Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Nations which did not begin to exist till long renturies after the Jew had acquired a history, have long ago run their course and perished; but he is unchanged. The Roman, the Athenian, the Babylonian, is now only a name?the shadow of a name; yet when the most ancient of these powers was laying the foundation of its existence, the Jew could already trace back a genealogy of many generations. As the modern traveller surveys the remains of the arch of Titus at Rome, he feels himself bewildered in endeavoring to realize the distant date of its creation?and yet it commemorates only the last of a long series of Jewish dispersions. You read of the fragments of antiquity dug up from the ruins of Babylon, and your mind is carried still further back than by the Roman arch; but the Jews possibly formed that Roman brick, and imprinted on it those arrow-headed characters. The pyramids of Egypt take your imagination still further back; the Jew, not improbably helped to build the oldest of them. Enter the most ancient of the royal tombs of Thebes, and mark the national physiognomies painted on the walls?you recognize that of the Jew unaltered to the present day. Time itself was young, when the Lord said unto Abraham,
I will surely make of thee a great nation. Nor will any of the ordinary means of national preservation account for their continuance. They have not, like the Chinese, been stationary, and built in from the rest of the human family. From about the year seven hundred and forty before Christ, till the final destruction of Jerusalem by Titus, they suffered as many dispersions, partial and entire, as there were centuries. Their wanderings in the wilderness, relieved by temporary encampments, may be regarded as an emblem of all their subsequent history. Foreign help and alliance…