Opening…

Introduction

“Tarry thou till I come.” These words smote Salathiel like successive thunder-claps, tho uttered without the noise of speech. At once a doom and a prophecy—this Jesus, now climbing Calvary to His death, would come again, and the Jew could not perish from the earth until His coming!

Our author, Dr. Croly, has based his story on this old, pathetic legend. He believed that “The Wandering Jew”—typical of the Jewish race—is about to end his wearisome journeyings, as Christ is soon to come.[A]

That the Christ is coming, and that this coming is near at hand, is believed to-day by millions.

He is coming—but how?

Hear Him:

The kingdom of heaven is like unto leaven which a woman hid in three measures of meal, till the whole was leavened—the life and nature of the leaven reappearing in the quickened mass.

Again: The kingdom of heaven is like a grain of mustard-seed, the least of all seeds, so little that it is likely to be lost sight of in the count of forces; but it has life in it, and the power to grow and multiply, and it spreads its branches in every direction, each laden with seeds—the life and nature of the first grain reappearing in every one of the myriads of grains.

And again: The kingdom of heaven is as if a man should cast seed into the ground; and it should spring and grow up, he knoweth not how; first the blade, then the ear, after that the full corn in the ear. It is all natural: the earth does its work; the sun, the air, the water do their work, and the life and nature of the seed grow and multiply, reappearing in each grain in exact accordance with the nature of the seed. It is natural, but marvelous: the man “knoweth not how” it is done; but no one says, therefore, that that growth is supernatural, miraculous.

Whence the germ of life in the seed? Whence the germ of life in the kingdom of heaven? Who can tell? The wind bloweth where it listeth. Thou seest the effect of it, but canst not tell whence it cometh, nor whither it goeth. So is life wherever you find it, whether at the birth of a yeast-plant, of grains of mustard-seed and of corn, or of the natural and spiritual man. But the leaven, and the grains of mustard-seed and of corn, and the kingdoms of the natural and the spiritual man grow and reach perfection by natural processes—that is, in harmony with cause and effect—each process subject to critical and scientific analysis, if that analysis goes deep enough, and wide enough, and far enough.

Life reappears in new life. The leaven and the seed and the Christ-life all reincarnate themselves in more leaven, more seed, more of the Christ life. “In that day,” said Jesus, “ye shall know that I am in you.” Those who study the New Testament can not but be impressed with how often, and under how many forms, is there uttered the thought, Christ formed in you.

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This is the coming of Christ. Not that it is the only coming; many millions of earnest men and women believe that in the near future He will come in a way palpable to our physical senses as He came nineteen hundred years ago. “Ye men of Galilee, why stand ye gazing up into heaven? This same Jesus, which is taken up from you into heaven, shall so come in like manner as ye have seen Him go into heaven” (Acts i. 11).

Yet experiences on the physical plane are of little comparative value—comparative. Jesus bade the doubting Thomas to reach forth his hand and touch Him, that he might have tangible evidence: Now, Thomas, you believe because you have seen and felt; but blessed is he who believes on the higher plane of spiritual knowing. It is “an evil and adulterous generation” that seeketh after proofs of spiritual things on the sensuous level. Men saw and touched Jesus in Palestine who were millions of miles from Him. Were Christ to appear in visible form, it might easily be of no value whatever to come into physical contact with Him, to meet Him on Broadway or on the Strand; but who can measure the value of having Christ recreated in himself, as the leaven is recreated in the meal, and as a seed is recreated in new seed, so that men, when they see that man, and talk to him, and deal with him, shall feel that they have been with Christ?

One day I saw in a neighbor’s flower-bed a little plant, that, as it pushed its way above the ground, had brought with it the mother seed from which it grew. That was a literal reappearance of the planted seed; but it was not the reappearance, not the resurrection of the seed, for which a seed grows.

Christ came the first time into men’s vision by coming on the plane of their senses; He comes the second time into men’s vision by lifting them up to His plane of spiritual comprehension.

