calamities confined to the miseries of war.  A long drouth burned the fields; seed rotted under the clods; the cattle moaned in the barren and dried-up pastures; while locusts devoured what the drouth had spared.  Says Stanley:  “The purple vine, the green fig-tree, the gray olive, the scarlet pomegranate, the golden corn, the waving palm, the fragrant citron, vanished before them, and the trunks and branches were left bare and white by their devouring teeth,”—­a brilliant sentence, by the way, which Geikie quotes without acknowledgment, as well as many others, which lays him open to the charge of plagiarism.  Both Stanley and Geikie, however, seem to be indebted to Ewald for all that is striking and original in their histories,—­so true is Solomon’s saying that there is nothing new under the sun.  The rarest thing in literature is a truly original history.

In this mournful crisis the prophet Joel, who was a priest at Jerusalem, demanded a solemn fast, which the entire kingdom devoutly celebrated, the whole body of the priests crying aloud before the gates of the Temple, “Spare Thy people, O Lord! give not Thine heritage to reproach, lest the heathen make us a by-word, and ask, Where is now thy God?” But Joel, the oldest, and in many respects the most eloquent, Hebrew prophet whose utterances have come down to us, did not speak in vain, and a great religious revival followed, attended naturally by renewed prosperity,—­for among the Jews a “revival of religion” meant a practical return from vice to virtue, personal holiness, and the just and wholesome requirements of their law; so that “under Amaziah, Uzziah, and Jotham, Judah rose once more to a pitch of honor and glory which almost recalled the golden age of David.”

A greater power than that of Syria threatened the peace and welfare of the kingdom of Judah, as it also did that of Israel; and this was the empire of Assyria.  During the reigns of David and Solomon this empire was passing through so many disasters that it was not regarded as dangerous, and both of the Jewish kingdoms were left free to avail themselves of every facility afforded for national development.  Ewald notices emphatically this outward prosperity, which introduced luxury and pride throughout the kingdom.  It was the golden age of merchants, usurers, and money-mongers.  Then appeared that extraordinary greed for riches which never afterward left the nation, even in seasons of calamity, and which is the most striking peculiarity of the modern Hebrew.  This was a period not only of prosperity and luxury, but of vanity and ostentation, especially among women.  The insidious influences of wealth more than balanced the good effected by a long succession of virtuous and gifted princes.  I read of no country that, on the whole, was ever favored by a more remarkable constellation of absolute kings than that of Judah.  Most of them had long reigns, took prophets and wise men for their counsellors, developed the resources of their kingdoms, strengthened