What an Ensign that would be to lift upon the walls of Zion, to the scattered House of Judah

The Lion of its Royal Line!

The Unicorn of Israel!

And the motto of Benjamin

"Dieu et mon droit!”

And, "Evil!" indeed, might Britons cry, "to him who evil thinks!" if called upon in battle to maintain a gage thus hurled into the arena of "the Eastern Question"! For haply if the cause be just and founded upon FACTS, all who essayed to stem it would but find themselves arrayed, in vain, against "A CHOSEN PEOPLE," and not one alone, if its two halves are England and America, and its progeny a thousand colonies!

The predictions concerning the future of the Israelitish nation are most explicit, and look towards an earthly grandeur of the widest international scope. Let us enumerate a few of them:

"This day will I begin to put the dread of thee upon the nations that are under the whole heaven, who shall hear report of thee, and shall tremble, and be in anguish because of thee." (Deut. ii. 25.)

The day thus selected for this beginning of Israel's military might is in notable keeping with the strange methods which always govern the councils of the Almighty. Viewed from the human standpoint, it was the least auspicious one in their whole history. They had wandered in the wilderness for thirty-eight years: "until all the generation of the men of war were wasted out from among the host, as the Lord sware unto them. For indeed the hand of the Lord was against them, to destroy them from among the host, until they were con

sumed " (Deut. ii. 14, 15). "So," continues Moses," it came to pass, when all the men of war were consumed and dead from among the people, that the Lord spake unto me, saying, Thou art to pass over . . . THIS DAY. Rise ye up, take your journey, and pass over the river Arnon: behold, I have given into thine hand Sihon the Amorite, . . . and his land: begin, possess, contend with him in battle." It is from this date that Israel truly reckons its prowess in arms, and whenever, since then, she has fought upon the Lord's side, the dread of her "thin red line" has prepared the certain victory. "Annuit Cæptis !"-" He has prospered our beginnings," even as Manasseh still records upon his seal; and down through all the ages, with the Scythians, Scots, and Saxons, and with Engle-men, and new Englemen-both "blue and gray," the dread and fear of them still make the nations pause, before they take up arms doomed not to prosper or prevail where ISRAEL is the foe! (Isa. liv. 17; 1 Sam. xxvi. 25.)

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Moses certainly viewed Israel in its latter-day development, when of its leading tribes he, also, uttered this :

"His glory is like the firstling of his bullock, and his horns are like the horns of unicorns; with them he shall push the people together to the ends of the earth; and they are the ten thousands of EPHRAIM, and they are the thousands of MANASSEH." (Deut. xxxiii. 17.)

And did Balaam's foresight look into the present day, and through it into Israel's further future, when he uttered: "God brought him forth out of Egypt; he has, as it were, the strength of a unicorn; he shall eat up the nations his enemies, and shall break their bones, and pierce them through with his arrows"? (Num. xxiv. 8.) After the Ten Tribes had been deported into captivity and lost, Jeremiah pronounced in their behalf this

wonderful promise of future greatness: "Thou art my battle-axe, and weapons of war; for with thee I will break in pieces the nations, and with thee I will destroy kingdoms; and with thee I will break in pieces the chariot and his rider." (Jer. li. 20, 21.)

The following striking utterances are from Isaiah and Micah:

"Behold, I will make [of] thee a new sharp threshing instrument having teeth; thou shalt thresh the mountains and beat them small, and shalt make the hills as chaff. Thou shalt fan them, and the wind shall carry them away, and the whirlwind shall scatter them; and thou shalt rejoice in the Lord, and shalt glory in the Holy One of Israel.” (Isa. xli. 15, 16.)

"And the remnant of Jacob shall be among the Gentiles in the midst of many people, as a lion among the beasts of the forest, as a young lion among the flocks of sheep; who, if he go through, both treadeth down, and teareth in pieces, and none can deliver. Thine hand shall be lifted up upon thine adversaries, and all thine enemies shall be cut off. The nations shall see and be confounded at all their might; they shall lay their hand upon their mouth, their ears shall be deaf. They shall lick the dust like a serpent, they shall move out of their holes like worms of the earth; they shall be afraid of the Lord our God, and shall fear because of thee. Thou wilt perform the truth to Jacob, and the mercy to Abraham, which thou hast sworn unto our fathers from the days of old." (Mic. v. 8, 9; vii. 16, 17, 20.)

It is certainly a great and military power that is described in such passages.

And certainly a people who were to perform so great a work in human destiny as is accorded here to Israel must of necessity make use of just such means as are

now in Anglo-Saxon reach. In commenting upon the contrasted history of the two nations, Tullidge, in his "Kingdom of Stone," remarks: "It must command the assent of every believer in Divine Providence that England has been used as just such an instrument. This is a striking fact which is bound to force itself upon the attention, and call forth some expressions of surprise."

The mission assigned to "Israel" by her various prophets-i.e., to Ten-Tribed Israel after her deportation-exactly agrees with what Daniel prophesied should be the mission of the successor to Rome's temporal power. This successor was to be the "Stone Kingdom," that "smote the image upon his feet which were of iron and clay, and brake them to pieces. Then was the iron, the clay, the brass, the silver, and the gold, broken to pieces together, and became like the chaff of the summer · threshing-floors; and the wind carried them away, that no place was found for them."

It was a world-wide dominion that Israel was to be trained to inherit, and this grander mission demanded the dure experience of a far longer pilgrimage than that from Egypt, which latter, even, needed forty years ere it fitted them to enter Palestine. Accordingly the prophets rise unto the theme so soon as Israel becomes "lost" in the northern wilderness. Thus Micah, immediately after the Assyrian invasion had led the tribes away, gives utterance to these words: "Who is a God like unto thee, that pardoneth iniquity, and passeth by the transgression of the remnant of his inheritance? He retaineth not his anger forever, because he delighteth in mercy. He will turn again, he will have compassion upon us; he will subdue our iniquities: and thou wilt cast all their sins into the depths of the sea. Thou wilt

perform the truth to Jacob, and the mercy to Abraham which thou hast sworn unto our fathers from the days of old." (Mic. vii. 18-20.) This promise of mercy was not given to Judah, but unto "Israel," as the other prophets imply, thus:

"And the Lord said unto me, The backsliding ISRAEL hath justified herself more than treacherous JUDAH." (Jer. iii. 11.)

"And when her sister AHOLIBAH [i.e., Judah] saw this, she was more corrupt in her inordinate love than she [Aholah, i.e., Israel, or Samaria], and in her whoredoms more than her sister in her whoredoms."

xxiii. 11.)

(Ezek.

"Thine elder sister is SAMARIA, she and her daughters that dwell at thy left hand; and thy younger sister, that dwelleth at thy right hand, is SODOM and her daughters. Yet hast thou not walked after their ways, nor done after their abominations; but, as if that were a very little thing, thou wast corrupted more than they in all thy ways? (Ezek. xvi. 46, 47. Jerusalem, the capital of "Judah," is here addressed, and the whole chapter will bear reading in this connection, Samaria being "Israel.”) "Neither hath SAMARIA committed HALF of thy sins." (Ezek. xvi. 51.)

The generally mistaken idea is that the Ten-Tribed Kingdom was guilty of a greater enormity of wickedness than Judah, but the foregoing Scriptures utterly refuse countenance to such a notion, and the following promises intensify the belief that these Ten Tribes are now in existence, somewhere, as a nation, and as one notably under divine favor.

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Therefore, behold, I will allure HER, and bring HER into THE WILDERNESS, and speak comfortably unto her. And I will give HER vineyards from THENCE, and the val