people in the observance of their rites, to abolish the Temple service and the Sabbath, to destroy the sacred books, and introduce idol worship.  The altar on Mount Moriah was especially desecrated, and afterward dedicated to Jupiter.  A herd of swine were driven into the Temple, and there sacrificed.  This outrage was to the Jews “the abomination of desolation,” which could never be forgotten or forgiven.  The nation rallied and defied the power of a king who could thus wantonly trample on what was most sacred and venerable.

Two hundred years earlier, resistance would have been hopeless; but in the mean time the population had quietly increased, and in the practice of those virtues and labors which agricultural life called out, the people had been strengthened and prepared to rally and defend their lives and liberties.  They were still unwarlike, without organization or military habits; but they were brave, hardy, and patriotic.  Compared, however, with the forces which could be arrayed against them by the Syrian monarch, who was supreme in western Asia, they were numerically insignificant; and they were also despised and undervalued.  They seemed to be as sheep among wolves,—­easy to be intimidated and even exterminated.

The outrage in the Temple was the consummation of a series of humiliations and crimes; for in addition to the desecration of the Jewish religion, Antiochus had taken Jerusalem with a great army, had entered into the Temple, where the national treasures were deposited (for it was the custom even among Greeks and Romans to deposit the public money in the temples), and had taken away to his capital the golden candlesticks, the altar of incense, the table of shew bread, and the various vessels and censers and crowns which were used in the service of God,—­treasures that amounted to one thousand eight hundred talents, spared by Alexander.  So that there came great mourning upon Israel throughout the land, both for the desecration of sacred places, the plunder of the Temple, and the massacre of the people.  Jerusalem was sacked and burned, women and children were carried away as captives, and a great fortress was erected on an eminence that overlooked the Temple and city, in which was placed a strong garrison.  The plundered inhabitants fled from Jerusalem, which became the habitation of strangers, with all its glory gone.  “Her sanctuary was laid waste, her feasts were turned into mourning, her Sabbath into a reproach, and her honor into contempt.”  Many even of the Jews became apostate, profaned the Sabbath, and sacrificed to idols, rather than lose their lives; for the persecution was the most unrelenting in the annals of martyrdom, even to the destruction of women and children.

The insulted and decimated Jews now rallied under Mattathias, the founder of the Asmonean dynasty.

The immediate occasion of the Jewish uprising, which was ultimately to end in national independence and in the rule of a line of native princes, was as unpremeditated as the throwing out of the window at the council chamber at Prague those deputies who supported the Emperor of Germany in his persecution of the Protestants, which led to the Thirty Years’ War and the establishment of religious liberty in Germany.  At this crisis among the Jews, a hero arose in their midst as marvellous as Gustavus Adolphus.