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Rh His worship to be suspended for seventy years; and His judgments accomplished what His mercies could not do. The very measure of Divine severity which at first sight threatened to sweep the worship of the true God from the face of the earth, and give up the world to the interminable dominion of idolatry, was the means of establishing it on a firmer basis than ever. Although Jerusalem was overthrown and the temple razed to its foundation, the Jews carried the true Jerusalem in their hearts. And so it is to-day. Although our holy city is no more, and although we are dispersed and many of us sold into slavery, yet the holy temple of our God lives and will continue to live in our hearts forever. Wherever we go, whether in the splendid cities of the East, or amid the fascinations of Egypt, or the tents of the wandering shepherds, still our affections will be in the holy land, and, like Daniel, we will turn our faces toward the land where our fathers worshipped the God of heaven.

"Nehemiah, when serving in the courts of princes, lamented when he heard that the walls of Jerusalem were thrown down. There in slavery, our fathers had time to reflect upon the cause of their calamities; there they read in the Book of Moses, which was the companion of their exile, the awful curses He had threatened them if they forsook the worship of the true God, and felt them to be fulfilled in themselves; there they read the prophecy which had been written by Moses more than a thousand years before in the book, iii., section 22: 'If thou