| 86 many well-disposed persons from endeavoring to promulgate the gospel of our Lord among the Jews, I am through bitter experience able to testify, Now if it is asked, "Does such a feeling exist indeed?" I answer, "it does;" but is this the wonder? surely not! had it been otherwise, then indeed it would have been a marvelous wonder. What! can I open my lips to express the least surprise at the murmur of the dumb animal when it sees him approaching whose hand has mal-treated him all the days of his life? And can you be surprised when you detect a suspicious feeling towards you in the Jew! If you have forgotten their centuries of miseries, be assured they have not; their history, since the destruction of their temple, is one characteristic of cruelty, misery, and despair which was exercised upon them in all those countries whither they fled for refuge. All that found them have devoured them; and their adversaries said: We offend not, because they sinned against the Lord, the habitation of justice, even the Lord, the hope of their Fathers." Jer. I:8. [50:1] Not only ought the rememberance [remembrance] of the sufferings which this people have sustained at your hands, be the means of raising your sympathy in their behalf, and thus induce you to alleviate their distress, as much as lies in your power; but it must also bring that forcible conviction home to such, particularly who will not stoop to receive the word of God in its original meaning, but are too fond to spiritualize such portions of it, which does not suit either the former expressed sentiments, or their present disposition. I say, to such the contemplation of the exact literal fulfilment [fulfillment] with regard to the afflictions of the children of Judah, ought to show that the blessings in store will as surely follow! For why should we give them the curses, and withhold from them the blessings?
Need I stop here to paint a picture of their long and unceasing miseries which they have undergone, even since the destruction of their Temple? This is generally admitted, but to give an idea of the extent and manner of their sufferings to such of my readers who may yet be unacquainted with it, I shall quote the testimonies of some esteemed writers, whose attention seems to have been impressively arrested, and who give us a short, precise, but candid account concerning it. "Kings have often employed the severity of their edicts and the hands of the executioner to destroy them; the seditious multitude has performed massacres and executions, infinitely more tragical than the princes. Both kings and people, Heathens and Christians, and Mahomedans, who are opposite to us, in so many things, have united in design of destroying this nation, and have not been able to effect it, The bush of Moses, surrounded with flames, has already burnt withont [without] consuming. The Jews have been driven from all places in the world, they have, from age to age, run through the misery and persecutions, and torrents of their own blood." (Basnage 1. vi. ci § 1. "Their banishment from Judea," says Keith in his evidence of Prophecy, "was only the perlude [prelude] to their expulsion from city to city, and from kingdom to kingdom. Not only did the first and second centuries of the Christian era see them twice rooted out of their own land, but each succeeding century has turued [turned] with new calamities to that once chosen but now long rejected race. The history of their sufferings is a continued tale of horror. Revolt is natural to the oppressed: and their frequent seditions were productive of renewed privations and distress. Emperors, Kings, and Caliphs, all united in subjecting them to the same "iron yoke." Constantine, after having suppressed a revolt which they raised, and having commanded their ears to be cut off, dispersed them as fugitives and vagabonds into different countries, whither they carried in terror to their kindred, the mark of their sufferings and infamy. In the fifth century, they were expelled from Alexandria, which had long been their safest place of resort. Justinian, from whose principles of legislation a wiser and more human policy ought to have emanated, yielded to none of his predecessors in hostility and severity against them. He abolished their synagogues, prohibited them even from entering into caves for the exercise of their worship, rendered their testimony inadmissable [inadmissible], and deprived them of the natural right of bequeathing their property; and when such oppressive enactments led to insurrectionary movements among the Jews, their property was confiscated-many of them beheaded-and so bloody an execution of them prevailed, that as it is expressly related, "all the Jews of that century, trembled." Gregory the Great afforded them a temporary respite from oppression, which only rendered their spoilation [spoliation] more complete, and their suffering more acute, under the cruel persecutions of Heraclias. That emperor, unable to satiate his hatred against them by inflicting a variety of punishments on those who resided in his own dominions, and by finally expelling them from the empire, exerting so effectually against them his influence in other countries, that they suffered under a general and simultaneous persecution from Asia to the farthest extremities of Europe. In Spain, conversions imprisonments, or banishments were their only alternatives. In France, a similar fate
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