upon the city, but guard it and reduce its inhabitants to submission by famine.  All supplies were accordingly cut off, and every avenue blocked up by the vigilant Romans.  In addition to this, intestine divisions, civil wars and pestilence raged within the walls of the city.  Having no employment in fighting the enemy, they fell to butchering each other.  These things proved their ruin, and their national sun went down in blood.  Every day thousands closed their eyes in death through famine and pestilence; and thousands by endeavoring to escape to the enemy and surrender themselves up as prisoners for safety and protection, were either cut down by the Roman sword, or met the same fate from their own countrymen.  Here they appeared!  All hopes of life cut off, nothing presented itself to their view, to end their woes, but the certain prospect of an untimely tomb!  Fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, gazing upon each other in silent expectation, saw death gradually advancing in all its horrors.  They were driven to the most dreadful extremities, until (is Josephus informs us) “they devoured whatever came in their way; mice, rats, serpents, lizards, even to the spider”—­and lastly mothers were driven to eat the flesh of their own children!  Here were lamentation and wo indeed!  Such tribulation as our Saviour says never was, and never will be.  In imagination the mind runs back to the period, and to the fatal spot.  It surveys the painful scene, characterized by nought but moral and physical woes—­madness and revenge, cruelty and carnage, pestilence and famine, and all the mingled horrors of war!  It surveys the starving child clinging to the maternal bosom for help and protection, but alas!  That bosom becomes its grave.  Here the ungodly and the sinner appeared in deep despair!  Unfeeling mortal, do you say that their punishment and sufferings were not sufficiently great, without adding that of immortal pain in the future world?  Are you not satisfied without arguing that they ought to suffer endless misery in addition to their woes?  Look with an unjaundiced eye over this scene of distress; and as you gaze let justice (if not compassion) once more take the throne of the heart, and then pronounce the shocking sentence of your creed if you can.

That their sufferings were overwhelming is evident from scripture as well as from history.  In Lam. iv.  The prophet Jeremiah says—­“The hands of the pitiful women have sodden their own children, they were their meat in the destruction of the daughter of my people.”  In Lev.  Xxvi.  Moses describes their sufferings as follows—­“And I will bring a sword upon you, that shall avenge the quarrel of my covenant:  and when ye are gathered together within your cities, I will send the pestilence among you, that shall make you few in number; and ye shall be delivered into the hand of the enemy.  And when I have broken the staff of your bread ten women shall bake your bread in one oven, and they shall deliver you your bread again by weight; and ye