ing or remarkable pictures have been produced by a living artist.

Dr. Keith, in pointing out the exact fulfilment of every tittle of ancient prophecy in this awful overthrow, after referring to the horrors of the famished wretches within the walls-too horrible to read-thus depicts this final scene:-"Sixty thousand Roman soldiers unremittingly besieged them; they encompassed Jerusalem with a wall, and hemmed them in on every side; they brought down their high and fenced walls to the ground; they slaughtered the slaughterers, they spared not the people; they burned the temple in defiance of the commands, the threats, and the resistance of their general. With it the last hope of all the Jews was extinguished. They raised, at the sight, an universal but an expiring cry of sorrow and despair. Ten thousand were there slain, and six thousand victims were enveloped in its blaze. The whole city, full of the famished dying, and of the murdered dead, presented no picture but that of despair, no scene but of horror. The aqueducts and the city sewers were crowded as the last refuge of the hopeless. Two thousand were found dead there, and many were dragged from thence and slain. The Roman soldiers put all indiscriminately to death, and ceased not till they became faint and weary and overpowered with the work of destruction. But they only sheathed the sword to light the torch. They set fire to the city in various places. The flames spread everywhere, and were checked but for a moment by the red streamlets in every street. Jerusalem became heaps, and the mountain of the house as the high places of the forest. Within the circuit of a few miles, in the space of five months,-foes and famine, pillage and pestilence, within,—a triple wall around, and besieged every moment from without,-eleven hundred thousand human beings perished, though the tale of each of them was a tragedy. Was there ever so concentrated a mass of misery? Could

any prophecy be more faithfully and awfully fulfilled? The prospect of his own crucifixion, when Jesus was on his way to Calvary, was not more clearly before him, and seemed to affect him less, than the fate of Jerusalem. How full of tenderness, and fraught with truth, was the sympathetic response of the condoling sufferer to the wailings and lamentations of the women who followed him, when he turned unto them and beheld the city, which some of them might yet see wrapt in flames and drenched in blood, and said, 'Daughters of Jerusalem, weep not for me, but weep for yourselves and for your children. For, behold, the days are coming, in which they will say, Blessed are the barren, and the wombs that never bare, and the paps which never gave suck.'"

Babylon, Nineveh, and the mighty cities of Assyria, are all buried under their heaps, but Jerusalem lives on, reserved for other and brighter days. She, too, it may be, holds buried treasures that shall yet be disinterred, to add new evidence to all that has been already yielded, though "Titus commanded the whole city and temple to be razed from the foundation. The soldiers were not Avarice combined with

then disobedient to their general. duty and with resentment: the altar, the temple, the walls, and the city, were overthrown from the base, in search of the treasures which the Jews, beset on every hand by plunderers, had concealed and buried during the siege. Three towers and the remnant of a wall alone stood, the monument and memorial of Jerusalem; and the city was afterwards ploughed over by Terentius Rufus."

The Roman ploughshare tore up the very foundations of the temple, leaving no longer one stone upon another, and the triumphal arch of Titus, erected at Rome in commemoration of the destruction of Jerusalem, still stands in evidence of the captured spoils of the last temple, wherein the desire of all nations had appeared, making

the glory of the latter house greater than the former. Sculptured on this memorial of the triumph of Titus, are still seen the Roman soldiers, bearing on their shoulders the seven-branched candlestick, and the holy vessels of the temple. Yet much may, and indeed must, have escaped the search of the Roman treasure-seekers, for Jerusalem was made heaps, even as Babylon and Nineveh.

Rome, a younger city than Palestine's ancient capital, bears abundant evidence of the changes wrought on a city set upon hills in the lapse of ages, the ancient remains which now exist, have mostly been dug out far beneath the ruins of her modern dwellings; and even since the expulsion of the present pope from the Roman capital, and its occupation by the soldiers of France, some very remarkable discoveries have been made. But great as the vicissitudes have been to which Rome has been exposed at different periods, they can never stand comparison with those of Jerusalem. The Romans, the Saracens, the Christian Crusaders, and the Turks, have each rebuilt a city of their own on the ancient site, in heedlessness or wilful contempt of all the work of their predecessors; and if, amid the vicissitudes of Roman history such a total change has taken place on the topography of the sevenhilled city, how vain must it be to imagine that the modern Turkish capital of Syria retains unaltered, after a lapse of eighteen centuries, features which characterized it in the days of the Redeemer.

