Is Britain part of Israel? Has God forgotten...

The Lost Ten Tribes of Israel
in England and America

This was written in 1881

[The Lost Ten Tribes of Israel: a vital part of God's purpose]

E. K. Tullidge: Does it lie in the power of any one to suggest even a plausible reason why the Ten Tribes of Israel, who have for centuries been so completely lost to human knowledge, should alone of all mankind, be shut out from the enjoyment of the privileges of Christianity? For to imagine that it could have been occasioned the mere arbitrary exercise of almighty power, is to make utter havoc of our most necessary notions concerning the wisdom, and goodness of the Deity.

And this we assert because, in the first place, the ten tribes of Israel were, above all people, wonderfully qualified to do most excellent service in the cause of Christianity. They had, for centuries, lived under a state of things which must have wrought into the national character elements by which they were constitutionally predisposed to Christianity. The habitual acknowledgement of the presence of God in human affairs must have been the basis on which their whole mental structure was builded. To make this point more clear, we subjoin some able remarks by the late Alexander J. Scott, formerly Professor of Logic in Owen's College, Manchester. Speaking of the Hebrew Theocracy, he says:

"It was an extraordinary intervention, but it was not intended to teach men to look for extraordinary interventions, or to feel it impossible to have that recognition of God, which in this instance is called for, at any other time than when God does so miraculously interpose. The purpose in this case, as in the others, was to the very contrary of all that; it was, because it was already true that God governs the social unity, that its laws are laws of His making, that it is in the, recognition of Him, as our Governor, and of the laws which He has established, that the well-being of the social unit is at all attainable; that God by one extraordinary intervention, called the attention of mankind to an abiding truth.

"And remember that man needs to be practically taught in such matters. God had to teach the human race, beginning with that early and very imperfect stage of its spiritual development, not in the manner of a lecturer, or of the author of a system. He had to teach them in a manner which should lay hold upon their whole being, and especially upon their practical character. And therefore it was not by words merely, even by words of inspiration, but by such interventions and by such institutions as those that are recorded in the Mosaic Books and the books of the Old Testament, God, not on one single occasion, but generation after generation, and century after century manifested Himself with this great lesson in His hand."

He speaks further of "that educational purpose of the miraculous dispensation, the purpose of training their minds to the habitual acknowledgment of God in a manner, which should ultimately become a far wider, more comprehensive, more permanent acknowledgement of Him than was contemplated in the more direct way of the original constitution."

No people ever lived under conditions more favorable for developing a national character imbued with all those great qualities which are calculated to lift them to the very highest rank in the scale of nations. Chief of all was the tameless spirit of freedom, inspired by those just and righteous laws by which they were governed. A modern jurist, a Frenchman and an infidel, has written regarding those laws:- "Good right had Moses to challenge his Israelites, And what nation hath statutes like yours ? a worship so exalted, laws so equitable, a code so complete? Compared with all the legislations of antiquity, none so thoroughly embodies the principles of everlasting and universal righteousness. Lycurgus wrote not for a people but for an army: it was a barrack which he erected, not a commonwealth: and sacrificing everything to the military spirit, he mutilated human nature in order to crush it into armor. Solon, on the contrary, could not resist the effeminate and relaxing spirit of his Athens. It is in Moses alone that we find a regard for the right, austere and incorruptible, - a morality distinct from policy, and rising above regard for times and peoples. The trumpet of Sinal still finds an echo in the conscience of mankind, - the Decalogue still binds us all."

Surely there is no need of proving in full detail that the people possessed those other great qualities; great intellectual vigor, the spirit of enterprise, persevering industry, and military enthusiasm.

How then can we reconcile it with our most necessary ideas concerning the wisdom of God that He should have made no use of these people as instruments wherewith to accomplish those great purposes for which they were so exactly qualified? "Among this people religious thoughts of a most exalted nature were common to all. They were profoundly earnest and serious with feelings of awful reverence toward the Most High, whom they believed to be always present among them." A predisposition to Christianity must therefore have been the grand result of the training to which they had been subjected. They were therefore the most proper instruments to be used in the service of Christianity, provided certain hindrances, which shall be hereafter considered, could be removed. What right then have we to believe otherwise than that this was the very object contemplated in the training of the Ten Tribes of Israel?

And now are we to be confronted with the assertion that the Ten Tribes were utterly and forever cast off on account of their incorrigible idolatry? Such an assertion is not warranted by the least particle of fair evidence. The wickedness of the kingdom of the Ten Tribes was not so outrageous as generally represented. We are accustomed to believe that the terrible sufferings which the Jews have had to undergo were all the natural outcome of the mad wickedness of their fathers in rejecting their Messiah; whereby were instilled those frantic prejudices so hostile to the reception of Christianity. Of what greater enormity of wickedness could the Ten Tribes have possibly been guilty as to deserve a so much sterner punishment? to be completely struck out of existence as a nation? They took no part in Judah's awful crime, and therefore could not by any possibility share in their punishment. True it is that the Ten Tribes were sold into the hands of their enemies on account of their incorrigible idolatry. But it is equally certain that not more than a century and a half later, Judah became steeped in the same sin to a far more awful extent.

"The repeated chastisements which its ancient propensity to idolatry had drawn down upon the nation had at length produced the desired effect; and after the Babylonish captivity the Jews appear to have been thoroughly weaned from the favorite sin of their fore-fathers. Simultaneously, however, with this remarkable change for the better in the national sentiment, certain less favorable characteristics began, for the first time to exhibit themselves, or, at least, assumed a prominence which had not hitherto belonged to them. The Jews bad been always prone to over-value the external privileges which, as the chosen people of God, they enjoyed ; but after the Babylonish captivity, this feeling became more intense and gave rise to a spiritual pride of the most virulent character." - Litton's Church of Christ.

Mark the unmistakable testimony of Scripture:-

And the LORD said unto me. The back-sliding Israel hath justified herself wore than treacherous Judah. - Jer. iii. 2.

