in which we live. That man must be blind indeed who does not
The more boldly and decidedly all true Christians set their faces against the things I have just named, and wash their hands of any complicity with them, the more likely are they to find their efforts to promote Christianity among the Jews prosperous and successful.
And now let me conclude all with a few plain words of application. I ask all who read this paper to take up the cause of the Jews' Society, and the Jewish subject, for the following reasons.
1. Take up the subject because of the important position which it occupies in Scripture. Cultivate the habit of reading prophecy with a single eye to the literal meaning of its proper names. Cast aside the old traditional idea that Jacob, and Israel, and Judah, and Jerusalem, and Zion, must always mean the Gentile Church, and that predictions about the Second Advent are to be taken spiritually, and first Advent predictions literally. Be just, and honest, and fair. If you expect the Jews to take the 53rd of Isaiah literally, be sure you take the 54th and 60th and 62nd literally also. The Protestant Reformers were not perfect. On no point, I venture to say, were they so much in the wrong as in the interpretation of Old Testament prophecy. Even our venerable authorized version of the Bible has many "tables of contents" which are sadly calculated to mislead, in the prophetical books. When the revised version comes out, I trust we shall see a great improvement in this respect.
2. In the next place, take up the Jewish subject because of the times in which we live. That man must be blind indeed who does not observe how much the attention of politicians and statesmen in these days is concentrating on the countries around Palestine. The strange position of things in Egypt, the formation of the Suez Canal, the occupation of Cyprus, the project of the Euphrates railway, the drying up of the Turkish empire, the trigonometrical survey of Palestine, what curious phenomena these are! What do they mean? What is going to happen next? He that believeth will not make haste. I will not pretend to decide. But I think I hear the voice of God saying, "Remember the Jews, look to Jerusalem."