The shades of thick coming darkness could not exclude the cruel picture; he closed his burning eye-balls, but still her figure appeared to stand distinct and sad before his shrouded orbs. His spirit sank into the lowest depths of dejection, all the curses of the law seemed poured out upon his head during these lonely hours. “Why hast thou forsaken me?” cried he; “my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” Suddenly the remembrance of those denunciations written in the Gospel, which he had trampled upon in his unbelieving indignation, came over his mind with the rapidity of lightning. All had been accomplished, all had been fulfilled. In darkness—fast bound in affliction and iron—a fear that Jesus of Nazareth was indeed the Christ entered the doubting soul of the Hebrew. He strove to harden his heart against conviction, but still conviction struggled mightily within him—till, exhausted with the mental warfare he sustained, he sank into a deep, death-like sleep, from which he did not awaken till the wandering sunbeams glimmering on his chains recalled him to consciousness and misery. The morning brought a companion to share in his sorrows—an elderly man of his own tribe, one of the defenders of Jerusalem under Simon Gioras. Every particular of this memorable siege was related by Josadec with terrible minuteness—the divisions among the leaders, the sacrilege, the murder, the cruel famine, and that deed whose matchless horror had made Titus swear “that the sun should never shoot his beams into a city where such a barbarity had been committed.” Adonijah groaned; he writhed in agony, a cold dew bathed his trembling limbs, his hair stood up, but Josadec, like a person rendered insensible to feeling by the dreadful force of habit, continued his revolting relations with an apathy that disgusted his sensitive auditor. The signs and portents of the nation’s fall; the warning voice whose perpetual cry of “Woe, woe!” had never been mute till the Roman missile silenced it for ever; the blazing star hanging over the devoted city in the form of a sword; the mighty sound as of a host rushing forth from the holy of holies with the awful words, “Let us depart;”[16] the temple laid in ashes, the foundations of the city ploughed up by Titus’ orders;—all convinced Adonijah that the Lord Himself had utterly forsaken the Jews. His arm had fought against them, and all the curses written in the book of the law were now fulfilled upon them. Again the awful prophecies concerning Jerusalem came into his mind. Jesus of Nazareth had foretold the coming miseries of Jerusalem.[17] “Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away.” Was Adonijah to acknowledge Him as a prophet, or as the promised Messiah, set at nought and rejected by the Jews? He was confounded. Unresolved and terrified, feeling himself exposed to the wrath of God, yet hanging on the very verge of eternity, the Hebrew knew not what to think; he wished to pray, yet like the prophet could only