And when her sister AHOLIBAH (i.e. Judah) saw this, she was more corrupt in her inordinate love than she (AHOLAH i.e. Israel or SAMARIA,) and in her whoredoms more than her sister in her whoredoms. - Ezek. 23: 2.

Thine elder sister is SAMARIA, she and her daughters that dwell at thy left hand, and thy younger sister that dwelleth at thy right hand, is Sodom, and her daughters. Yet hast thou not walked after their ways, nor done after their abominations, but as if that was a very little thing, thou wast corrupted more than they in all thy ways. - Ezek. xvi. 46, 47.

Neither hath SAMARIA committed HALF of thy sins. - Ezek. xvi. 51.

Scripture therefore, would hardly seem to lend any countenance to the loudly expressed idea of the greater wickedness of the kingdom of the Ten Tribes. Divine testimony is abundant to the effect that the sins of Judah, long before they had committed their crowning act of wickedness, were already almost beyond comparison, greater than those of Israel. How then can any one presume to believe, that less mercy has been shown to the Ten Tribes? For it is a most necessary idea of justice that, in the words of Milton,

"Of worse deeds, worse sufferings must ensue."

"The greater the sin, the greater the punishment" - Spenser

"Doth God pervert judgment? or doth the Almighty pervert justice?" Omnipotence has no power to alter the eternal constitution of right and wrong. "He cannot deny Himself."

Just after the Assyrian had invaded the land and led into captivity the Ten Tribes, the prophet Micah gave utterance to these words:-

"Who is a God like unto thee, that pardoneth iniquity, and passeth by the transgression of the remnant of his heritage? be retaineth not his anger for ever, because he delighteth in mercy. He will turn again, he will have compassion upon us; he will subdue our iniquities; and thou wilt cast all their sins into the depths of the sea. Thou wilt perform the truth to Jacob, and the mercy to Abraham, which thou hast sworn unto our fathers from the days of old." - Micah vii. 18-20.

There is not the least semblance of reason for confining this promise of mercy to the kingdom Of Judah, but very particular reasons for supposing it to have especial reference to the kingdom of the Ten Tribes. But that could not be a very signal act of mercy, which shut them out, alone of all people on the face of the earth, from the only means of obtaining mercy which God could ever extend to our fallen race; seeing that they, moreover, were of all people the best adapted to profit by it.

Scripture does not grant the least permission to imagine that God ever intended to strike the Ten Tribes out of existence. That ought to be plain enough to every one without needing any array of evidence in its support. For it is palpable that if Scripture had plainly declared their destruction as a nation, there would never have been such an anxious search prosecuted after them. It was because Scripture was so positive and explicit that ALL the Tribes were one day to be restored to the land of promise, never again to be disturbed, that any effort was made to discover their hiding place. Out of many striking passages we select the following one from Ezekiel as being probably the most emphatic:-

"The word of the LORD came again unto me, saying, {16} Moreover, thou son of man, take thee one stick, and write upon it, For Judah, and for the children of Israel his companions: then take another stick, and write upon it, For Joseph, the stick of Ephraim, and for all the house of Israel his companions: {17} And join them one to another into one stick; and they shall become one in thine hand. {18} And when the children of thy people shall speak unto thee, saying, Wilt thou not show us what thou meanest by these? {19} Say unto them, Thus saith the Lord GOD; Behold, I will take the stick of Joseph, which is in the hand of Ephraim, and the tribes of Israel his fellows, and will put them with him, even with the stick of Judah, and make them one stick, and they shall be one in mine hand. {20} And the sticks whereon thou writest shall be in thine hand before their eyes. {21} And say unto them, Thus saith the Lord GOD; Behold, I will take the children of Israel from among the heathen, whither they be gone, and will gather them on every side, and bring them into their own land: {22} And I will make them one nation in the land upon the mountains of Israel; and one king shall be king to them all: and they shall be no more two nations, neither shall they be divided into two kingdoms any more at all:"
- Ezekiel 37:15-22.

Nothing that can properly be called a fulfillment of this Scripture has yet transpired. No such lasting union between the two parts of the Hebrew commonwealth has ever yet been effected. It is most clear therefore that in order to its being carried out the Ten Tribes must still be in existence as a nation. To imagine that they have not been allowed to enjoy the privileges of Christianity is altogether as unaccountable as if they had, in the most summary manner, been completely struck out of existence. The mysterious part of such proceedings would be that they should not have been used for that great work, for which their long and remarkable training had so especially qualified them.

All to no purpose has the globe been ransacked hitherto to discover the hiding place of the lost tribes. So totally lost to human knowledge have they been, so unsatisfactory all efforts to find them, that it seemed justifiable to say of them in the words of the poet:-

Like the dew on the mountain,
Like the foam on the river,
Like the bubble on the fountain,
They are gone and for ever.

But was there any indication of right reason apparent in the conducting of those researches? The anxious explorers, zealous for the integrity of Scripture, did not see that the integrity of Scripture was just as completely violated if the Ten Tribes had degenerated into the obscure, good-for-nothing specimens of humanity with which they sought to identify them, as if they had indeed been "cut off like the foam on the river." They did not realize what bitter mockery it was, if in such a manner God's promise of mercy were carried out. There was entirely too much haste in the matter. It was merely noted that the Bible did not allow the supposition that the Ten Tribes had ceased to exist. Steps must therefore be taken to find them. With strange lack of wisdom they neglected to take with them their infallible guide to direct their steps in the prosecution of their search. Thus did they,

With a clear and shining lamp supplied
First put it out, then took it for a guide.

If the Ten Tribes were to be kept in existence it must haver been for some worthy purpose, and the Scriptures disclose that purpose as plainly as they declare the continued existence of the tribes. If the Ten Tribes are still in existence it is self evident that they are themselves complete strangers to their illustrious origin. There is therefore no more presumption in seeking for them among the nations of Christendom than anywhere else. It is the only course consistent with right reason and worthy of the assurance of Scripture - that they were never to cease their existence as a nation (Jer. 31:35-36). It only remains then to say that they must be identified with that nation whose history is a plain fulfillment of what had been foretold of the Ten Tribes.

