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SERMON I.

THE LORD'S SONG IN A STRANGE LAND.

(PREACHED AT VENICE,

ON THE FOURTEENTH SUNDAY AFTER TRINITY, 1852.)

PSALM CXXXVII. 4.

How shall we sing the Lord's song in a strange land?

THE Prophets, whose writings or whose history now begins to be read in the Church Service, -Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Daniel,-bring us to that remarkable period of the Jewish people which we call the Captivity. The word "Captivity" perhaps hardly expresses what is meant by it. It was not so much a captivity, as an exile; not the imprisonment, but the transplantation, of a whole nation. In some respects, when the first pangs of separation from their own country were over,—when the first bitter grief had vented itself in those la

mentations, of which the pathos has never been surpassed, which Jeremiah poured forth over the ruin of Jerusalem, — it might have seemed that the change, after all, was not so greatly for the worse. The nation still survived; partly from the custom of those Eastern conquerors, who kept together the tribes or peoples whom they thus transported, (as even in the case of the Grecian colonies seen in those parts nearly a hundred years after by their countrymen, in the heart of Asia,) still more by that extraordinary vitality and tenacity of endurance which has always been one of the most remarkable characteristics of the Chosen People. Families were still united, as we see in the Apocryphal book of Tobit, which, though disfigured by later traditions, contains no doubt a genuine picture of Jewish life during this period of their history. Individuals like Daniel and his companions, and at a later time Mordecai and Nehemiah, were exalted to stations of high rank and power in the court of the reigning sovereign; their worship was usually tolerated, sometimes even held in honour, by their new masters. Unlike too as was the scene of their exile to the hills

and valleys of their own native Palestine, it was not without its attractions, even to the mind of an Israelite. They were in that queen of cities of which the fame had gone through all the eastern world, Babylon the great, the golden city, the city of many waters, the glory of the Chaldees' excellency, on the wide Mesopotamian plains where in ancient days their father Abraham had wandered and worshipped, on the shores of that mighty river the river Euphrates, the fourth river of the primeval Paradise, the boundary to which, in no very distant days, had reached the kingdom of their own princes, David and Solomon.

Yet, happy as in these respects their condition might be, glorious as was the outward scene which surrounded them, in spite of all this, "By the waters of Babylon they sat "down and wept; as for their harps they "hanged them upon the trees that were "therein. To them that required of them a

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song and melody in their heaviness, they "answered, "How shall we sing the Lord's song in a strange land?"" They could not forget that they were strangers; they still with

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a longing heart remembered the hill of Zion; they could not forget Jerusalem in their mirth; they could not forget that the especial duties which had belonged to them as a nation, as the chosen people, were no longer theirs, that the holy and beautiful house in which their fathers worshipped was burnt with fire, that those amongst whom they dwelt had no sympathy with the thoughts which were to them most dear and cherished.

I. It is this feeling which renders the history of the Exile or Captivity capable of such wide application. It is, if I may so say, the expression of God's condescension to all those feelings of loneliness, of desolation, of craving after sympathy, which are the peculiar and perpetual lot of some, which to others are only temporary, but to which all, under any circumstances, are liable from time to time. The Psalms which express, the prophecies which console, the history which records, these sorrows of the exiled Israelites, are the portions of Scripture which, if only as the echo of our own thoughts, have again and again sounded gratefully to the weary heart