peculiar position which Israel as a nation occupies at the present day.
Mosaic services were brought to an end. The Jews themselves were deprived of their land and scattered all over the earth.
The whole history is wonderful, peculiar, and unlike anything else that is recorded and known by man. Never was a people so peculiarly favored and so peculiarly punished. Never did any nation at one time rise so high and at another fall so low. Never was there such a tremendous proof given to the world of the depravity of human nature, and the incessant tendency of man to moral and spiritual decay. Those who are fond of telling us in modern times that kindness and love are sufficient to regenerate man and keep man good, are always forgetting the mighty lesson that is taught us by the history of the Jews. The corruption of man is a far worse disease that your modern philosophers suppose. Israel was surrounded by mercies and loving‐kindnesses: yet Israel fell. Let that never be forgotten.
2. I shall now ask you in the second place to consider the very peculiar position which Israel as a nation occupies at the present day.
In handling this point I shall first simply refer to facts which are open to the observation of every intelligent and well informed man upon earth, whether believer or unbeliever. I will allow such a man to shut up my Bible for a moment, and I will not ask him to listen to texts. I will only appeal to facts, and I challenge him to deny them if he can.
I assert then that the Jews are at this moment a peculiar people, and utterly separate from all other people on the face of the earth. They fulfill the prophecy of Hosea: "The children of Israel shall abide many days without a king, and without a prince, and without a sacrifice" (Hosea 3:4). For 1,800 years they have been scattered over the globe, without a country, without a government, without a capital city, strangers and aliens everywhere, often fiercely persecuted and vilely treated. Yet to this moment they continue a distinct, isolated, and separate nation, far more so than any nation on the earth. The
wonderful words of that strange prophet Balaam, who God constrained to speak, are still literally true: "The people shall dwell alone, and shall not be reckoned among the nations" (Num. 23:9).
Of what nation or people on earth can the like be said? I answer, confidently, none. When Nineveh, and Babylon, and Tyre, and the hundred‐gated Thebes of Egypt, and Susa, and Persepolis, and Carthage, and Palmyra were destroyed, what became of their inhabitants and subjects? We can give no answer. No doubt they were carried away captive and dispersed. But where are they now? No man can tell. When Saxons, and Danes, and Normans, and Flemings under the persecution of Alva, and Frenchmen after the edict of Nantes, settled down in our own England, what became of them? They were all gradually absorbed into our own population, and have generally lost all their national distinctions, except, perhaps, in some cases, their names. But nothing of the sort has ever happened to the Jews; they are still entirely distinct and never absorbed.
Even in matters of comparatively minor importance, there is to this very day an extraordinary separateness between the Jews and any other family of mankind on the face of the globe. Time seems unable to efface the difference. At the end of eighteen centuries they are a separate people. Physically, they are separate. Who does not know the Jewish type of countenance? Even a man like Mr. Lawrence, in his work on physiology, is obliged to admit that "the Jews exhibit one of the most striking instances of national formation unaltered by the most remarkable changes" (p. 468, ed. 3). In customs and habits they are separate. The tenacity with which they still keep to their Saturday Sabbath, and the feasts of their law, might put Christians to shame. Even in their political influence they are strangely separate. The extraordinary financial power which they exercise in all the money‐markets of the world enables them to sway the actions of Governments to an extent of which few have any conception. In short, if there ever was a people who are distinct, marked, cut off and separate from others, that people is Israel. Though they have dwelt
among the Gentiles for eighteen centuries, they are still as distinct from the Gentiles as black is distinct from white, and seem to be as incapable of mixture or absorption as oil is incapable of being absorbed into, or mixed with, water.
Now how shall we account for this extraordinary state of things? How shall we explain the unique and peculiar position which the Jewish people occupies in the world? Why is it that, unlike Saxons, and Danes, and Normans, and Flemings, and French, this singular race still floats alone, though broken to pieces like a wreck, on the waters of the globe, amidst its 1,500 million inhabitants? After the lapse of 1,800 years, it is neither destroyed, nor crushed, nor evaporated, nor amalgamated, nor lost sight of. Rather, it lives to this day as separate and distinct as it was when the arch of Titus was built at Rome.
I have not the least idea how questions like these are answered by those who profess to deny the Divine authority of Scripture. In all my reading I never met with an honest attempt to answer them from the unhappy camp of unbelievers. In fact it is my firm conviction that, among the many difficulties of infidelity, there is hardly any one more really insurmountable than the separate continuance of the Jewish nation. It is a burdensome stone which your modern skeptical writers may stubbornly despise, but cannot lift or remove out of their way. God has many witnesses to the truth of the Bible, if men would only examine them and listen to their evidence. But you may depend on it there is no witness so unanswerable as one whom he always keeps raising up, and enlivening, and moving before the eyes of mankind. That witness is the Jew.
The question, however, about the exceptional and peculiar position of the Jewish people is one that never need puzzle anyone who believes the Bible. Once open that Book and study its contents and the knot which so completely baffles the skeptic is one which you can easily untie. The inspired volume which you have in your hands supplies a full and complete explanation. Search it with an honest