looks upon the city, and assigns, as the cause of his tears, that he would often have gathered her children together as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, but she would not? Ah! what political Jew would have thought of _that_! He would have turned his attention to the purposes of governors and the intrigues of courts. Into his estimate of the causes that might affect the prosperity of Jerusalem, the moral temper of the nation as indicated by its rejection of Jesus of Nazareth, would not have entered. And yet, it was from this rejection, even in the way of natural consequence, from the want of those moral qualities which only a regard to his teachings could have produced among them, that the destruction of the Jews resulted. Nothing else could have destroyed their fool-hardy confidence in God, or have allayed those fiendish passions which led contending factions to fill the streets of the city with dead bodies even in the midst of the siege. But they would not have his spirit; they would not have him to reign over them, and we know that from the moment the words dropped from his lips, "Your house is left unto you desolate," that was a doomed city, and no political skill could have deferred the horrors of a siege and of a final overthrow, such as was not from the beginning of the world, no, nor ever shall be. And not only from Babylon and Jerusalem, but from the grave of every nation buried in antiquity, from Nineveh, and Tyre, and Edom, and Egypt, there comes a voice calling upon rulers to be "just, ruling in the fear of God." The true cause of their destruction was the attitude which they assumed towards the will, and worship, and people of God. It is from these moral causes, between which and the result there is no immediate, nor, to the superficial eye, perceptible connexion, that I fear most for the stability of our institutions. It is when the sun is shining most brightly, and the face of the sky shows, it may be, not a single cloud, that the elements of the tornado are ascending most rapidly; and it is when men are in prosperity and in fancied security that they become presumptuous, and that a disastrous train of causes is silently put in motion, as resistless as the tornado. Upon this point of security, the eye of the true statesman is fixed. It is here that he sees the danger and provides against it; while the mere politician knows nothing, and sees nothing, till he begins, when it is too late, to see the lightnings, and hear the thunders of embodied wrath.