It is simply unjustifiable to demand that they shall exhibit all those peculiarities which are supposed to constitute a Hebrew. The more striking peculiarities of the Jews are owing to the state of things under which they lived after their return from Babylon, by which the Ten Tribes could be in no way effected, since they did not take advantage of the permission granted by Cyrus to return to the land of their fathers. Call to mind also their history while they were yet in their own land. They always evinced the most determined jealousy of their brethren of Judah; most conspicuously in refusing to be governed by a king from that tribe. After they had constituted themselves a separate kingdom, they took no part in the temple worship, manifesting therefore an ever weakening attachment to those outward observances of their religion to which for centuries their brethren of Judah have so desperately and tenaciously clung. There is not the slightest warrant therefore for refusing to acknowledge a people as the Ten Tribes because they do not exhibit all the striking peculiarities that belong to the Jew. Let it be carried in mind that though every Jew was an Israelite, not every Israelite was a Jew. Let us not seek to identify the objects of our search by any peculiarities, however remarkable, which they were at perfect liberty to cast aside at any time. Let us rather identify them by those great national characteristics, which, having laid hold upon their whole being, could not be put off at pleasure; and let us identify them by the results which those characteristics would naturally tend to work out.

[The Ten Tribes always to exist as a nation]

It is now our intention to place before the eyes of the reader of some of the most remarkable testimonies of Scripture, which yield the most direct and complete sanction to the truth of our proposition that the Ten Tribes are now in existence as a nation, doing active and efficient work in the interest of Christianity.

First, then, let us consider those passages which give the strongest assurance that the Ten Tribes (distinguished in Scripture by the various names, "House of Israel," " House of Joseph." "all the House of Israel wholly," "Ephraim," "Samaria "), were never to pass out of existence as a distinct nation. The mission of Hosea and Amos was expressly to the kingdom of the Ten Tribes. In the second chapter of Hosea, after the shameful wickedness of the people has been described and severe punishments denounced against them, there comes a most tender promise of mercy:-

"Therefore, behold, I will allure her, and bring her into the wilderness, and speak comfortably unto her. And I will give her her vineyards from thence, and the valley of Achor for a door of hope: and she shall sing there, as in the days of her youth, and as in the day when she came up out of the land of Egypt. Hosea 2:14-15.

From the eleventh chapter we produce a passage still more explicit:-

"How shall I give thee up, Ephraim? how shall I deliver thee, Israel? how shall I make thee as Admah? how shall I set thee as Zeboim? mine heart is turned within me, my repentings are kindled together. I will not execute the fierceness of mine anger, I will not return to destroy Ephraim: for I am God, and not man; the Holy One in the midst of thee: and I will not enter into the city." Hosea 11:8-9

Still another assurance is supplied by the same prophet in the fourteenth chapter:-

"I will heal their backsliding, I will love them freely: for mine anger is turned away from him. {5} I will be as the dew unto Israel: he shall grow as the lily, and cast forth his roots as Lebanon. {6} His branches shall spread, and his beauty shall be as the olive tree, and his smell as Lebanon. {7} They that dwell under his shadow shall return; they shall revive as the corn, and grow as the vine: the scent thereof shall be as the wine of Lebanon. {8} Ephraim shall say, What have I to do any more with idols? I have heard him, and observed him: I am like a green fir tree. From me is thy fruit found." Hosea 14:4-8

For further testimony we turn to the ninth chapter of the prophecy of Amos:-

"Behold the eyes of the Lord GOD are upon the sinful kingdom, and I will destroy it from off the face of the earth ; saving that I will not utterly destroy the house of Jacob saith the LORD: For, lo, I will command and I will sift the HOUSE of Israel among all nations, like as corn is sifted in a sieve, yet shall not the least grain tall upon the earth." Amos 9:8-9

That the prophet here refers exclusively to the Ten Tribes is established by the fact that, in the very beginning of his prophecy, he draws a clear distinction between Israel and Judah, and declares that his words are of the former kingdom.

Jeremiah also is careful to maintain a clear distinction when speaking of the two kingdoms, as is evident from the following instances:-

"In those days the house of Judah shall walk TO (not with) the house of Israel, and they shall come together out of the land of the north to the land that I have given for an inheritance unto your fathers." - JER. iii. 18.

The whole of the thirty-first chapter of this prophecy is a prediction of the restoration of the Ten Tribes, as the preceding chapter is, in the same way, concerned with the house of Judah.

"At the same time saith the LORD, will I be the God of all the families of Israel, and they shall be my people. Thus saith the LORD, the people which were left of the sword found grace in the wilderness.

Is Ephraim my dear son? is he a pleasant child? for since I spake against him, I do earnestly remember him still: therefore my bowels are troubled for him; I will surely have mercy upon him saith the LORD.

Thus saith the LORD, which giveth the sun for a light by day, and the ordinances of the moon and of the stars for a light by night, which divideth the sea when the waves thereof roar; the LORD of hosts is his name. If those ordinances depart from before me, saith the LORD, then the seed of Israel also shall cease from being a nation before me forever. Thus saith the Lord; If heaven above can be measured and the foundations of the earth searched out beneath, I will also cast off all the seed of Israel for all that they have done, saith the LORD." - JER. 31:2, 20, 35, 37.

Nothing could be more explicit than the testimony we subjoin from Ezekiel:-

"Again the word of the LORD came unto me, saying, Son of man, thy brethren, even thy brethren, the men of thy kindred, and all the house of Israel wholly, are they unto whom the inhabitants of Jerusalem have said, Get you far from the LORD: unto us is this land given in possession. Therefore say, thus saith the Lord: Although I have cast them far off among the heathen, and although I have scattered them among the countries, yet will I be to them as a little sanctuary in the countries where they shall come."
- Ezek. xi., 14 16.

