The great interest of states & kingdoms. A sermon preached before the Honourable House…The great interest of states & kingdomes. A sermon preached before the Honorable House…

Darius Histaspis mentioned Ezra 4. ver. 24. permitted the Jews to go on in building it, as their poverty would suffer them; and after another interruption, Darius Nothus, ^*Ezra 6. did put Cyrus his Decree in force again, and allows the expense of the finishing it out of his own revenues, and inserts this in his revived Decree, that the Jews ⟨p. 24⟩might pray for the life of the King and of his children, ver. 10. They also had of the seed of the Jews great men at Court with them, as Daniel, Mordecai, Ezra, and Nehemiah, the two latter of whom were sent by Artaxerxes to build the City of Jerusalem; yea, & another of their Kings admitted one of that Nation (through the providence of God) to the royal bed: Ahasuerus married Esther, of the seed of the Jews, under whom, and under other of these Kings they had the greatest prosperity. Now as this favour to the Jews was the cause of the erecting that Monarchy at first, so surely of the continuance of it so long: Historians wonder that it should stand so long, it being so loose and dissolute a Court and State^* and having so many great shocks. I can attribute it to nothing but this, the eminent favour they showed to the Jews, the people of God. And I shall but cast in this Observation more about it. When was it that it came to be ruined and destroyed? but in the time of the latter Darius, then when Cyrus (who had been Gods Shepherd) his seed was wholly extinct?^* For though his seed by the Male issue continued not to a Grandchild, yet in the seed of Atossa, Cyrus daughter, wife to Darius Histaspis, the Kingdom was continued in his race. And to make the providence the more remarkable, whereas Darius had sons before by another wife, yet the interest of Atossa ^*for Cyrus sake, carried the succession to Xerxes her son, Cyrus Grandchild. But that last Darius, in & with whom that Empire was destroyed by Alexander, was of another race^*