* * * * *

This coming of Christ involves a new birth, a new creation, a new kingdom. It means a new step in the evolution of man. As man has stepped from the mineral kingdom to the vegetable kingdom, and from the vegetable kingdom to the animal kingdom, and from the animal kingdom to the kingdom of the natural man,[B] so now he steps from the kingdom of the natural man to the kingdom of the spiritual man, every portion of this step a natural process subject to critical scientific analysis, if that analysis goes deep enough, wide enough, far enough. It is the continuance of evolution without a break, without a leap (“Nature never makes leaps,” says Leibnitz; the leaps are only seeming), lifting the race by a new birth through Christ the type-life up to the plane of spiritual being and knowing.

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Is the visible second coming of Jesus fancy or truth? Our author believed it true, and increasing multitudes to-day believe it true. Among these are many of the foremost Christian teachers of this generation, as that trio of great preachers recently dead, Charles H. Spurgeon, A. J. Gordon, and Dwight L. Moody; Newman Hall, Theodore Monod, Arthur T. Pierson, F. B. Meyer, J. H. Brookes, C. Cuthbert Hall. There is evidently near at hand an extraordinary revival of this belief.

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In the republication of this remarkable story about the Jew who is “to wander on earth until Christ comes again,” it has seemed to me that it would not be inappropriate to give, by way of Introduction, and in the Appendix, several lines of thought bearing upon the coming of Christ.

THE ESSENTIAL COMING OF CHRIST

I

This coming is in harmony with the laws of sequence and continuity.

In each preceding step in the evolution of man the unfolding of the physical basis of life was from below, but the life itself was from above, never from below. Scientists are now practically unanimous in saying that, “There is not a scintilla of evidence that the inorganic or mineral world has ever evolved a plant life.” “To the scientist,” says Darwin, “it is a hopeless inquiry as to how life originated.” “Life from an egg,” is still the latest dictum of science; that is, life only from life.[C] Each of the successive steps or kingdoms has had its type-life. The plant—that is, the physical basis of the plant life—came from the inorganic matter; the animal—that is, the physical basis of the animal life—came from the plant and through the plant from the mineral kingdom; the natural man—that is, the physical basis of the life of the natural man—came from the animal and the kingdoms below it; the spiritual man—that is, the physical basis of the life of the spiritual man—comes from the natural man and the kingdoms below him.

The development from kingdom to kingdom was a natural unfolding; yet the new creature of the next higher order always came through a new birth—a double birth: (1) the birth of the new type-life of the next higher kingdom into the evolutionary order of nature, through the hereditary chain; and (2) the birth of each individual into this type-life.

* * * * *

None of the previous transitions from a lower to a higher kingdom has taken place within historic times. The cradle at Bethlehem flashes a searchlight down the spiral stairway up which man has come from platform to platform, kingdom to kingdom. Here at last we see that the type-life of the kingdom of the spiritual man is born from above into the hereditary chain of evolution. Many times, and in many ways, He declares I am “from above.” He is born a natural man, and yet possesses the life of the kingdom next higher, and proceeds to lift the natural man by a new birth into the kingdom of the spiritual man. He is born the son of man and the son of God, bridging the chasm with His own being.

Again and again He says, “I am the life”; “I have come that ye may have life”; except ye partake of Me “ye have no life in you.” He calls Himself the “bread of life,” “the water of life.” This would all be meaningless were Christ talking about the life of the kingdom of the natural man which all now have and have had.

As the spiritual type-life lifts the natural man into the spiritual kingdom, so the type-life of the natural man lifted the animal into the kingdom of the natural man, and the animal type-life lifted the vegetable, and the vegetable type-life lifted the mineral.

There is no break in the golden thread that runs through all this series of development from the mineral world up to the new creature in Christ Jesus. There is nothing in this last development contrary to nature; it follows along exactly the same laws of natural unfoldment as did the other kingdoms. The law of continuity holds.[D] Christ is born really into the kingdom of the natural man, and the natural man is born into the spiritual kingdom, through Christ, the type-life. In this last stage of man’s ascent, as in the previous ones, nature makes “no leap.” Think not, says Christ, “that I have come to destroy the law; I have not come to destroy, but to fulfil”; I have come to carry on My work in harmony with the processes of the universe. What is law but the method that the immanent God, everywhere and forever, pursues in His work? True, segments of the circle He follows are easily out of the reach of our vision. Huxley tells us that he has no doubt that even on the physical plane, most important work is being done far beyond the reach of the most powerful microscope. He might have said, and kept easily within bounds, the most important work.