But a complete confirmation of these observations has recently been recorded. Amid the earnest and increasing interest felt in the ancient land of Palestine, the chosen people to whom it belonged of old have not been forgotten by the Christians of Britain. Missionaries have of late years returned to Jerusalem, bearing the message of glad tidings which once went forth from thence to the Gentiles; and during the visit of Mr. Bonar and Mr. M'Cheyne, two clergymen of the Church of Scotland, sent

to Jerusalem on a mission of inquiry in 1839, one of the novelties which struck them in that strange city, was rows of camels following one another, carrying stones into the town from a quarry a few miles to the north of Jerusalem, and designed for materials wherewith to build a Hebrew Christian church. In a letter of Mr. Nicolayson, the English missionary to the Jews of Palestine, published in the Jewish Intelligence for April 1840, he describes the protracted excavations made in digging for a foundation for the new church. They laid bare heap after heap of the debris of ancient buildings, and it was not till they had dug upwards of fifty feet under the modern surface of Jerusalem that they reached the ancient foundations on which the city of Judah was built. The Rev. Mr. Bonar, who was there while these excavations were in progress, remarks: "In seeking a solid foundation they had dug down about forty feet, and had not yet come to rock. They laid bare heap after heap of rubbish and ancient stones. It is a remarkable fact, which cannot but strike the traveller, that not only on mount Zion, but in many parts of the city, the modern town is really built on the rubbish of the old. The heaps of ancient Jerusalem are still remaining; indurated masses of stones and rubbish forty and fifty feet deep in many places. Truly the prophets spoke with a divine accuracy when they said, 'Jerusalem shall become heaps.' 'I will make Jerusalem heaps.' And if so, shall not the future restoration foretold by the same lips be equally literal and full? The city shall be builded upon her own heap.' The fact that these heaps of ruins are of so great depth, suggested to us a literal interpretation of the words of Jeremiah, 'Her gates are sunk into the ground.' The ancient gates mentioned by Nehemiah are no longer to be found, and it is quite possible that several of them may be literally buried below the feet of the inquiring traveller."

Who shall say what interesting memorials may yet be brought to light from beneath the foundations of modern Jerusalem? A lively sympathy is experienced by every intelligent mind in the researches of Dr. Layard and Major Rawlinson among buried palaces and temples of Assyria, but how would the heart thrill with emotions of deepest interest and high anticipation, if it were possible to conduct such researches on the site of the Temple, or amid the vast accumulations of debris that now fill up the ancient valleys once intervening between the heights on which Jerusalem stood! But even now, the intelligent traveller can discover remains which appear undoubtedly to belong to the city, against which Titus led the avenging legions of Rome. Dr. Robinson, the distinguished American traveller, furnishes in his "Biblical Researches in Palestine," a most interesting and minute account of the topography of Jerusalem and its environs, comparing and contrasting them with the features of the ancient city, as described by Josephus. He thus describes the result of his investigation of the walls of the modern city adjoining the site of the Great Mosque, which has always been held, both by Jew and Gentile, to occupy the site of Solomon's Temple :-"The lower part of this wall in several places is composed of very large hewn stones, which at once strike the eye of the beholder as ancient; as being at least as old as the time of Herod, if not of Solomon. The upper part of the wall is every where obviously modern; as is the whole wall in many places. The Golden Gate, which once led out from the area of the mosque upon this side, is now walled up. Near the north-east corner of this area, towards St. Stephen's Gate, we measured one of the large stones in the wall, and found it twenty-four feet long, by six feet broad and three feet high. Just north of the same gate is a small tank or reservoir on the outside; and within the gate, on the left hand, is the very large and deep reservoir, to which the name of Bethesda is commonly