Page:The old paths, or The Talmud tested by Scripture.djvu/236

 temple, the monument of God's favour and presence, it is still amongst us, and shows that Jesus could not have been the Messiah. If he had been the Messiah, God would not have left us this unequivocal testimony of his favour." But this proof of their righteousness God has taken away, and that within forty years after the crucifixion of Jesus; so that God himself has given the strongest possible attestation to the truth of his claims. Let any reflective Israelite calmly consider this, that, if Jesus was not what he claimed to be, his crucifixion was the most meritorious act that the Jews ever performed. They thereby did what they could to stay the progress of a false religion that was to overrun the world, and to uphold the truth; can they, then, suppose that God would punish them for doing that which was right, and give the sacred sanction of His providence to him that was doing wrong? When Phinehas, the son of Eleazar, slew the Israelite and the Midianitish woman with his spear, the plague was stayed from Israel, and can we imagine that the high priests who condemned Jesus would have had a less reward if his claims had been false? If Christianity be not true, then God himself has interposed to crush the truth, and to build up falsehood. If Christianity be true, then God could do nothing more to attest its truth than he has done by the destruction of the temple. There was but one unanswerable argument against Christianity, and that was the existence of the temple; but God himself has answered that argument by taking away the temple, and therefore we infer that as God has done all that he could to establish the truth of Christianity, it must be true.

The Jews think that if Jesus had been the Messiah, it is impossible that the priests and learned men of his time could have rejected him. But the events which they commemorate on the ninth of Av show the untenableness of this argument. On this day the Jews commemorate, first of all, the decree that the Israelites should die in the wilderness. And why did they die in the wilderness? Because they would not believe in Moses. "And all the children of Israel murmured against Moses and against Aaron: and the whole congregation said unto them, Would God that we had died in the land of Egypt! or would God that we had died in this wilderness! And they said one to another, Let us make a captain, and let us return into Egypt." (Numbers 2.) Yet they had seen the plagues of Egypt, and they had passed through the Red Sea, and were at that moment supplied miraculously with food, but for all that they did not believe, and that "The whole congregation." Will any Jew say, that this unbelief proves that Moses was a false prophet? If not, why not? Every argument, that will prove that the unbelief of that