These are very simple words:  but they are awful words enough.  Awful enough to the poor creatures of whom they speak.  You here, most of you, can hardly guess all that these words mean.  You may thank God that you do not.  That you do not know the horrors of war, and the misery of a conquered country, in old times.

To lose all they had ever earned; all that makes life worth having.  To have their homes burnt over their heads, their crops carried off their fields.  To see their women dishonoured, their old men and children murdered—­to be insulted, beaten, and tortured to make them tell where their money was hidden; and after they and theirs had suffered every unspeakable shame and misery from the hands of brutal enemies, to be stripped, bound, and marched away, for hundreds of miles across the deserts, into the cold and dreary mountains of the north of Assyria, there to live and die as slaves, and never again to see their native land.  And such a land as it was, and is still:  or rather might be still, if there were men in it worthy the name of men.  For of all countries in the world, that land of Israel is one of the most rich and beautiful.  The climate and the soil there is such, that two crops can often be grown in the year, of almost any kind which man may need; there are rich valleys well watered, where not only wheat and every grain-crop, but the olive, and the fig, and the vine, flourish in perfection; rich park-like uplands, where sheep and cattle without number may find pasture; great forests of timber, fit for every use; and all kept cool and fruitful, even beneath that burning eastern sun, by the clear streams which flow for ever down from Hermon. the great snow-mountain ten thousand feet high, which overlooks that pleasant land.  There is hardly, travellers say, a lovelier or richer country upon earth, than the land of Israel, from Hebron on the south to Hermon on the north; nor a country which might have been stronger, and safer, and more prosperous, if these Jews had been but wise.

It is, so to speak, one great castle, rising most of it two thousand feet high, and walled in by God in a way as is seen hardly in any other land.  On the west lies the sea; on the south and on the east vast wildernesses of sandy desert; and on the north, the mighty mountains of Hermon and Lebanon, which no invading army could have crossed, if the Jews had had courage to keep them out.  And that, the noble and divine Law of Moses would have given them.  It would have made them one free, brave, God-fearing people, at unity with itself; and the promise of Moses would have been fulfilled—­that one of them should chase a thousand, and no man or nation be able to stand against them.  In David’s time, and in Solomon’s time also, that promise came true; and that small people of the Jews became a very powerful nation, respected and feared by all the kingdoms round.

But when they fell into idolatry, and forsook the true God, and his law:  all was changed.  Idolatry brought sin, and sin brought bad passions, hatred, division, weakness, ruin.