindreds, and tongues and people, maintain their national character without a national organization? Bowed down with afflictions, oppressed by the legal institutions of almost every country under heaven, and where the civil constitution of society does not grind them down, yet failing to remove the doom of Heaven, the instinctive repugnance of mankind humbles them to the ignominy of an inferior and despicable caste; rejected of God, outcast of men, it seems as if the stars of heaven fought against them in their courses. The sun, in his career, has been hailed in every clime by their cry of lamentation and wo, as if the hand of divine judgment held then up to the gaze and scorn of the revolving world, and yet made them immortal in dissolution itself.

The prophecy states, that though God should make" a full end of all the nations whither he would disperse the Jews, yet of them he would not make an end." This has been fulfilled. The nations that were contemporary with them in the days of their national existence live only