It is with emotions of actual relief and gladness, that we leave to other works the details of that awful war, during the continuance of which 1,356,460 of our hapless countrymen perished, and 101,700 graced as prisoners the triumph of the Roman emperor and his son; and this calculation relates only to the period of the destruction of Jerusalem: the thousands and thousands of men, women, and children, who fell victims to aftermassacres, are not included.

As a History of the Women of Israel, we need not linger on details which our own historian Josephus, and yet more powerfully, in all the eloquence of modern writing, Milman, has brought so vividly before us, save to give one shuddering glance on what must have been the anguish, the tortures, of the female children of the Lord at that awful period. Every social tie—mother, daughter, sister, wife—must every hour have been subject to the agony of such bereavement as we can but faintly image now. We see, by both Isaiah and Ezekiel, that the sins of the women had added to the weight of national iniquity; but still all were not sinful, all were not rebellious. Countless thousands of those that fell were true to their God and His law. The service of the Temple, the daily offerings, were continued in the very midst of the most horrible internal dissensions and outward siege; and not only men armed for battle, but the aged and the feeble, the loveliest and the most unprotected female, the stripling youth and the tender child, sought the temple courts to worship, and often by the very altar found their deaths.