the foot; with fever, pestilence, consumption, inflammation; with blindness, madness, and astonishment of heart;" "the heaven above them will be of brass, and the earth under them of iron; they will be to all the kingdoms of the earth for oppression, and their carcases will be the food of the birds of the air, and the beasts of the field; they will live scattered among all nations from one end of the earth to the other; they will become an astonishment, a by-word, and a derision to the nations."[427] If the prophets announced the day of judgment and the destruction of the unfaithful, they seldom forgot to describe, in the most glowing colours, Israel's restoration; they remained in the firm conviction that Jehovah's mercy would be as great as his anger: that Jehovah, through the remnant of the faithful and the regenerate Israel, would turn all nations to his service; that again in the future "a shoot would spring from the stock of Jesse;" that the race of David would reign with a renewed divine power (p. 28, 133). These great ideas of the restoration of the renewed and purified Israel, these hopes of the Saviour and restorer from the house of David, are wanting in the Book of the Law. It is simply pointed out, in regard to the kingdom of Israel, "that if Israel returns, Jehovah will lead back the captives, and gather Israel again, and circumcise his heart."[428] If it is a subordinate point of view that the Israelites ought to serve Jehovah in order that it may be well with them, this conception nevertheless follows necessarily from the position of the tribal god to the tribe recommended to his protection--and to any unfettered mind the assumption is natural that reward should attend good actions; that the good must prosper and the evil suffer on the earth. The centre of this class of conceptions among the Israelites is not so much to serve for the sake of the hire, as that the worship of Jehovah would have this reward as its immediate consequence. But if at the same time the recompense for service was brought more strongly into prominence among the Jews than among any other nation, if in no other people this legal state of the relation between God and man is established so much in the form of a compact, the prophets had already given an inward and moral meaning to the simple relation of contract between Jehovah and Israel. They looked on it as a marriage (p. 40), and consequently they did not merely reprove the breach of the contract as an outrage on right, but branded it as faithlessness. The Book of the Law also does not remain at the point of the mere contract. The Book asks: "Whether such a mighty thing was ever done or heard of on the earth, as that a God had attempted to take a people to himself out of the midst of the nations by signs, and wonders, and war, and a strong hand and an outstretched arm, by great and wonderful deeds."[429] But we are further told, "Jehovah