Again Jeremiah: "Turn, O back-sliding children, saith the Lord; for I am married unto you; and I will take you one of a city, and two of a family, and I will bring you to Zion: and I will give you pastors according to my own heart, and they shall feed you with knowledge and understanding. And it shall come to pass when ye be multiplied and increased in the land in those days, saith the Lord, they shall say no more the ark of the covenant of the Lord: neither shall it come to mind. * * * At that time they shall call Jerusalem the throne of the Lord; and all the nations shall be gathered unto it, to the name of the Lord, to Jerusalem. * * * In those days the house of Judah shall walk with the house of Israel, and they shall come together out of the land of the north, to the land that I have given for an inheritance unto your fathers." [6] It is needless to multiply passages; if any credit is to be ascribed to prophecy at all it is clear that Israel, the chosen people of God, though now smitten and scattered, are to be gathered together again and reestablished in the land given to their fathers. The lost tribes are to be brought from the land of the north, Judah is to return to Jerusalem, and the envy of Ephraim and Judah is to depart, and the mighty power of God which was manifested in the deliverance of Israel from Egyptian bondage is to be so far surpassed by a display of his power in the latter-day deliverance, that the former shall not be called to mind. Not only are the tribes of Israel to be re-assembled upon the lands of their inheritances, but the descendants of the children of Israel scattered through all the nations among which they have been "sifted," are also to be gathered. The Jews since the destruction of their city and nation by the Romans have been scattered among all nations, but they have succeeded in a remarkable manner in preserving their identity as a distinct people. Still it is not to be doubted that there are instances where Jews have married and inter-married with the Gentiles among whom they lived, until they lost their identity, and thus the blood of Israel, unrecognized, is in the veins of many supposed to be Gentiles. The tribes of Israel sent into Babylon, Assyria and the surrounding countries at the fall of the kingdom of Israel, in the sixth century B. C., in like manner intermingled their blood with the people of those nations. Moreover there are good reasons to believe that in that exodus of the ten tribes from Assyria to the north--(spoken of, it is true, only by the apocryphal writer Esdras; but as what he says agrees so well with the idea that Israel is to return from the "north," according to the prophets, I am inclined to accept it as true [7])--many became discouraged and stopped by the way. Others unable to prosecute the journey abandoned the expedition, and those that halted, uniting and intermarrying with the original inhabitants of the land, doubtless constituted those prolific races