tered like a hill of snow in the morning
sunshine, or sparkled as though wrapped in flame when the sunbeams
struck full on its golden roof.

Then redder flames than ever the sunshine made leapt above the golden
roof; pillars fell, beams crumbled to ashes, while round the altar of
sacrifice the people of Jerusalem lay heaped together, slain in such
numbers in the Holy Place that their blood flowed down the broad marble
steps in a heavy crimson stream.

And the golden candlestick and the Book of the Law were carried away in
triumph into heathen Rome.

Alas for the Holy City, over which the Saviour of the world had stood
and wept forty years before, knowing the suffering that lay before her!

'These Jews are dangerous. We must not allow them to rebuild their
city, or to become a separate people again. As a nation they must
cease to exist.'

So the Roman conquerors of Jerusalem agreed; and from that day onward
the Jewish people have had no country of their own. They have, indeed,
been '_led away captive into all nations_' (Luke xxi. 24) exactly as
the Lord foretold.

There is scarcely a country in the world where Jews may not be found,
but Jerusalem lies still in the hands of strangers, and is the property
of the Turkish nation.

The Jews were now no longer a nation. They had become merely a body of
people led by their Rabbis, or teachers of the Law; but they were still
'the people of the Book,' for even after frequent rebellions had so
angered the Romans that they passed a law forbidding a Jew to enter the
partially re-built city of Jerusalem under pain of death, they allowed
the Jewish teachers to continue the synagogue services in other parts
of Palestine, and to teach in their colleges.

The most famous Jewish college of these days was at Tiberius, on the
shores of the 'Sea of Galilee,' over whose clear depths the Lord Jesus
Christ had sailed so often, and beside whose shores He had done so many
wonderful deeds of love and mercy.

A great and beautiful college it was, with broad terraced gardens,
where the students paced to and fro, their whole hearts and souls
absorbed in their work. The Temple copy of the Book of the Law was now
in the palace of the heathen Emperor in Rome, but many less precious
copies were left to them. So all day long they studied and copied the
old Hebrew Bible.

As we have seen, the Jewish scribes had not been content with taking
the Word of God just as it stood; they had begun