[2 This is not the place to discuss the later Jewish fiction of a second or 'suffering' Messiah, 'the son of Joseph,' whose special mission it would be to bring back the ten tribes, and to subject them to Messiah, 'the son of David,' but who would perish in the war against Gog and Magog.] As regards the ten tribes there is this truth underlying the strange hypothesis, that, as their persistent apostacy from the God of Israel and His worship had cut them off from his people, so the fulfilment of the Divine promises to them in the latter days would imply, as it were, a second birth to make them once more Israel. Beyond this we are travelling chiefly into the region of conjecture. Modern investigations have pointed to the Nestorians, [3 Comp. the work of Dr. Asahel Grant on the Nestorians. His arguments have been

well summarised and expanded in an interesting note in Mr. Nutths Sketch of Samaritan History, pp. 2-4.] and latterly with almost convincing evidence (so far as such is possible) to the Afghans, as descended from the lost tribes. [4 I would here call special attention to a most interesting paper on the subject ('A New Afghan Question'), by Mr. H. W. Bellew, in the 'Journal of the United Service Institution of India,' for 1881, pp. 49-97.] Such mixture with, and lapse into, Gentile nationalities seems to have been before the minds of those Rabbis who ordered that, if at present a non-Jew weds a Jewess, such a union was to be respected, since the stranger might be a descendant of the ten tribes, [e Yebam 16 b.] Besides, there is reason to believe that part of them, at least, had coalesced with their brethren of the later exile; [5 Kidd. 69 b.] while we know that individuals who had settled in Palestine and, presumably, elsewhere, were able to trace descent from them.[l So Anna from the tribe of Aser, St. Luke ii. 36. Lutterbeck (Neutest. Lehrbegr. pp. 102, 103) argues that the ten tribes had become wholly undistinguishable from the other two. But his arguments are not convincing, and his opinion was certainly not that of those who lived in the time of Christ, or who reflected their ideas.] Still the great mass of the ten tribes was in the days of Christ, as in our own, lost to the Hebrew nation.