envied the Greeks their games; numbers of the Jewish youth had felt themselves scandalized by the initiatory rite of their religion; the painted and theatric attractions of the Greek altar had been contrasted with the severe, though magnificent, formalities of the national worship; every act of this guilty shame was successively avenged.

At length, Joshua, the brother of Onias, the high priest, lighted the pile which Judah had been so long gathering with her own hands. Ambitious of his brother's office, he intrigued against him; expelled him, and robed in the garb of holiness, commenced his career of iniquity. Having purchased his office with a vast sum sent to the Syrian court, what he had obtained by one act of corruption he determined to secure by another. His bribe to power was followed by a fatal bribe to popularity. He openly made Greece his standard, changed his name from that of the most honoured leader of Israel, after Moses, to that of the hero of fable, from Joshua to Jason; built a theatre for Greek and countenanced every games; innovation of the idolator.

Public corruption was now irrestrainable; the law was scorned; the temple service openly neglected; the priests' offices were set up for sale. The horror of the faithful few who still remembered the covenant, was to be further raised by the apostate's sending an avowed and formal

contribution to the shrine of the Tyrian Hercules! Nothing could be done to increase the horror, but the planting of the Olympian Jove in the temple; and it was done. But vengeance dire and awful

was at hand.

CHAPTER XXXVI.

THE GREEK LANGUAGE.

No feature is more distinguishable in the history of Judæa, than the frequent presence of some signal effort of Heaven to awake her on the eve of punishment, or to counteract the results of her crime for the benefit of mankind. The time was drawing nigh when Judah was to feel heavy retribution. But in the long and desperate sufferings through which she was to pass to her final hour, the Scriptures, of which she was the sole depositary, might be exposed to the hazard of extinction. The savage Syrian or profligate Greek, the hosts of licentious mercenaries who were yet to make a prey of the land, or the tyrannical sovereigns who were to load it with chains, must be but contemptuous preservers of her religion. It was the will of Providence that the sacred volume should now be taken from the exclusive keeping of the Jew, and committed to the keeping of the world. Yet the widest diffusion of the Hebrew copies could not

have accomplished this diffusion of their knowledge.

The language had received a death-blow by the captivity; the Chaldee had become the popular substitute. The Syriac, the language of those powerful dynasties with which Judah was to hold such long and anxious connection, finally superseded the Chaldee. Thus the Hebrew perished without hope of revival. Its study was thenceforth limited to the priesthood and the learned. Thus the nation was successively divested of all that formed its superiority; the ship was going down, and the mariners flung their treasures overboard, until they followed them; or, like captives on the field, they surrendered their successive ornaments, until they could surrender nothing but what left them naked, and undistinguishable from the other sufferers and slaves of misfortune. the jargon of barbarians we can have no feeling. Every extinction of the dialects of savages by the invasion of a more civilized tongue, is an advance of mankind. It is a rescue of so much of the productive soil from weedy entanglement and noxious fertility. No boldness of tradition, no stamp of national character, no casual grace of language, can retrieve them; more than the chance aspirings of the weed, or the passing fragrance of its bloom, can forbid the hand of extirpation. But we feel differently when we look upon the national fall of a great language, like the Hebrew. We

For

the trivial, meagre,

well regret, that may among and common-place crowd of dialects that still make Europe a Babel, we cannot see the hoary majesty of the language of inspiration raising its honoured head from the dust, moving in its native grandeur above the multitude, and with the voice, reminding us of the times, of Jewish glory and virtue. Or, if this renewal be unfitted for our day; if the songs of Sion are not to be sung beside the waters of Babylon; and we are never to hear the rich and holy harmonies of Isaiah, the tones that wept from Jeremiah's harp, or the stormy supremacy, the swell of wrath, terror, and wonder, that Ezekiel struck from his string, as if it were swept by the whirlwind, and made living by the lightnings; must we not hope that this extinction is not to be final? that in times when the guilt of Judah shall be purified, this last vestige of the chain shall be cleared away? that when she shall cease to be the dweller in all lands, and the denizen of none; with a fixed home she may have a fixed language? that the great ancestral tongue shall. be loosed, by the same miracle which breaks down her prison gates? that the Oracle of her fathers shall lie in its ruins no more; that the fount which, like the rock struck by Moses, had poured out the living waters for the first wanderers of the wilderness, shall not be dry for ever, or lie out of the track of human life; but shall stream again in the days when "the wilderness shall blossom as