Here are four distinct predictions, of national peculiarity, universal dispersion, grievous oppression, and remarkable preservation. The fulfillment is obvious, and undeniable. You need no commentary to explain it. Go into any clothing-store on Western Row, or into the synagogue in Broadway, and you will see it. The Infidel is sorely perplexed to give any account of this great phenomenon. How does it happen that this singular people is dispersed over all the earth, and yet distinct and unamalgamated with any other? How does it happen that for eighteen hundred years they have resisted all the influences of nature, and all the customs of society, and all the powers of persecution, driving them toward amalgamation, and irresistible in all other instances? In the face of the power of the Chinese Empire, in spite of the tortures of the Spanish Inquisition, amid the chaos of African nationalities, and the fusion of American democracy, in the plains of Australia, and in the streets of San Francisco, the religion, customs, and physiognomy of the children of Israel are as distinct this day as they were three thousand years ago, when Moses wrote them in the Pentateuch, and Shishak painted them on the tombs of Medinet Abou. How does the Infidel account for it? It will not do to allege the favorite story about purity of blood and Caucasian race; for the question is, How does it happen that this people, and this people alone, have kept the blood pure; while all other races are so mingled that no other race can be found pure on earth? Besides, lest any should suppose such a cause sufficient for their preservation, another nation, descended from the same father and the same mother—the children of Jacob's twin brother—has utterly perished, and there is not any remaining of the house of Esau.
Human sagacity, with all the facts before its face, can not give any rational account of the causes of this anomaly. It can not tell to-day why this people exists separate from, and scattered through all nations, from Kamschatka to New Zealand; how, then, could it foretell, three thousand years ago, this singular exception to all the laws of national existence? While the sun and moon endure, the nation of Israel shall exist as God's witness to God's word, an undeniable proof that the mouth of the Lord hath spoken it.
A very peculiar feature of the desolation of Israel was the desolation, but not the destruction of the cities. In most cases of the desolations of war, the cities have been burned and the buildings destroyed. There is no shelter for man or beast in the mounds of rubbish which cover the ruined cities of Assyria. Where the buildings have not been destroyed, or have been rebuilt, they have again been inhabited; as we see in the cases of Rome, Constantinople, Jerusalem, and many others. But on the cities of Israel it was written that God's curse should go forth "till the cities should be wasted without inhabitant, and the houses without man, and the land be left utterly desolate." But for a long time the literal fulfillment of this prediction was not witnessed, as the cities on this side the Jordan had been mostly reduced to ruins. The richest and most populous part of the land, however, was the land of Bashan; where, in a territory of about thirty miles by twenty, sixty cities still remain standing to attest the wonderful fertility of the soil and industry of the people. "And though the vast majority of them are deserted, they are not ruined. * * * Many of the houses in the ancient cities of Bashan are perfect, as if only finished yesterday. The walls are sound, the roofs unbroken, the doors, and even the window shutters in their places."[117] From two hundred to five hundred houses have been found perfect in some of these cities; and from the roof of the Castle of Salcah, Dr. Porter counted thirty towns and villages dotting the plain, many of them perfect as when first built; "yet for more than five centuries there has not been an inhabitant in one of them." So sure is every word of God.
Take another instance of preservation, so remarkable amid the surrounding destruction, that it arrested the attention and admiration of the author of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, skeptic and scoffer though he was.
The seven churches of seven of the most considerable cities of Asia were then, as the churches of Christ still are, the salt of the earth. Ten righteous men would have averted God's judgments from Sodom. Jesus pronounced the sentences of these churches seventeen hundred and sixty years ago, and the present condition of the cities attests the divine authority of the record containing them. They are various and specific. Three were to be utterly destroyed. Against two no special threatening is denounced. To the remaining two promises of life and blessing are given.
Ephesus, famous for its magnificence, the busy avenue of travel, the seat of the temple of Diana, long the residence of an apostle, and afterward of Christian bishops—"one of the eyes of Asia"—as it stood first on the roll of cities, first receives the doom of abused privileges: "I will remove thy candlestick out of its place, unless thou repent."
Says Gibbon: "The captivity and ruin of the seven churches of Asia was consummated (by the Ottomans) A. D. 1312; and the barbarous lords of Ionia and Lydia still trample on the monuments of classic and Christian antiquity. In the loss of Ephesus the Christians deplored the fall of the first angel, and the extinction of the first candlestick of the Revelation. The desolation is complete, and the temple of Diana or the church of Mary will equally elude the search of the curious traveler."[118]
Since Gibbon's day the foundations of the temple have been discovered twelve to fourteen feet below the soil; but no church of Christ remains to illuminate the minds of the few squalid and lazy dwellers in the village of Aisayalouk. One cobbler's stall represented the whole manufacturing industry of Ephesus; and four boys playing a game like drafts, with pebbles, in front of it seemed the only public likely to patronize its theater, as I took note of its people and their occupations, in 1872. Then leaving the storks in their nests, on the top of the ruined arches of its great aqueduct, to proceed toward the ruins of the great theater, we tried in vain to procure horses or asses for the ladies; found the only road so filled with water from the recent rains as to be impassable, and were fain to plunge on foot through the plowed fields till we reached the elevation on which it was erected. Here we surveyed its rock-hewn seats, capable of accommodating an audience larger than that of all the theaters of New York; but there was no longer a voice to cry, "Great is Diana of the Ephesians!" The sea has forsaken the harbor, which is now a pestilential morass. We passed through the ruins of the custom-house, now miles inland, and found a single Turkish soldier on guard. The peasants who cultivate some parts of the plain come from distant villages, and fever, filth, and beggary reign in Ephesus.
Had the twenty thousand patrons of the drama, in the thirty-one theaters of New York, honored the theater of Laodicea with their presence, its polite citizens would have accommodated them all on the reserved seats, retiring themselves to ten thousand less commodious sittings, and to two less gigantic theaters. While yet busy in the erection of their splendid places of public amusement, Jesus said, "I will spew thee out of my mouth." "The circus, and three stately theaters of Laodicea, are peopled with wolves and foxes," says Gibbon.
The church was spewed out of Christ's mouth, and the city too. It has been overturned by earthquakes, and is now nothing but a series of magnificent ruins, from which, however, ample evidence may be collected of its former magnificence. Those of the aqueduct, the theater, and the amphitheater, are remarkable; in the latter an inscription has been found showing that it was in course of erection when the Lord dictated the warning to its people. But the warning was unheeded, and now the whole space inside the city walls is strewn with fragments of columns and pedestals.