chapters of this wonderful book.  The homeward march of the Persian army was a kind of triumphal procession in which the Hebrew princes and leaders walked as captives.  The king marched in the guise of a slave, with his eyes put out, followed by sullen princes, with bound hands, and unsubdued hearts.  As slaves the Hebrews crossed the Euphrates at the very point where Xenophon crossed with his immortal ten thousand.  In the land of bondage the exiles were planted, not in military prisons, but in gangs, working now in the fields, now in the streets of the city, and always under the scourge of soldiers.  When thirty years had passed the forty thousand captives were scattered among the people, one brother in the palace, and another a slave in the fields.  Soon their religion became only a memory, their language was all but forgotten, their old customs and manner of life were utterly gone.  But God raised up two gifted souls for just such an emergency as this.  One youth, through sheer force of genius, climbed to the position of prime minister, while a young girl through her loveliness came to the king’s palace.  One day an emancipation proclamation went forth, from a king who had come to believe in the unseen God who loved justice, and would overwhelm oppression and wrong.  The good news went forth on wings of the wind.  Making ready for their return to their homeland, all the captives gathered on the outskirts of the desert.  It was a piteous spectacle.  The people were broken in health, their beauty marred, their weapon a staff, their garments the leather coat, their provisions pieces of moldy bread, and their path fifteen hundred miles of sands, across the desert.  To such an end had come a disobedient and sinful generation!

In that hour, beholding these exiles and captives, a flood of emotions rushed over the poet; he saw those bound who should conquer; he saw that men were slaves who should be kings.  Then, with a rush, an immeasurable longing shivers through him like a trumpet call.  Oh, to save them!  To perish for their saving!  To die for their life, to be offered for them all!  In an abandon of grief and sympathy, he began to speak to them in words of comfort and hope.  At first these exiles, dumb with pain and grief, listened, but listened with no light quivering in the eye, and no hope flitting like sunshine across the face.  Their yesterdays held bondage, blows and degradation; their tomorrow held only the desert and the return to a ruined land.  Then the word of the Lord came upon the poet.  What if the night winds did go mourning through the deserted streets of their capital!  What if their language had decayed and their institutions had perished?  What if the farmer’s field was only a waste of thorns and thickets, and the towns become heaps and ruins!  What if the king of Babylon and his army has trampled them under foot, as slaves trample the shellfish, crushing out the purple dye that lends rich color to a royal robe?  “Comfort