Ezekiel's prophecies were delivered long after the Ten Tribes had been carried away by the Assyrians. It is not to be disputed therefore, that those of whom he here speaks as having been "cast far off among the heathen," and "scattered among the countries," were his brethren of the Ten Tribes.

Perhaps the following passage from Zechariah is the most valuable of all, because having been written after the first and partial restoration of the nation of Israel, it cannot refer to anything that.has yet taken place:-

"And I will strengthen the House of Judah, and I will save the HOUSE of Joseph, and I will bring them again to place them; for I have mercy upon them: and they shall be as though I had not cast them off: for I am the LORD their God, and will hear them. And they of Ephraim shall be like a mighty man, and their hearts shall rejoice as through wine : yea, their children shall see it, and be glad, their heart shall rejoice in the LORD. I will hiss for them and gather them; for I have redeemed them: and they shall increase as they have increased" - Zech. x. 6-8.

If the Scriptures are to be regarded as infallible on all questions with which they are concerned, (and we address those only who believe them to be so), then they surely furnish us with such an array of evidence as should force us to believe that the Maker of Israel never had any intention of striking out of existence the work of His own hands. If anything of explicitness and certainty seems to be wanting, it is only because the powers of language must somewhere find a limit. There seems to have been a determination to give assurances as strong as language could express that the Ten Tribes were never to "cease from being a nation," as though purposely to provide against a time when, to all appearances, there would not be a vestige of them to be found in existence. That they have been so totally lost to human knowledge is so far from affording any evidence against our position, that it can easily be shown that such a state of things was absolutely necessary, in order that they might work out their mighty destiny; that it would have been disastrous to the spread of true Christianity to have had it otherwise. It is in perfect harmony with God's usual method of working. As Bishop Butler says:- "There is no manner of absurdity in supposing a veil on purpose, drawn over some scenes of infinite power, wisdom, and goodness; the sight of which might, some way or other, strike us too strongly; or, that better ends are designed and served by their being concealed than could be by their being exposed to our knowledge. The Almighty may cast clouds and darkness round about Him, for reasons and purposes of which we have not the least glimpse or conception."

[The Ten Tribes located in England]

The tribe Of Judah was the divinely appointed means for bringing the Messiah into the world, while the Ten Tribes were commissioned to carry the tidings of salvation to the ends of the earth, and to procure for the Redeemer the dominion which from eternity had been promised to Him as His inheritance, "from sea even to sea, and from the river even to the ends of the earth." And yet, although the Ten Tribes had been trained to carry forward this great work, how could they be managed so that the whole course of their national life might tend to its accomplishment? The will of man is contrary to the will of God, and in nothing so much as in accepting and furthering the Divine counsels for his own eternal welfare. It was absolutely necessary therefore that the chosen people should bring about unconsciously the grand result for which they had been set apart and trained; that they should lose completely the knowledge of their illustrious origin. From the considerations thus far brought forward we believe that we are entitled to come to the conclusion that the Ten Tribes must be sought for among the nations of Christendom. Which of these nations, therefore, has been doing such glorious work for the Almighty, as ages ago was consigned to the tribes of Israel? Can there be a moments hesitation [in 1881] before we hear the answer that England alone can claim the slightest pretension to so lofty a distinction?

"Has He not bid her and her favour'd land
For ages safe beneath His sheltering hand,
Giv'n her His blessing on the clearest proof,
Bid nations leagued against her stand aloof
And charged hostility and hate to roar
Where else they would but not upon her shore?"

How repeatedly has attention been called to the peculiar favor which God has extended to England above all nations of modern times! Listen, for instance, to the grand words of Milton:-

"Lords and Commons of England! consider what nation it is whereof ye are and whereof ye are the governors! a nation not slow and dull, but of a quick, ingenious, and piercing spirit; acute to invent, subtle and sinewy to discourse, not beneath the reach of any point, the highest that human capacity can soar to. Yet that which is above all this, the favor and the love of Heaven, we have great argument to think in a peculiar manner propitious and propending towards us. Why else was this nation chosen before any other, that out of her, as out of SION, should be proclaimed and sounded forth the first tidings and trumpet of reformation to all Europe? . . . Now once again, by all concurrence of signs, and by the general instinct of holy and devout men, as they daily and solemnly express their thoughts, God is decreeing to begin some new and great period in His church, even to the reforming of reformation itself; what does he then but reveal Himself to His servants, and as His manner is, first to His Englishmen? I say as His manner is, first to us, though we mark not the method of His counsels, and are unworthy." - Areopagatica.

D'Aubigné, the celebrated historian of the Reformation, after a visit to England, cannot refrain from giving vent to similar impressions:-

"I have been struck with admiration at beholding the people of those islands, encompassing the globe, bearing everywhere civilization and Christianity, commanding the most distant seas, and filling the earth with the power and the Word of God. At the sight of such prosperity and greatness I said: 'Ascribe ye strength unto God: His excellency is over Israel; and His strength is in the clouds. O God, Thou art terrible out of thy Holy places. The God of Israel is He that giveth strength and power unto His people. . . . Blessed be God.'"

[England's Mental alignment with ancient Israel]

Why is it that Englishmen have always delighted to rouse their warlike enthusiasm by calling to mind the deeds of the heroes of ancient Israel, Joshua, Gideon, Jeptha, Samson and David; precisely as though they considered their splendid exploits as part of the history of their own nation? Why, in so many particulars, has the Anglo-Saxon the characteristics of the Hebrew mind so peculiar to his own? [British Prime Minister] Disraeli writes in his Tancred:

"As an exponent of the mysteries of the human mind, as a soother of the troubled spirit, to whose harp do the people of England fly for sympathy and solace? Is it to Byron or Wordsworth, or even the myriad minded Shakespeare ? No; the most popular poet in England is the sweet singer of Israel, and by no other race except his own have his odes been so often sung. It was the sword of the Lord and of Gideon that won for England its boasted liberties and the Scotch achieved their religious freedom, chanting upon their hill sides the same canticles which cheered the heart of Judah amid their glens." - Tancred.

