he
Temple.--Emotions of the old men.--Rejoicings of the young men.

The period of the invasion of Babylonia by Cyrus, and the taking of
the city, was during the time while the Jews were in captivity there.
Cyrus was their deliverer. It results from this circumstance that the
name of Cyrus is connected with sacred history more than that of any
other great conqueror of ancient times.

It was a common custom in the early ages of the world for powerful
sovereigns to take the people of a conquered country captive, and make
them slaves. They employed them, to some extent, as personal household
servants, but more generally as agricultural laborers, to till the
lands.

An account of the captivity of the Jews in Babylon is given briefly
in the closing chapters of the second book of Chronicles, though many
of the attendant circumstances are more fully detailed in the book
of Jeremiah. Jeremiah was a prophet who lived in the time of the
captivity. Nebuchadnezzar, the king of Babylon, made repeated
incursions into the land of Judea, sometimes carrying away the
reigning monarch, sometimes deposing him and appointing another
sovereign in his stead, sometimes assessing a tax or tribute upon the
land, and sometimes plundering the city, and carrying away all the
gold and silver that he could find. Thus the kings and the people were
kept in a continual state of anxiety and terror for many years,
exposed incessantly to the inroads of this nation of robbers and
plunderers, that had, so unfortunately for them, found their way
across their frontiers. King Zedekiah was the last of this oppressed
and unhappy line of Jewish kings.

The prophet Jeremiah was accustomed to denounce the sins of the Jewish
nation, by which these terrible calamities had been brought upon them,
with great courage, and with an eloquence solemn and sublime. He
declared that the miseries which the people suffered were the special
judgments of Heaven, and he proclaimed repeatedly and openly, and in
the most public places of the city, still heavier calamities which he
said were impending. The people were troubled and distressed at these
prophetic warnings, and some of them were deeply incensed against
Jeremiah for uttering them. Finally, on one occasion, he took his
stand in one of the public courts of the Temple, and, addressing the
concourse of priests and people that were there, he declared that,
unless the nation repented of their sins and turned to God, the who