Excerpt from History of the Jewish Nation: From the Earliest Times to the Present Day

The history of no nation is so intimately connected with the welfare of the whole human race as that of the Jews. Immanuel was a Jew, and for this reason, if for no other, mankind would have an interest in tracing the narrative of the race to which that mighty Personage belonged. The Jews are the people of promise, to whom the Divine Word stands pledged, in a sense which is true of no other nation ality. They stand nearer to God, in certain respects, than any other people. The Jews are the people of prophecy. The things foretold concerning them in one age are fulfilled in another. Prophecy and its fulfillment are in them joined closely together. History, within a certain limited range, exists and is written for their sakes. In their gradually developing history, the word of Jehovah stands, as it were, on trial; and the reverent mind takes the deepest interest in inquiring what is the issue of this test. Is the Divine word, in the gradual unfolding of the ages, fulfilled? And he who worthily sets forth the materials for the answering of this question, does a service to theology, to learning, to history, and to every curious inquirer. God made promises to the Hebrew nation from the days of Abraham till the close of the Old Testament Scripture. He threatened evil to them as the fmit of rebellion and sin. Have the good things promised, and has the evil threatened come to the nation in alternating succession, in proportion to their varying deserts? The Jews who lived in the times of the incarnation of Christ imprecated curses upon themselves and their children for the share they chose to take in compassing the death of the Son of God. Has the curse rested upon the people? Do they feel, in their present separation from the nations of the earth, in the lack of respect with which they are, as a general rule, regarded, in the cruel persecutions which have been visited upon them, and in their stubborn blindness to the light of the Gospel, the awful cfiect of Divine displeasure These questions, as they are continuously solved by history, hold an important relation to the theology of the world. While the Divine omni presence is a truth universally conceded, and which needs no argument, we find in the Jewish nation and its history, the most convincing illustration of that doctrine. In the Jewish history God stands forth before men, an acknowledged, a present God, a jealous God, visiting the iniquities of the fathers upon the children, unto the third and fourth generations of them that hate him. If other histories are so written as to seem like events without a God, the Jewish history is a history with God every where embodied, and everywhere apparent. The history of the Jewish people is a commentary on the Divine faithfulness and veracity, and in it God brings himself very near to men.

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