Dean Stanley has somewhere remarked:-

"The sons of Israel are literally our spiritual ancestors; their imagery, their poetry, their very name, have descended to us; their hopes, their poetry, their psalms are ours."

The testimony of a foreigner will be still more to the purpose. The point which we desire to enforce is strikingly brought out in the following rather lengthy passage from the highly-wrought rhetoric of Monsieur Taine:

"I have before me one of those great old folios, in black letter, in which the pages, worn by horny fingers, have been patched together, in which an old engraving figures forth to the poor folk the deeds and menaces of the God of Israel, in which the preface and table of contents point out to simple people the moral which is to be drawn from each tragic history, and the application which is to be made of each venerable precept. Hence have sprung much of the English language, and half of the English manners; to this day the country is biblical; it was these big books which had transformed Shakespeare's England. To understand this great change, try to picture these yeomen, these shopkeepers, who in the evening placed this Bible their table, and bareheaded, with veneration, heard or read one of its chapters. Think that they have no other books, that theirs was a virgin mind; that every impression would make a furrow; that the monotony of mechanical existence rendered them entirely open to new emotions, that they opened this book not for amusement, but to discover in it their doom of life and death; in brief, that the somber and impassioned imagination of the race raised them to the level of the grandeurs and terrors which were to pass before their eyes. Tyndale, the translator, wrote with such sentiments, condemned, hunted, in concealment, his mind full of the idea of a speedy death, and of the great God for whom at last he mounted the funeral pyre; and the spectators who had seen the remorse of Macbeth and the murders of Shakespeare, can listen to the despair of David. and the massacres accumulated in the books of Judges and Kings. The short Hebrew verse style took hold upon them by its uncultivated austerity. They have no need, like the French, to have the ideas developed, explained in fine clear language to be modified and connected. ' The serious and pulsating tone strikes them at once; they understand it with the imagination and the heart. They are not, like Frenchmen, enslaved to logical regularity; and the old text, so free, so lofty and terrible, can retain in their language its wildness and its majesty. More than any people in Europe, by their inner concentration and rigidity, they realize the Semitic conception of the solitary and Almighty God; a strange conception, which we, with all our critical methods, have hardly reconstructed within ourselves at the present day. For the Jew, for the powerful minds who wrote the Pentateuch, for the prophets and authors of the Psalms, life, as we conceive it, was secluded from living things, plants, animals, firmament, sensible objects, to be carried and concentrated entirely in the one Being, of whom they are the work and the puppets. Earth is the footstool of this great God, heaven is His garment. He is in the world, amongst His creatures, as an Oriental king in his tent, all vanishes before the absorbing idea of the master; you see but him; nothing has an individual and independent existence. These arms are but made for his hands, these carpets for his foot; you imagine them only as spread for him and trodden by him. The awe-inspiring face and menacing voice of the irresistible lord appear behind his instruments. And in a similar manner, for the Jew, nature and men are nothing of themselves; they are for the service of God; they have no other reason for existence, no other use; they vanish before the vast and solitary Being who extended and set high as a mountain before human thought, occupies and covers in Himself the whole horizon. Vainly we attempt, we seed of the Aryan [European] race, to represent to ourselves this devouring God. We always leave some beauty, some interest, some part of free existence to nature; we but half attain to the Creator, with difficulty, after a chain of reasoning, like Voltaire and Kant; more readily we make Him into an architect; we naturally believe in natural laws; we know that the order of the world is fixed; we do not crush things and their relations under the burden of an arbitrary sovereignty; we do not grasp the sublime sentiment of Job, who sees the world trembling and swallowed up at the touch of the strong hand; we cannot endure the intense emotion or repeat the marvelous accent of the psalms, in which, amid tho silence of beings reduced to atoms, nothing remains but the heart of man speaking to the eternal Lord. These Englishmen, in the anguish of a troubled conscience, and the oblivion of sensible nature, renew it in part. If the strong and harsh cheer of the Arab, which breaks forth like the blast of a trumpet at the sight of the sun and of the bare solitudes, if the mental trances, the short visions of a luminous and grand landscape, if the Semitic coloring are wanting, at least the seriousness and simplicity have remained; and the Hebraic God brought into the modern conscience, is no less a sovereign in this narrow precinct than in the deserts and mountains from which He sprang. His image is reduced, but His authority is entire; if He is less poetical, He is more moral. Men read with awe and trembling the history of His works, the tables of His law, the archives of His vengeance, the proclamation of His promises and menaces; they are filled with them. Never has a people been seen so deeply imbued by a foreign book, has let it penetrate so far into its manners and writing, its imagination and language. Thenceforth they have found their King, and will follow Him; no word, lay or ecclesiastic, shall prevail over His word; they have submitted their conduct to Him, they will give body and life for Him; and if need be, a day will come when, out of fidelity to Him, they will overthrow the State."

Will the reader bear in mind how we have already tried to bring out that these conceptions so natural to Englishmen, and so hard of comprehension to Frenchmen, must have been the great end which God had in view in the training to which He subjected the Israelites. Since it is so plain that these characteristics form part of the national character of the English people, and since God so clearly signified that a long and patient training was necessary before a people's mind could become imbued with such qualities, and since but one people ever received such a training, it must follow that Englishmen and Israelites are one and the same people. The honor of the Divine government is blasted if it is possible to draw a different conclusion from such premises.

[prophetic references to Israel's wanderings among the nations]

It is proper now to go somewhat more into detail and see whether the history of the Anglo-Saxon race, in its most prominent features, was not plainly forecast in the pages of revelation. Let us prosecute our researches in the Sacred Volume according to the method which Bishop Butler has laid down; "attending to, comparing, and pursuing intimations, scattered up and down it, which are overlooked and disregarded by the generality of the world."

And in the first place we may gather some intimations, which, though few, are yet quite explicit, regarding the designation of the Ten Tribes, after God had shut them out of the land of their fathers.

