of the nation that only the agonizing surgery of war could remove it. Those melancholy and prophetic words of his will never be forgotten: "Fondly do we hope fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn by the sword—as it was said three thousand years ago—so still it must be said
Despite the multitude of books on Palestine, there is no one connected history, in English, of the country from the Fall of Jerusalem to the present time. Our endeavor will be made during this year to repair this lack of easy acquirable information by the publication of a series of addresses in THE MACCABAEAN on Palestine and its history. A variety of brief points will be represented, and on some periods there will probably be some duplicates, but we believe that these papers will collect the material for the much needed continuous record of the Holy Land.—Ed. MACCABAEAN.
INTRODUCTORY.
"For sale till no man would buy them." It is in these words that we get a last glimpse of Israel and of his country. Palestine, of the destruction of Jerusalem and of the dispersion of its population. In that history, the most tragic of national histories, that most appalling in its completeness, halts; but as the black veil of misery blots out the details of the complete desolation, we are possessed with a strange feeling that even here, where Titus tramples on the holy Temple Hill, when the enslaved
This is true both of the land and of its ancient people. The seal of a great purpose seems to have been set both in the divine and in the human sense, upon land and people, but between the episode which left Titus conqueror and the modern cry of "Back to Zion," is a long-drawn-out history of the people of Israel and the jolting records of Palestine. No country, perhaps, has so great a bibliography compared to the material of its episodical history. The books concerning Palestine go more by quantity than by quality: trashy travels, fustian book-made books, scores of biassed volumes, that, end on end, might pave the road from here to Jerusalem. But it is the filling up of at least a part of the chasm of history, the plain record of the facts and data of Palestine since Titus left it to build his crowning Arch of Triumph in Rome, that is still needed.
that the 'judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.' " The judgments of the Lord have not ceased to be alive. Not when the sinner says, "It is enough," do they cease from scourging him. If the American nation is now and then alarmed at the multitude of evils the crime of slavery has left in its wake, not upon the black man should be the blame. Let pride be chastened by the thought that, "the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether."
. By J. De Haas
nation is led off to dungeon, galley or mine, even here the end is not yet.
The history of Palestine since the destruction of Jerusalem by Titus falls naturally into a series of periods, though, in many instances, it is only by the most ex-