The glory of this latter house shall be greater than the former, saith the Lord of Hosts; and in this house will I give peace, saith the Lord of Hosts."

These comfortable words were fulfilled when our Lord Jesus Christ came into this house; he who is the brightness of his Father's glory, and the express image of his person, who came down from heaven to make our peace with God, and to leave behind him the blessing of peace, as a sacred legacy to all his faithful followers. It was in this temple, you know, as I was telling you the other day, that the aged Simeon took into his arms his infant Saviour, and having seen the salvation of God, having beheld him who was to be the light of the gentiles, and the glory of his people Israel, exclaimed with his heart full of gratitude, "Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace."

Here, too, it was that our Lord, while yet a child, conversed with the Jewish doctors, and astonished them with his heavenly wisdom; here, too, in later years, he began to teach the truths of that gospel which publishes peace to all mankind; and near this same temple, and while it was still standing, did Christ offer himself up to God as a more precious sacrifice than any which had been ever offered in either temple before; that sacrifice which was to make our peace with God, and to be the foundation of all those glorious hopes, which as Christians, we are allowed to cherish. This was indeed a glorious fulfilment of the prophet's, words: and thus you see how in every thing the thoughts of pious men in old time were directed forward to the coming of that

Redeemer who was promised from the very first, and whom we, after them, should learn to look upon as the great end which both the law and the prophets had continually in view.

SIXTY-SEVENTH SUNDAY EVENING.

THE JEWS AGAIN A PEOPLE.

M. WELL, Edward, you look so impatient for 'me to come, and so anxious to hear more about the Jews, that I do not know what you will say, when I tell you that I have almost finished my history of them.

E. Almost done with the history of the Jews, mother! I am very sorry; I had not thought at all of your coming to an end of it. But I hope the

Bible tells us a little more about them?

M. The Bible does not quite finish its account of them at the dedication of the second temple, although the remainder of their history will take us but a little while longer. I will give you some of what we find in the Old Testament about them after this most interesting event.

Though the second temple was so much less magnificent than the first, yet the building of it took far more time. The temple of Solomon, beautiful been finished in seven years, but

as it was, had

twenty years passed away from the time the second was begun under Cyrus, before it was completed. We do not wonder at this, because we have seen how sadly the Jews were hindered in their work, and how much they had to suffer while they were about it. It was in the sixth year of King Darius's reign, that they had the happiness of dedicating it to the service of God, and of beginning to worship him regularly in it. They must then, for the first time, I think, have begun to feel that they were again a people, and to hope that they might still see their country all that it had once been, under the favour and blessing of the Almighty. The finishing of the temple alone would have been enough to have made the sixth year of King Darius an interesting and important one, but there was another event which occurred at the same time, which makes that year of great consequence in history. This, Edward, was the destruction of Babylon, which was then, after a long siege, taken by Darius; for the inhabitants of Babylon, during the reign of Darius, had determined to revolt from his dominion, and by throwing off the yoke of Persia, to recover their former liberty. It was this that provoked Darius to come against that beautiful city with his great armies, and, when he had taken it, to punish the people for their rebellion, and to put it out of their power to offend again. And this he did indeed. He took away her hundred gates, and beat down her thick and lofty walls, destroyed her beauty, and began to bring upon her all the sorrows and calamities of which the prophet Jeremiah had spoken in

many remarkable words. All that he had said was most exactly fulfilled, partly at that time and partly in the ages that followed. Cyrus had begun the punishment of this proud and wicked city: Darius was employed to go on with the awful sentence that had been pronounced against her; and in a few years more another king of Persia, called Xerxes, came to Babylon and stripped her temples and idols of all their treasures. Some time after this, a mighty conqueror, called Alexander the Great, wished very much to restore Babylon to her former glory, and made great endeavours to do so, but all in vain; he died before he had even in good earnest begun the work.

Soon after the time of Alexander the Great, Babylon was brought lower still, for both her inhabitants, and even her name were taken away from her, and given to another city which was built close by.

As time rolled on, this great city became more and more desolate, so that at the time when our Saviour appeared, the chief part of it had become a wilderness, and was made by the kings of Parthia a park or chase for wild beasts; and thus the words of the prophets were fulfilled when they said, "the wild beasts of the desert shall dwell there, and cry in their desolate houses."

Such became the condition of that wonderful city, which had been called "the lady of kingdoms;" and the hundreds of years that have rolled by since, have only made things worse and worse; so that if you were now to travel to those parts, and ask for

what had once been Babylon, you would find few signs left of the spot where she had stood; so few that you would scarcely believe that you had been guided to the right place. Indeed, so difficult is it to find the spot where Babylon stood, that travellers, to this day, differ about it. We only know that the place where she must once have been is now overrun with serpents and scorpions, and all kinds of venomous and unclean creatures. A traveller who was there only four years ago (in 1827), says, that as he journeyed along, the road was covered on every side with rude hillocks and mounds formed over masses of ruins: in short, his path lay through great masses of ruined heaps of bricks and tiles; all was dreary, lonely, and naked about him, as he entered the once mighty Babylon, the queen of nations; and thus, as the prophets had said, their houses are full of doleful creatures, and dragons or serpents cry in her pleasant places, and Babylon is become heaps: neither can the Arabian pitch his tent there, neither can the shepherds make their folds there; so that we may go on and say, in the words of Scripture, "How is Babylon become a desolation among the nations; every purpose of the Lord hath he performed against her, to make the land of Babylon a desolation, without an inhabitant; for the Lord of Hosts hath swept it with the besom of destruction."

We had said so much about Babylon before, Edward, and her history is so much connected with that of the Jews, and so much spoken of by their prophets, that I wished to tell you what became of