Hosea prophesied of them:

"My God will cast them away, because they did not hearken unto him: and they shall be wanderers among the nations." Hosea 9:17

But Isaiah seems plainly to indicate where they were to cease from their wanderings and " renew their strength:"

"Keep silence before me, O Islands, and let the people renew their strength." Isa. 41:1

There are many other passages which seem plainly to imply that God had provided an island home for His people, a place where enemies could not molest them, altogether the most suitable situation for that nation which was destined to "blossom and bud and fill the face of the world with fruit." Isa. 27:6

Isaiah's language indicates an insular position when he says:

"For thou shalt break forth on the right hand and on the left; and thy seed shall inherit the Gentiles, and make the desolate cities to be inhabited." Isaiah 54:3

And so it is in the prophecy of Balaam:

"Lo, the People shall dwell alone, and shall not be reckoned among nations." - Num. 23:9.

Mark now how well this description is suited to England. Shakespeare says:

"I' the world's volume
Our Britain seems as of it but not in 't." - Cym. iii. 4.

Virgil [Vergilius] says the same:

"Penitus toto diviscis orbe Britannos." - Ecl. i. 66.

"The Britons, A race of men from all the world disjoined." - Dryden.

There is another remarkable passage which gives further testimony on this point, and has an important bearing on another part of our subject. It reads as follows :

"For thy waste and thy desolate places, and the land of thy destruction, shall even now be too narrow, by reason of the inhabitants, and they that swallow thee up shall be far away. The children which thou shalt have, after thou hast lost the other, shall say again in thine cars, The place is too strait for me give place to me that I may dwell." - Isa. 49:19-20.

Surely some peculiar significance lies in the words "after thou bast lost the other." Their proper meaning will become manifest, I believe, if we bring them into connection with certain remarkable prophecies uttered when as yet the sons of Jacob were a nation only by promise; prophecies familiar enough to every reader of Scripture; but never properly understood. No commentator that I know of seems to have realized the difficulties connected with them, and attempted a solution. The first which I desire to notice here is the blessing, pronounced by Jacob, upon the two sons of Joseph:-

"And Israel stretched out his right hand, and laid it upon Ephraim's head, who was the younger, and his left hand upon Manasseh's head, guiding his hands wittingly; for Manasseh was the firstborn. {15} And he blessed Joseph, and said, God, before whom my fathers Abraham and Isaac did walk, the God which fed me all my life long unto this day, {16} The Angel which redeemed me from all evil, bless the lads; and let my name be named on them, and the name of my fathers Abraham and Isaac; and let them grow into a multitude in the midst of the earth. [Properly, " let them increase as fishes increase."] {17} And when Joseph saw that his father laid his right hand upon the head of Ephraim, it displeased him: and he held up his father's hand, to remove it from Ephraim's head unto Manasseh's head. {18} And Joseph said unto his father, Not so, my father: for this is the firstborn; put thy right hand upon his head. {19} And his father refused, and said, I know it, my son, I know it: he also shall become a people, and he also shall be great: but truly his younger brother shall be greater than he, and his seed shall become a multitude of nations. {20} And he blessed them that day, saying, In thee shall Israel bless, saying, God make thee as Ephraim and as Manasseh: and he set Ephraim before Manasseh." - Genesis 48:14-20

It is here as plainly declared that the descendants of Ephraim should form a MULTITUDE of NATIONS, and that the descendants of Manasseh should form a separate, independent NATION by themselves, as in the next chapter it is foretold that the Messiah should be born of the tribe of Judah. Note also that when Moses pronounces, his blessings upon the several tribes, Ephraim and Manasseh are again brought Into especial notice:

"Let the blessing come upon the head of Joseph, and upon the top of the head of him that was separated from his brother. His glory is like the firstling of his bullock, and his horns are like the horns of unicorns: with them he shall push the people together to the ends of the earth : and they are the ten thousands of Ephraim, and they are the thousands of Manasseh." - Deut. 33:17.

[Finding the fulfillment of prophecy in history]

The true meaning of any prophecy is to be understood from its fulfillment. Prophecy is history told before it has come to pass. But there is nothing in the records of Hebrew history which is at all commensurate with the promises of future greatness delivered in such a rapture of prophetic Inspiration. Consider the end held in view and it will be manifest at once how impossible it was that such a history as is there foretold could be transacted on the narrow strip of land at the end of the Mediterranean Sea. God was hereby providing means for carrying His message of salvation to all places of the earth, surely the greatest of all human agencies employed for restoring the world to its true allegiance. That this was the work for which the children of Israel were set apart and trained, we have already maintained to be plain both from the nature of the case and from the most express testimony of the inspired writers. Since this is the meaning of these predictions how manifest is it that we can expect to find them realized only in history which has transpired since the great salvation was wrought out. Therefore when we read that the Ten Tribes went away into captivity and never returned to the land of their fathers, is it in any sense a proper conclusion to draw that God had cast them aside as utterly worthless for performing the great work He had once determined to place in their hands? What is this but affirming that God had been taken by surprise, that He had not foreseen that they would become so firmly joined to their idols? Shall we thus do violence to one of His everlasting attributes and forget that it is His wondrous prerogative to bring good out of evil ? If the Israelites were not to perform the great work, by whom else could it be effected? Was that long training of centuries a mere farce? It is iniquitous to imagine so. It is most strenuously insisted upon in the pages of inspiration that God foresaw all their wickedness from the beginning, but that notwithstanding they should still remain His especial servants. Read the words once more:

"For I knew that thou wouldst deal very treacherously and wast called a transgressor from the womb. For my name's sake will I defer mine anger, and for my praise will I refrain for thee, that I cut thee not off. For mine own sake, even for mine own sake, will I do it: for how should my name be polluted? and I will not give my glory unto another." Isa. 47:8, 9, 11.

We have already maintained and insist upon it again, as being the very keynote of our whole treatment of the subject, that it was an essential part of the whole plan that the people should completely lose the knowledge of their own origin. There needs but one consideration to make this good. Think how woefully the significance of their position has been misunderstood by those sons of Israel who have never lost their identity. They have imagined that God's favor was for them alone, to the exclusion of all the rest of mankind; whereas we know that God's intention to extend favor and mercy to all the world, through their instrumentality, was the true reason of their being so distinguished by Him.

