And the LORD shall scatter thee among all people, from the one end of the earth even unto the other; and there thou shalt serve other gods, which neither thou nor thy fathers have known, even wood and stone.
The Lord shall scatter thee among all people. There is, perhaps, not a country in the world where Jews are not to be found. But for centuries they underwent every species of public and private persecution; they have nowhere acquired a settlement; and although they are in some European States admitted to the privileges of citizenship, those 'tribes of the wandering foot and weary breast' are always looked upon as foreigners, whose wishes and destiny are associated with another land. The hosts of northern nations-Goths, Vandals, Huns-poured into the countries of southern Europe; and where are they now? Nay, at a much later period, the Britons, Romans, Saxons, Danes, and Normans all came successively into England and formed settlements; and who can distinguish those colonists from the aboriginal inhabitants; or the Gauls, the Romans, and the Franks in France; or the native Spaniards from the Goths and Moors who conquered Spain? They are blended in one indiscriminate mass, and their national distinctiveness irretrievably lost.
Much more might it have been expected that the intense and protracted sufferings of the Jews would, through the furnace-heat of affliction, have fused them into the common mass of humanity with the various nations among whom they dwelt. But still they continue a separate people, distinct in their characteristic features, special in their manners and customs.
Dr. Watson (of Llandaff) remarked, that 'he never saw a Jew, but he beheld in him a living testimony to the truth of the Old Testament.' Whoever looks upon this condition of the Hebrews and is not filled with awe, when he considers the fulfillment of this prophecy, and traces in the past sufferings and the present dispersion of that people the most legible marks of divine power, rectitude, and faithfulness.