But even so, within ten years the Jews that were left in Jerusalem again tried to form alliances against Babylon, and this time the great eastern power seems to have resolved to make a final end of the business. Jerusalem was attacked by a siege, and so resolutely defended that it held out for nearly a year and a half; but in the end it had to yield. Its defending walls and many of its chief buildings were overthrown, and, most dreadful of all in the eyes of the Jews, their holy temple of Jehovah was destroyed by fire after being robbed of its valuable and sacred vessels. The date of the Fall of Jerusalem is 586 B.C. Surely it must have seemed to the unhappy people, in spite of the hope of return which even Jeremiah, the prophet of all this terrible calamity, held out to them, that they were wiped out as a nation. The might of Babylon must have appeared too great ever to be overthrown. I have said so much about the Jews and their misfortunes, although they were a people of so little apparent importance in comparison with the great empires on either side of them, because all that happened to them, small nation though they were, has been really of the very greatest importance in {107} making the story of the world what it is. It is through them, and by reason of these disasters, and others of the same kind of which I will tell you soon, that they were scattered all over the world. And being thus scattered, and holding to their traditions and to their religion with a tenacity which no other people in the whole story ever has shown, they took those traditions and that religion everywhere. [Sidenote: The religion of the Jews] And here I would draw your attention to a fact about the Jews and the Jewish religion which we are rather apt to forget. We are accustomed to speak of Jews and Christians as if they were entirely opposed to each other in every possible way, as if the one was absolutely the opposite of the other. And so, in one, and perhaps the very most important, point of the Christian religion they are, because the Jews deny the divine nature of Christ which is the very chief point in the Christian religion. But, for all that, we must never forget that it was on the Jewish religion that the Christian religion was founded. It was the religion that came into the minds and hearts of men who had been trained up in the Jewish religion. The early Christians were Jews, for the most part. Christ Himself was a Jew, brought up in the Jewish religion, and we know that He said He came to "fulfil," not to destroy. He was, on His human side, the last of those Hebrew prophets of whom the first, in point of time, was Amos.