From all considerations of right reason therefore, we are to consult the history of the past eighteen hundred years for the fulfillment of the predictions made by Jacob and Moses. That the people whose history was to be a realization of these predictions should have been utterly unconscious that they were carrying them out, was, as we have seen, an indispensable condition of their fulfillment.

[The stature of England in 1881]

We have already decided that the history of the English race is the only one in which we can for a moment hope to find anything answering to them. What can be gathered, therefore, from this history which can be said to afford a fair explanation of the passages set before the reader as having never yet received a proper solution?

Place alongside the language of prophecy the splendid eulogy of Daniel Webster, on England's greatness, and who will deny that the one is in every way worthy of being regarded as a most striking and satisfactory fulfillment of the other?. In his words then, England is " a power to which for purposes of foreign conquest and subjugation, Rome, in the height of her glory, is not to be compared; a power which has dotted over the surface of the whole globe with her possessions and military posts, whose morning drumbeat following the sun, and keeping company with the hours, circles the earth daily with one continuous and unbroken strain of the martial airs of England."

[The United States as Manasseh]

If the position of England may be fairly held to correspond with the high destiny assigned to the descendants of Joseph, then must the history of these United States of America be taken as the fulfillment of what was predicted of the descendants of Manasseh; "he also shall become a people, and he also shall be great" (Gen. 48:19). If it is not here intimated that the descendants of Manasseh were to form a great and independent nation, then the words imply nothing more than might be equally asserted of all the sons of Jacob. "The ten thousands of Ephraim, and the thousands of Manasseh," (Deut. 33:17) in the blessings pronounced by Moses agrees readily with such an interpretation. Who will not realize at once how strikingly apposite the expression of Isaiah, "the children which then shalt have after thou hast LOST the other," (Isa. 49:20) is to the separation of the American colonies from the mother country? Many a prophecy whose import has been of the vaguest kind discloses at once its true and natural meaning when this new light is thrown upon it. Isaiah uttered the following prediction after the Ten Tribes had been carried away by their conquerors :

"They shall eat every, man the flesh of his own arm : Manasseh Ephraim and Ephraim Manasseh: and they together shall be against Judah." -Isa. 9:20, 31.

Now this is certainly a prophecy of civil war to take place among the tribes after their departure. But there is no means of ascertaining whether it has ever fulfilled or not, unless we look upon English history as the fulfillment of the destiny assigned to the Hebrew people. Then indeed all perplexity vanishes.

It was but natural, from the very different destiny assigned to them, that the tribe of Manasseh should form a sort of republican element among a people, with this exception, devoted to monarchy. The words which Jacob and Moses had spoken concerning them must have dwelt in the minds of every member of that tribe, and rendered them comparatively but slightly attached to the government by which their brethren were content to be ruled. Now it is certainly a wonderful strengthening of our position that the Anglo-Saxon race should be thus divided into the two most powerful nations of the earth, according as Jacob foretold of the two sons of Joseph.

[Fulfillment of Prophetic Details]

It was one of the earliest promises made to the seed of Abraham, that they should possess "the gates " of their enemies (Gen. 22: 17). We cite the testimony of an admiring Frenchman to show to what an extent England's history realizes this prediction. M. Dupin, in his Force Commerciale de la Grande Bretagne, (1826) writes:

"In Europe the British Empire borders at once towards the north upon Germany, upon Holland, upon France; towards the south upon Spain, upon Sicily, upon Italy, upon Western Turkey. It holds the keys of the Adriatic and Mediterranean; it commands the mouth of the Black Sea as well as the Baltic. In America it boundaries to Russia, towards the Pole; and to the United States towards the temperate regions. Under the torrid zone it reigns in the midst of the Antilles, encircles the Gulf of Mexico, till, at last, it meets those new States, which it was the first to free from their dependence on their mother country, to make them more surely dependent on their own commercial industry, and, at the same time, to scare, in either hemisphere, any mortal who, might endeavor to snatch the heavenly fire of genius, or the secrets of its conquests, it holds, midway between Africa and America, and on the road which connects Europe with Asia, that rock to which it chained the Prometheus of the modern world [Spain?]. In Africa, from the center of that island devoted of yore, under the symbol of the cross, to the safety of every Christian flag, the British Empire enforces from the Barbary States [North Africa] that respect which they pay to no other power. From the foot of the Pillars of Hercules, it carries dread into the remotest provinces of Morocco. On the shores of the Atlantic it has built the forts of the Gold Coast and of the Lion's Mountain [Sierra Leone]. It is from thence that it strikes the prey which the Black furnishes to the European races of men: and it is, there that it attaches to the soil the freed men whom it snatches from the trade in slaves. [In the early 1800's, Christian activists turned England strongly anti-slavery]. On the same continent, beyond the tropics, at the point nearest to the Austral Pole, it has possessed shelter under the very Cape of Storms [South Africa and Cape of Good Hope]. Where the Spaniard and the Portuguese thought only of securing a port for their ships to touch at, where the Dutch saw no capabilities beyond those of a plantation, it is now establishing the colony of a second British people, and, uniting English activity with Batavian [Boer] patience, at this moment it is extending around the Cape the boundaries of a settlement which will increase in the south of Africa to the size of the States it has founded in the North of America [the unfulfilled vision of Cecil Rhodes]. From this new focus of action and of conquest, it casts its eyes towards India; it discovers, it seizes the stations of most importance to its commercial progress, and thus renders itself the exclusive ruler over the passes of Africa from the East of another hemisphere. Finally, as much dread in the Persian Gulf and the Erythrean [Aegean] Sea as in the Pacific ocean and the Indian Archipelago [Indonesia], the British Empire, the Possessor of the finest countries of the East, beholds its factors reign over eighty millions of subjects. The conquests of its merchants in Asia begin where those of Alexander ceased, and where the terminus of the Romans could not reach. At this moment, from the banks of the Indus to the frontier of China, from the mouths of the Ganges to the mountains of Tibet, all acknowledge the sway of a mercantile company [East India Company] shut up in a narrow street in the city of London."

