career of singular prosperity. He gave the country an established rank once more. He was among the wealthiest, most powerful, and most magnificent princes of his time. But the great feature of his fame was the rebuilding, or rather the new erection, of the Temple. This was a source of individual honour which might have been envied by all the Jewish kings since its first founder. It was a peculiar source of national pride, and made the name of Herod and his country conspicuous throughout the world. But that Temple was also the source of a still higher national honour: it saw the living presence of HIM, whose emblematic glory alone had shone on the Temple of the son of David. Those were the years of the true renown of Judah external and acknowledged splendour to the eye of all; spiritual lustre to the eye of those who "waited for the promise of Israel."

But the correspondence is not limited to this outline. In the degenerate day of the sons of Seth, a Divine warning had been given, that long-suffering was exhausted, and that there would be an end of their existence, within a hundred and twenty years. It will be found that a similar warning was given to the Jews in their degenerate day. In the year B.C. 63, Jerusalem was, for the first time, captured by the Romans, under Pompey, exactly one hundred and twenty-three years before the day of its final war (reckoning from the tumult in Cæsarea, A.D. 60, which was

the origin of the war). Nothing could be more fitted to awake the Jew to his fate. The determination of Rome to possess universal empire, was fully known; the Jewish nation once in its grasp, was sure to be finally extinguished in the general mass of Roman power. That grasp was rapidly tightened on Judæa, and the Jew saw the independence of his country sinking hour by hour, into the hands of that people, whom their "strange speech," so alien to the Oriental ear, their inveterate and repulsive idolatry, their habitual love of the sword, and their severe extortion, stamped as the final destroyer declared in the prophecies; as the conquerors more sweeping and remorseless than Babylon, to avenge crimes deeper than those which had broken the strength of Judah before the cavalry and chariots of the great Eastern invaders; as the fixers of that chain which was to fasten the neck of Judah to the ground, in a captivity reckoned, not by years, but ages.

The building of the ark for the preservation of the patriarchal family, was a peculiar feature of the last days of the ante-diluvian world. The last days of Judah witnessed a not less peculiar and literal preservation of the small household of faith, the few who adhered to the true worship of Israel. Forty years before the catastrophe, the whole Jewish people were earnestly appealed to, to escape from the impending danger. A prophet

was sent to command the nation" to flee from the

wrath to come," temporal as well as eternal. The appeal was listened to with general interest, yet soon forgotten. An ark, the Christian Church, was next built before their eyes, and the declaration solemnly made, that, to all who entered it, it should be a place of perfect safety; that “not a hair of their heads should perish." The promise was kept to the letter. Those who entered it were saved, in body, as in spirit. Amid the general ruin which overwhelmed the nation, the individuals who took shelter in the Church of the Gospel, the Christians, were carried secure through this new deluge of fire and sword; and, when the devastation was done, were sent forth to be the spiritual regenerators of the world.

CHAPTER XVII.

THE POST-DILUVIAN PATRIARCHS.

THE coincidence of the post-diluvian generations with the events of the similar periods in European history, is sustained with equal clearness. Arphaxad, the son of Shem, was born two years after the deluge (corresponding to A. D. 72). The deluge and the fall of Jerusalem being still taken as corresponding events, his generation, or the period between his birth and that of his firstborn, is, by the Septuagint, 135 years; bringing the close of the period, in the corresponding series, to A. D. 207; and so of the rest:

is closed; and the new, under the appointment of Abraham, begins.

ARPHAXAD (the healer), a period of 135 years. From A.D. 72 to 207.-The first two centuries of the Christian era exhibited the successful struggles of Christianity; especially when, by the fall' of the Jewish nation, its most inveterate antagonists were disabled. The period was in general a time of persecution, but of persecution which at once invigorated the zeal and purified the tenets of the Christian. After the capture of Jerusalem, conversion had begun its full course; and the Church, under all its trials, spread through the empire'. The religion, whose especial and prophetic character it was, to come with healing on its wings, the "healer of the broken-hearted and the deliverer of such as were bound," now passed the limits of the empire, and was preached through the ends of the earth. Paganism was palpably perishing before it, and nothing but the violent opposition of the Pagan emperors, and the strong interests connected with the support of the Pagan hierarchy,

"Before the close of the second century, Christ was worshipped as God almost throughout the whole East, as also among the Germans, Spaniards, Celts, Britons, and many other nations. The writers of this century attribute this rapid progress of Christianity to the power of God." (Mosheim i. 135.)