Let us turn now to Judea, whose mission was much higher in the order of moral grandeur, though not so dazzling to the imagination as that of Rome. Daniel foretold the end of the captivity of the Jews when a period of seventy years should be completed, and the birth and death of the Messias after another period of seven times seventy years from the rebuilding of the city and Temple. The schism and captivity of the ten tribes had freed the kingdom of David from putrescent parts and given a more pure and healthy life to Juda. The corruption of Juda found a severe and efficacious remedy in the captivity which befell that tribe also at a later period. A purified remnant, the _élite_ of the nation, were restored to their own land under Cyrus. The city and temple were rebuilt. Alexander the Great extended the same favor to the Jewish nation which had been granted by the Persian monarchs. Under his successors, the kings of Syria and Egypt, Judea flourished both in a political and a religious sense for three centuries, although not exempt from vicissitudes, a second temple was established in Egypt, and in Alexandria, the new capital founded by Alexander, the Jews became numerous and attained to great consideration and importance. The Hebrew Scriptures were translated into Greek and the important books of the second canon were written. Under Antiochus Epiphanes a new crisis arrived, which threatened the total extinction of Judaism. A large portion of the priests and people were infected with the corrupted Greek civilization of that period, the practice of the Mosaic law was forbidden and suppressed by the most oppressive edicts sanctioned by the most cruel penalties, and Jerusalem was changed into an apparently heathen city. The sacred ark containing all the hopes of the world in the ages to come seemed about to be wrecked. But God raised up the heroic family of the Machabees to rescue once more Jerusalem and Judea from the ruin which seemed to be imminent. There is no greater and more wonderful hero in all history than Judas Machabeus, a new and more sublime Leonidas, standing with his small but invincible host in the world’s Thermopylæ, as the defender, even unto death, not of Greece but of all mankind; the saviour, not of mere national and temporal interests, but of the precious inheritance of faith, the supernatural treasure by which all men were to be enriched with those blessings which are eternal. The history of the Asmonæan dynasty, its period of glory and of decay, and, next, of the Idumæan usurpation in the person of the cruel tyrant, Herod the Great, a mere creature and dependent viceroy of the Roman emperor, brings us to the end of the dispensation of Abraham and Moses, to the epoch of the new Prophet, Priest, and King, who teaches, sanctifies, and rules mankind by his own personal and inherent might and right, as the Emmanuel, who is both the Creator and the Redeemer of the world.