The crystal is matter plus the principle of crystallization; so the plant, the animal, the natural man—always the creature of the kingdom below with the plus sign, for a birth is an unfoldment and something more. And so, the Christ life takes the character, the soul, the spirit of the natural man, which have developed through the ages—takes them through a new birth, this time with man’s consent. “Marvel not that I say unto you, ye must be born again.” “Verily, verily, I say unto thee, except a man be born from above he can not see the kingdom of God” (John iii. 3). Ye are “babes in Christ,” “Ye are new creatures.” We become heirs “of God through Christ,” crying “Abba, Father.” “In love’s hour Eternal Love conceives in us the child of God” through the spiritual type-life Christ Jesus.

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Christ could not have been more explicit or more scientifically exact in declaring Himself the type-life of the spiritual man. “I am the door,” “the way,” “the life”; “no man can come to the Father but by Me.” “He that hath the Son hath life; and he that hath not the Son of God hath not life”; he may be a Cæsar leading armies against Pompey, or a Cicero declaiming his matchless orations against Cataline, and yet be dead.

In the inspired picture-history of creation, an Adam is the type-life of the kingdom of the natural man; in the New Testament, Christ is presented in every way as the type-life of the kingdom of the spiritual man. “The first man Adam was made a living soul; the last Adam was made a quickening spirit. Howbeit that was not first which is spiritual, but that which is natural; and afterward that which is spiritual” (1 Cor. xv. 45, 46).

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Here, also, the law of conformity to type is manifest. Each type-life is perfect, but those who are born through the type-life begin at the bottom; the “fall” is great from the type-life to the beginning of growth in the next higher kingdom. But from that onward the battle of evolution is to secure likeness to the type. “We all, with open face beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image from glory to glory” (2 Cor. iii. 18). We shall be “conformed to the image of His Son” (Rom. viii. 29). “As we have borne the image of the earthy, we shall also bear the image of the heavenly” (1 Cor. xv. 49). After the night is over we shall awake in His likeness.

Newton said that he made a splendid guess at the universal law of gravitation when he saw the apple fall. Why may it not be permissible for us to guess, from the law of conformity to type, that in every kingdom the new creature carries with it the pattern of its type-life, and that after this pattern, in the lower kingdoms, the accompanying cells strive to weave a nature corresponding with its kingdom, and in the kingdom of the spiritual man the Holy Spirit strives to weave the nature of the spiritual man?[E]

In the lower kingdoms it is a survival of the fightest, in the highest a survival of the fittest, the struggle for life for ourselves merging into a struggle for life for others. Even among men in the earlier days, to discover the greatest man, the measuring-string was placed around the muscle. That was the age of Hercules. Then the time came when the measuring-string was placed around the head. That was the age of Bacon and Shakespeare. But the time comes in the rapidly advancing future when the measuring-string will be placed around the heart, and he who measures most there will be most conformed to the Master, for he is greatest who most fully gives himself for others.

* * * * *

Evolution goes on, hereafter, in the inner and upper world, outside and beyond our vision, making many and many variations doubtless, as in the lower realms. In the Father’s spiritual house also are many mansions. We are stepping from the physiological to the psychological, from body and mind to spirit. As in all previous growth, the latest type-life is reappearing in His generation—in the “new creatures” of His kingdom.

II

The outward evolution—that of the physical—marvelous beyond thought, is comparatively insignificant. The chief evolution has been and is within. The scientist is unscientific who ignores the greater evolution and builds his explanatory system on the lesser—on the least. Psychology is also a science. Has nature one method for the development of the physical part of man’s being, and another for the development of the non-material and spiritual? Nature is not divided. What means the hereditary likeness, mental and spiritual—not less marked than the physical? These marks often skip many generations and then reappear again in full. They can not, therefore, be the result of education or imitation. Nor is it easy to believe that they were placed within us by a direct act of creation, as the old-fashioned theological professor taught that God mixed the fossils with the plastic stones at creation, somewhat as a cook mixes raisins and other fruits in the dough for her plum-pudding.

