=1. Starlight.=――The darkness which closed in upon the Jews when Jerusalem fell, in the year 70, lasted for 1,500 years. Through all those long centuries the clouds of prejudice and of persecution hung low and lowering over all the countries in which Jews dwelt, and it was only in Spain, and for a comparatively short interval, that there was any break in the gloom. Through all those centuries, the race was outcast and alien, under the lash of the Church and under the ban of the State. Church and State changed faiths and names, old dynasties and old beliefs gave place to new, boundaries were shifted, and civilisation took fresh forms, but the darkness that had fallen on the Jews when Titus ruled over pagan Rome, never lifted in all those centuries, save for that brief period during the Mahomedan occupation of Spain. In the dense gloom, the word of God was, to His ‘witnesses,’ in literal truth what David had declared it should be, ‘a lamp unto their feet.’ It did not keep them from stumbling, but it saved them from being utterly lost and cast away in the terrible thick darkness. Burdens were heavy, and a ‘lamp unto the feet’ was sorely needed, for men stooped under their loads, and their eyes looked mostly earthwards. But also, from time to time, through that long night of sorrow, stars, as it were, rose on the black background, giving, to those who could look up, some trembling and uncertain light on their weary way. Good men, and wise men, and successful men, at different periods, and in different countries, stood out from the ranks, and made the name of Jew a name of honour, and not of reproach. Some of these men were like shooting stars, just raising a bright swift track of light, and dying down as quickly, having lit up only their own pathway. And some gave forth but tiny rays, yet, grouped together in patient scholarship, these unnamed units gradually grew into useful constellations. And just a few, in their great gift of shining, were like fixed stars, and the wide white light of their wisdom endures even unto these days.