Romans from one political division and one ruler to another. All through this time the Jews had been turbulent. They were bitterly divided against each other and continually intriguing. Finally in 66 a.d. the country blazed out into a war which forced the Romans to bring large reinforcements to Palestine. Vespasian came to the gates of Jerusalem, where the parties of the Jews had been fighting against each other, but the final capture of the city, whose garrison was divided against itself, was delayed until the coming of Titus in September, 70 A.D. This time the Romans did the work thoroughly. The city was sacked, and the inhabitants sold as slaves or used in the combats in the public games; and the plunder of the temple was exhibited in the triumph of Vespasian and Titus in Rome. So came the final end of the Jews as a nation with a local and settled home.

Meantime their religion, starting from the impetus given by the great prophets of the eighth century, Amos, Hosea and Isaiah, soared to constantly higher planes. The great writer who wrote the original Deuteronomy, besides concentrating the worship at Jerusalem, formulated in the 7th century B.C. the doctrine of the dependence of the outward fortunes of Israel on its faithfulness to the covenant with Jehovah.

The Lord did not set his love upon you, nor choose you, because ye were more in number than any people: for ye were the fewest of all people:

But because the Lord loved you, and because he would keep the oath which he had sworn unto your fathers, hath the Lord brought you out with a mighty hand, and redeemed you out of the house of bondmen, from the hand of Pharaoh king of Egypt.

Know therefore that the Lord thy God, he is God, the faithful God, which keepeth covenant and mercy with them that love him and keep his commandments to a thousand generations;

And repayeth them that hate him to their face, to destroy them: he will not be slack to him that hateth him, he will repay him to his face.

Thou shalt therefore keep the commandments, and the statutes, and the judgments, which I command thee this day, to do them.1

In the next century, during the Exile, another great unknown prophet, whom we may call the Isaiah of the Exile, advanced to a new and higher doctrine. Through his mouth Jehovah proclaimed:

I am the Lord, and there is none else, there is no God beside me: I girded thee, though thou hast not known me:

That they may know from the rising of the sun,

1 Deut. vii. 7-11.

and from the west, that there is none beside me. I am the Lord, and there is none else.

I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the Lord do all these things.1

And he sets forth as the corollary of this doctrine the futility of idol-worship. The notable passage of grim humor in Isaiah describes how a man, after hewing down an ash,

burneth part thereof in the fire; with part thereof he eateth flesh; he roasteth roast, and is satisfied: yea, he warmeth himself, and saith, Aha, I am warm, I have seen the fire:

And the residue thereof he maketh a god, even his graven image: he falleth down unto it, and worshippeth it, and prayeth unto it, and saith, Deliver me; for thou art my God.2

When one remembers that these mighty doctrines were uttered by the prophet of a people whom the Chaldeans must have looked on as one of the least important of their captive nations, one sees how far the religion of Israel had risen. In the succeeding centuries the Jews rose to still further heights. Clinging as they did with a passionate earnestness to the promises of the prophets and at the same time driven by the coercive weight of circumstances to

1 Isa. xlv. 5-7.

2 Ib. xliv. 16-17.

see that these promises could not be fulfilled in their own day, gradually they came to realize that their faith would be rewarded in a future life; and in Daniel and the other apocalyptic writings, the doctrine of immortality is set forth clearly and specifically.

And many of them that sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt.

And they that be wise shall shine as the brightness of the firmament; and they that turn many to righteousness as the stars for ever and ever.1

From this period between the Captivity and the period of the Maccabees come probably many of the psalms, and the great poem of Job. Meditation on the meaning of the world had come, but it was guided by men whose faith in their God was unquenchable.

Thus in the thousand years or less in which the history of the people of Israel can be traced, we find them changed from a small and loosely bound league of nomadic tribes to a congregation widely scattered through the world, and bound together only by their allegiance to a law understood and followed in the most scrupulously literal way. In their religion they have passed from the simple, unthinking

1 Dan. xii. 2-3.

devotion of a desert tribe to its tribal god to a realization that Jehovah is the God of all the earth, and that though his chosen people may for a time seem to be oppressed and helpless, yet it is in his power to set them above all the heathen who surround them. It is the history of a people who in spite of disasters which often brought it to the verge of annihilation, yet by its inextinguishable faith rose superior to the events of this life and attained to an elevation of religious thought which has made it for all its small numbers and its helplessness one of the great powers in the shaping of the modern world,

The books of the New Testament are hardly affected by external history, for the Christian Church accepted the empire of Rome as a matter of course. The spread of Christianity to the Jews of the Dispersal and then to the Gentiles led to the translation of the gospel into terms of Western thought under the leadership of St. Paul, and Revelation was written under the stress of the early persecutions against the Christians; but otherwise the books written to aid the spread of the gospel were little influenced by external history. The Christian Church in the apostolic days was in no way a political organization, and was only indirectly influenced by the political