What means the gradual development in the brain of the cerebrum and cerebellum, the organs of the soul powers, enlarging from generation to generation? These are scarcely visible in the lowest animals. They become larger as we advance up the animal scale of intelligence, or psychic power; large in the ape, who came far along the same line that man came; four times as large in the lowest Zulu as in the ape, but far larger in the European and American civilized man—thus slowly made perfect through awful struggles and sufferings, painfully growing a million years or more. Is it not then reasonable to believe that there is a corresponding psychic or soul development from generation to generation in the unseen individuality, the ego, which uses the cerebrum and cerebellum as organs; that up the spiral stairway of evolution the whole man has come,—his personality, with its soul powers, and the physical organs of these powers in the brain, and the entire physical man?

To-day, in the unfolding embryo of every child, nature marvelously and clearly retells the history of the evolution of the physical nature of the human race from the one-celled moneron to the billion-celled man. For the embryo of the child is a historic map, done in flesh and blood, of the evolution of man, of the forms he has assumed, broadly speaking, as he climbed nature’s stairway.[F]

Is it hard to believe that our individuality has been born and reborn through the line of ancestry back to the type-lives, and through them back to the “beginning,” when God took of His own life to develop, through ages of conflict, personalities other than His own who would, of their own free will, choose goodness? Is it hard to believe that at every successive birth each parent has placed his stamp upon the individuality, but that the individuality has perdured being reborn again and again into successive higher kingdoms? Does it seem hard to believe that we should be born many times? Is it then harder to believe that we should be born after we have lived than that we should be born when we have not lived? The profoundest mystery is in the first birth, in which we all believe. And why should it be thought by us incredible that, with the mingling of the parental cells, the individuality exactly fitted should be reborn in the line of heredity, receiving the parental stamp, being attracted by the law which answers to that law which guides the atom unerringly to its place in the crystal—that same law wonderfully exalted? Whatever and wherever character is, it must be obedient to the law that draws it, for the law of attraction is even more irresistible in the inner world than is the law of gravitation in the outer world. Every man as he comes to his birth comes to his own place; in a profound sense he chooses his parents and his surroundings. As he was, he is, plus his birth-gain and his growth through consent and volition; his past leads him.

And in this last transition each man is conscious that his individuality continues, altho he passes from one kingdom into the next. The dictum of science is “no leap, no break”—continuity. Then it is reasonable to believe that the individuality will continue through succeeding future changes, as it has continued these millions of years through the successive past changes. It would require much credulity to believe that nature has travailed in pain these untold ages to develop a personality that would of its own free will choose goodness, only to destroy that personality as soon as made. John Fiske has well said:[G] “The materialistic assumption that the life of the soul ends with the life of the body, is perhaps the most colossal instance of assumption that is known in the history of philosophy.”

That was a provincial notion about the universe which was held before Copernicus’s time—the belief that the sun, planets, stars, all revolved around the earth. Copernicus was called the destroyer of faith and bitterly denounced. His idea made the earth but a speck, and the Milky Way—billions of miles long—the mere yard-stick of the universe. All this has immensely enlarged faith—did not destroy it. Darwin, too, was called the destroyer of faith; but now we begin to see that evolution, in giving man countless eons of growth, instead of keeping him a creature of yesterday, bounded by the cradle and grave, has immensely enlarged faith, and beyond thought has added to the dignity of man.

III

At each succeeding birth the individuality, to thrive, must be in harmony with its changed surroundings, and the cells that swarm in every organized body struggle to bring this to pass. It is the business of the cell to obey the pushings of the governing force in the organization to which it belongs. The plant needs water, minerals, air, sunshine. Its attendant cells hear the cry of their master and build roots into the ground and branches into the air, and weave leaves into lungs and laboratories. Note a vine in some cave—how it works its way toward the hole through which sunshine is streaming, and how it causes some roots to build out toward a vein of water; others toward a skeleton many feet away and along the bones of that skeleton—hungering and thirsting for minerals, water, light, heat. Hungering and thirsting—asking, knocking—the plant receives. Seek and ye shall find; strive and it shall be yours. This is the law in the plant life, the law in the animal life, in the life of the natural man, in the life of the spiritual man.

In a deep sense, as a man thinketh so he is. The universe of cells within each man calls him “master.” Ye are gods; kings upon thrones; your slightest wish is heard; your earnest, persistent desire compels obedience. Answer to prayer is a growth, a building up or down to what you wish. Wishing is asking. Ask what you will, and from that instant receiving, you receive.

