spoken by Jeremiah, which had stayed the spirits of their forefathers.  The great prophet promised that after seventy years the nation should be restored to its native land, and should renew its prosperity gloriously.  It had won back its home, but in the old homestead it had grown poorer and feebler, generation after generation.  Had the ancient promise of prophecy failed?  Good men could not think so.  To some devout soul came the suggestion that the seventy years had meant seventy Sabbatical years, each of which consisted of seven years; that is, four hundred and ninety years.  One can still feel the thrill that must have gone through him, as he saw that this computation would place the defiling of the temple—­that sign of God’s having forsaken his people—­in the middle of the last week of years.  It was then only about three years to the destined end of the weary period that Jeremiah had included in the term of Israel’s humbling, after which would come Jehovah’s help.  Fired with this thought, he set himself to inspire his people with fresh hope and courage.

Around a traditional Daniel, famed for his wisdom and piety, and possibly upon an earlier document containing some tales of this sage and saint, he wove a story which should interpret Jeremiah’s prophecy and Jehovah’s purpose.  With charming grace he tells the tale of Daniel’s constancy and trust under the sorest trials, and of the divine deliverance that always came to him.  Into his mouth he placed predictions of what had already come to pass in history, that thus his reputation as a prophet might be established.  Then he caused him to present a striking series of symbolical visions, the clue to which was furnished for the writer’s contemporaries by certain clear allusions.  These visions foretold deliverance as about to come at the approaching end of the four hundred and ninety years of Jeremiah.  Other visions sketched the ushering in of the Messiah-Kingdom, in glowing pictures of lofty religious tone.

In that dark night over Israel this book was as the morning star.  It was truly, as Dean Stanley called it, “the Gospel of the age.”  Its story spread, and with it spread renewed patience and hope.  It doubtless fed the forces of that glorious revolt that shortly thereafter burst forth under the heroic Maccabees.  Thus it kept alive the vital spark in the nation, through a crucial hour, that else might have gone out before it had given birth to Christianity.  Noble as the book of Daniel is in many ways, especially as the real father of “the philosophy of history,” it has a still deeper interest to us Christians for its timely service to the sinking nation through which came at last our Blessed Master.

The Acts of the Apostles, when studied in the light of the tendencies known to have been working in the apostolic church, becomes of similar importance in New Testament history to Deuteronomy in Old Testament history.