It is surely not hard to recognize all this a worthy fulfillment of the prophecy: "Thou shall reign over many nations, but they shall not reign over thee." - Deut. xv. 16.

It was a most extraordinary prophetic blessing when Moses declared before the assembled tribes: "For the Lord thy God blesseth thee, as he promised thee; and thou shalt lend unto many nations, but thou shalt not borrow. [cf. the Marshall Plan]" - Deut. xv 16.

It has been well remarked by an able writer upon our subject, William Carpenter in "The Israelites Found", that this was

"a thing so unlikely to come to pass in the history of a people not then formed into a nation, whose views of territorial occupation were confined within very narrow limits, and who, as a nation, were to have but little intercourse with other people - that no impostor would have ventured to utter it. Put there it stands recorded, in two several places, amongst the especial blessings that were predicted of His people by the great and inspired Lawgiver. It obviously implies that the people of whom it was spoken, though then just escaping from slavery, poor, despised, and opposed by all the nations whose path they crossed, should exceed all others in accumulated wealth. Other nations would require monetary assistance from without, but these never. On the contrary, they were to lend to all others. They were not only to possess abundance, but of their superfluity, were to lend to all others. That this was said of them as a nation, and not as individuals, is clear, for all the blessings and curses pronounced in these two chapters (Deut. 15, 28) were addressed to them in their collective or national character; is also clear from the terms in which the borrowers are spoken of 'nations.'"

In all that has heretofore been received as Hebrew history, there, is nothing in the least answering to this prophecy, but who does not know how remarkably true it is of England? The immense sum of nearly £ 2,800,000,000 is now owing to England from foreign nations, and they are continually coming for more. "A loan is announced for some state in the Old World, or the New, and the subscriptions so pour into the banks, appointed to receive them, that the usual thing is for many millions more than are required to be offered in a week, sometimes in a day; the applications for permission to lend to the borrower being so numerous that an applicant is not permitted to contribute more than a-half, or a-third, or less than that of what he offers. So enormous are the loans, that the amount of interest paid upon them, in England alone, sometimes exceeds five or six million, sterling in a single month. And while they have thus lent and are still lending, the amount of unemployed capital is often so great, that, though offered on loan, at from 2 to 3 per cent. [!], borrowers cannot be found."

Consider now another of the declarations which Moses was inspired to make to his Israelites. In regard to the grand code of laws which had been bestowed upon them, he said:

"Keep therefore and do them; for this is your wisdom and your understanding in the sight of the nations, which shall hear of all these statutes, and say, Surely this great nation is a wise and understanding people. For what nation is there so great, who hath God so nigh unto them, as the Lord our God is in all things that we call upon Him for? And what nation is there so great that hath statutes and judgments so righteous as all this law which I set before you this day." - Deut. iv 6-8.

But were the people so regarded while they dwelt in the land of Canaan? We surely cannot esteem it so from anything recorded in Sacred History. But how suitable are these words to the admiration which has been so frequently, and loudly bestowed by foreigners upon the English [and more recently American] constitution. Will not the following passage from Edmund Burke then furnish a splendid commentary on the passage we have quoted? In his "Appeal from the to New to the Old Whigs," he writes:

"Place, for instance, before your eyes such a man as Montesquieu. Think of a genius not born in every country, or every time; a man gifted by nature with a penetrating aquiline eye, with a judgment prepared with the most extensive erudition, with an herculean robustness of mind, and nerves not to be broken with labor; a man who could spend twenty years in one pursuit. Think of a man like the universal patriarch in Milton, (who had drawn up before him in his prophetic vision, the whole series of the generations which were to issue from his loins), a man capable of placing in review, after having brought together from the east, the west, the north, and the south, from the coarseness of the rudest barbarism to the most refined and subtle civilization, all the schemes of government which had ever prevailed amongst mankind, weighing, measuring, collating and comparing them all, joining fact with theory, and calling into council, upon all this infinite assemblage of things, all the speculations which have fatigued the understandings of profound reasoners in all times! Let us then consider, that all these were but so many preparatory steps to qualify a man, and such a man tinctured with no national prejudice, with no domestic affection, to admire and to hold out to the admiration of mankind, the constitution of England."

He speaks of it again as "the admiration and the envy of the world; the pattern for politicians; the theme of the eloquent; the meditation of the philosopher in every part of the world."

Now it is a well recognized fact that the Great British constitution developed step by step, out of the meager system of government introduced by the early settlers of England, is founded on the very code of law delivered amid the thunders of Sinai. Read the following remarkable testimony from a most unexpected witness. The Osservatore Romano, the official organ of tho Pope, under date May 19, 1876, (as quoted by the London Times), writes as follows of the English Constitution and England's Christianity:

"She has however retained all the remainder of Christianity, and above all the ten commandments. These she has always maintained in her customs, her laws, and her government. Her customs are in perfect accord with the spirit of Christianity. Her institutions perpetuate the same spirit, her laws watch over and maintain it with inflexible constancy. The whole nation in a word is religious and christian. If it is true that customs, laws, and government especially constitute a nation, and the condition of English legislation is to be particularly noted, it may be said that to be not nothing else than the faithful echo of that of Sinai received through Christianity. You see it the guardian of that great law, and publicly maintaining the adoration of the true God, author of the Decalogue, placing in His name the social sanction upon all those divine and natural commands; wherefore in His name, it may be said to punish the delinquencies and crimes committed against Him, not less than against society, homicide, theft, false witness, offenses against good manners [!], parents and country. In a word the laws of God are the laws of the State - the one takes its force from the other."

Part 1 of
The Lost Tribes of Israel in England and America
The Throne of David
The Kingdom of Stone
The British Empire
Their identity maintained
by E.K. Tullidge
New York: Office of the Heir of the World, 1881