Page:The Archko Volume (1896).djvu/182

178 interposed to vindicate His honor and reëstablish His worship, and at last obtained a triumph by the very means which at first threatened to overthrow it forever.

"I have said that the objects of our national existence were greatly promoted by the building of the temple at Jerusalem. It was a splendid edifice, calculated to awaken the curiosity, to attract the attention, and command the respect of the world. It furnished a place of appropriate convenience, beauty, and dignity for the celebration of our daily sacrifices and our national rites. It made more interesting our three yearly festivals when all the males were obliged to present themselves before God. It gave us what we all need at this time — a fixture to our religion, a local habitation to our religious applications and associations. It connected the sentiment of religion with another no less strong — that of patriotism — and enlisted them both in the maintenance and defence of the national institutions of Moses; and it also led to the formation of a national literature which gave expression to these two most powerful sentiments of the human heart, and thus operated to call forth and strengthen them in each succeeding generation.

'Still the Mosaic institutions, assisted by the magnificence of the temple service, failed to extirpate entirely the propensity to idolatry. Occasionally it sprang up and overspread the country, till at last the Almighty saw fit to suffer that temple to be overthrown, His people to be carried into captivity, and