In contemplating the sufferings of this unfortunate race, the heart sickens at the punishments which resulted from their resistance to foreign usurpation. Unable to discern the hand of God in their humiliation, their struggles were, indeed, hopeless, but not the less heroic. Captives in Babylon, after a long and cruel servitude, they were restored only to be again scattered by the destruction of Jerusalem, under Titus. Through the varying fortunes of the Romans, no resting-place seems to have been vouchsafed to them; plundered and disgraced, the fall of Rome only eventuated, as far as _they_ were concerned, in a change of masters. Ruthless persecutors tracked them through the dark ages, and what Heathenism spared, Christianity despoiled; our pious ancestors praising God when they had a chance of maltreating an Israelite. For these reasons, and with such incentives, can we doubt that the timid amongst them would endeavour to remove the means of identity which circumcision afforded. We have so refined away the simplicity of the patriarchal times, that it is almost necessary to apologise for alluding to the reverential awe with which all matters relating to the seed of Abraham were regarded. It was a solemn and impressive act when the Patriarch, believing that the time was come for his son Isaac to have a wife, sent for his chief servant, and said, “Put, I pray thee, thy hand under my thigh, and swear by the Lord that thou wilt choose a wife for my son out of mine own kindred;” and the servant, with his hand on his master’s genitals, took the required oath; and we all know how faithfully he performed it. Whilst this simple, but deeply significant ceremony was being enacted, the heart of the father of the faithful was doubtless filled with contemplations of the great purposes for the accomplishment of which the organs of generation were appropriately considered as the direct agents. This mode of taking the oath is further adverted to in the 47th chapter of Genesis, when Jacob is taking his farewell of his children. In our blind adoration of classical heathenism we undervalue the sublime and not less poetical incidents which mark the rise, progress, culmination, and decay of that people with whom our highest interests are identified. If, for instance, the Book of Job had not been written under inspiration, and had been accidentally discovered among the ruins of the _first_ Babylon, our antiquarians would have regarded it as the loftiest of epics; and especially so if, instead of inculcating the worship of the true God, its subject had been the glorification of whatever false deity might have been in the ascendant when this most ancient poem was composed. The prejudices of education subjugate the judgment, and the gross and sensual attributes with which the Greek poets invested their deities, are accepted with complacency, if not with admiration; even Pope, their great panegyrist, describes their heroes thus:—