Prophecy Speaks (E.A.Rowell).pdf

with ruins should be inhabited? Or being inhabited, that the ruins should not have been
utilized or removed? But the inspired writer foresaw this fact, and you and I are compelled to
admit the marvellous correspondence of fact to prediction.
“Though ruined, desolate, bereft of her own people, Palestine was nevertheless to be
pre-eminently a land of pilgrimages, for Moses tells of ‘the foreigner that shall come from a
far land.’ Deuteronomy 29:22. And is this not true today? Is there any other spot on earth to
which so many pilgrims journey? Not one? More than half a hundred languages are spoken
in their city of Jerusalem alone.
“ ‘I will . . . draw out a sword after you,’ declares Jehovah, speaking to the Jews. (See
Leviticus 26:33). The history of this people has been one long, bloody commentary on the
uncanny accuracy of this prediction.
“Two million of them were killed, starved to death, or sold into a slavery worse than
death in A.D. 70. More than half a million more were slaughtered by the Romans sixty years
later. The history of the Israelites has been but the slaughter of a nation, continuing for
nineteen centuries — the sword drawn out after them.
“But let the words of the historian Milman tell the story: ‘No fanatic monk set the
populace in commotion, no public calamity took place, no atrocious or extravagant report
was propagated, but it fell upon the heads of this unhappy caste. In Germany the black
plague raged in all its fury; and wild superstition charged the Jews, as elsewhere, with
causing and aggravating the misery, and themselves enjoying a guilty comparative security
amid the universal desolation. . . .
“ ‘The same dark stories were industriously propagated, readily believed, and
ferociously avenged, of fountains poisoned, children crucified. . . . Still, persecuted in one
city, they fled to another, and thus spread over the whole [country]. Oppressed by nobles,
anathematized by the clergy, hated as rivals in trade by burghers in commercial cities,
despised and abhorred by the populace, their existence is known by the chronicle . . .of their
massacres.’ — ‘History of the Jews,’ Volume 3, pages 222, 223.”
8. SCEPTICS COMPELLED TO WITNESS FOR THE BIBLE
A SLIGHT RIPPLE of applause greeted David Dare’s appearance on the platform at
the next meeting. He smiled his acknowledgement, and began:
“Look at mighty Babylon in the heyday of her glory. Here was a city that seemed
destined to endure for ever. The ‘golden city’ had grown more and more powerful until it
was now the wonder of the ancient world.
“She drew her stores from no foreign country. She invented an alphabet; worked out
problems of arithmetic; invented implements for measuring time; conceived the plan of
building enormous structures with the poorest of all materials — clay; discovered the art of
polishing, boring, and engraving gems; knew how to reproduce faithfully the outlines of
human and animal forms; attained high perfection in textile fabrics; studied successfully the
motions of the heavenly bodies; conceived of grammar as a science; elaborated a system of
law; saw the value of exact chronology. In almost every branch of science she made a
beginning. Much of the art and learning of Greece came from Babylon.
“No, never had the world seen such a city. Its great rampart walls towered upward
two hundred feet, and on top several chariots could race abreast. Gleaming in the sun, its
lofty palaces and temple towers stabbed the sky above the towering walls and thrilled the
approaching traveller while he was yet miles away.
23