offered for the twelve tribes, as represented there at the time. With reference to these offerings, the late Bishop Tomline remarks, "it seems to indicate that some of all the tribes returned from captivity," (Elements of Christian Theology, vol. i. p. 214); but we may judge that it indicates more, and that it shows the ten tribes to have been all considered there present, forming one people.
Under the government of Nehemiah, who came to Jerusalem twelve years after Ezra, another assembly of the children of Israel is recorded, "with fasting, and with sack-clothes and earth upon them," but no specification of the sacrifices is given. The prayer, however, then delivered is given at length, and in it we find the following passage, "Now therefore our God, the great, the mighty, and the terrible, who keepest covenant and mercy, let not all the trouble seem little before Thee that hath come upon us, on our kings, on our princes, and on our priests, and on our prophets, and on our fathers, and on all thy people, since the time of the kings of Assyria unto this day." (ch. ix. ver. 32.) Here the mention of "our fathers and all thy people since the time of the kings of Assyria," cannot but be understood as referring to the ten tribes specially, rather than to those of Judah and Benjamin only, inasmuch as the latter suffered comparatively little from the Assyrians, who in fact, under Sennacherib, "returned with shame of face from before them."
If the above considerations fail of ensuring a conviction that the main body of the remnant of all the twelve tribes was understood to be gathered together at Jerusalem as one people, after the return from Babylon under Zerubbabel and Ezra, according to the prophecies above detailed, still it must be conceded that there is not any ground in all the sacred writings in our canon, for the supposition that any of them ever wandered away into unknown or remote and inaccessible regions. As far as the Old Testament teaches us their later history, our arguments may perhaps be pronounced only matters of inference; but how can the authority of the New Testament be explained away in its more direct declarations of the twelve tribes being then still existing? St. Paul, in his address to king Agrippa, whom he knew "to be expert in all customs and questions among the Jews," reminds him of the "promise unto which our twelve tribes instantly serving God day and night hope to come." (Acts, ch. xxvi. ver. 7.) And St. James, the brother of our Lord, addresses his general epistle "to the twelve tribes which are scattered abroad." Had the ten tribes really wandered away into unknown or