Christ can never fully come into a man until the man has grown up to the level of spiritual things. It is a sensuous generation that seeks to be satisfied with consolation through the physical senses.

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All of our faculties carry their own demonstrations of truth up to the level of their development. To the pure and loving, purity and love need no witnesses. Every man has had placed in his hand a latch-key to the beauty and wisdom—to all of the excellences of the universe; but there is only one way of using that latch-key effectively. We must grow to a level with the latch. I must have an eye fitted for the landscape, and must have a poetic soul before the landscape can read its poetry to me. I may believe that Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony is music because a master of music has told me so; that is belief based on authority; or, I may measure the waves of sound and scientifically demonstrate that it is music; but such evidences are beggarly, and praise based on them would drive a composer mad. But let me hunger and thirst after music; seek, pray for musical sight and soul until I develop up to the level of Beethoven’s Symphony; then as quickly as I hear it I exclaim: “That is music!” Do you ask: “Who told you?” I answer: “No one; I know it!” My latch-key enters, for I am on a level with the latch. I asked, I sought, I knocked, until I grew up into the musical world. I must grow up to God before I can know Him; I must grow up to Christ before I can see Him. The pure in heart shall see and hear spiritual things. I must be on God’s level before even the lowly flower can tell me the thought that was in His mind when He created it.

Seek is the law of growth in all kingdoms; and it is the law of development and of the adjustment of the feeders through which each kingdom asserts itself to its creatures and gives them their food and consolation. Who has not smiled many times at the serio-humorous reflection of Robert Louis Stevenson on hearing of the death of Matthew Arnold: “So, Arnold is dead! I am sorry; he won’t like God.” There is a profoundly solemn truth under this witticism.

There is health for the plant in sun-rays; the plant had the need of light, and its cells heard the cry and groped toward the light. That capacity for light and that groping of the cells proved the existence of the sun. The conscious feeling after God among people everywhere proves the existence of God and of the spiritual world.

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The new-born child must adjust its lungs to the atmosphere into which it comes or it must die. It hereafter must eat and drink with its mouth, breathe with its lungs; it must have new feeders. The bird, as it chips its way out of the egg, adjusts itself to its new surroundings. It is a hard trial often for a child to be weaned, yet it is love that does it. It is done to give it more abundant life, not less.

This is the meaning of self-denial, fasting, repentance, suffering—the weaning of the feeders from the old to the new environment—the feeders that give food and consolation. We enter into the kingdom of the spiritual man as the babe enters into the kingdom of the natural man. Every new creature grows up from the grave of the old. Up the stairs of holy patience we climb the heights of the inner kingdom. Our will henceforth is to yield our will, but the sensuous man contests every inch with the spiritual. The perishing of the old man day by day is painful, and so is the renewal of the inner, for birth also is painful. We learn to love love, hate hate, and fear only fear; but every move upward has in it birth-pangs. We are in the soul’s gymnasium—on its battle-field. The creature was made subject to vanity for a cause.[H] Says Ruskin: “I do not wonder often at what men suffer, but I wonder at what they lose.”

How strange it is to look into a human face, and to look into human eyes, and to think that a son of the living God is veiled there—to think of the greatness of that creature, for the accomplishment of which all creation on earth has been in travail for these untold ages!

Often not anything extraordinary impresses us as we see the Christ-nature in a comrade; but wait; we see this kingdom of the soul only in its germ. The bulb of the tiger-lily is not over-pretty, but to the eyes that see the possibilities of the tiger-lily that bulb is a poem. The step from the highest morality of the natural man to the lowest round in the kingdom of the spiritual man is a stupendous one. John the Baptist was the greatest of those born of women; but the least in the new kingdom of the spiritual man is greater than he.

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Do not say that you can not be born again. You can and must. It is natural to step into this kingdom, as natural as growth is. The natural response of the heart is Christian, says Tertullian. Our experience supports and justifies this necessity.

The great original sculptors of Greece, whom all the world now studies, stayed at home to study as Emerson would say, and did not bother much with going to Egypt or Mesopotamia. God is a rewarder of those that diligently seek Him, not by imitation, not outwardly, not with the noise of words that men may hear, but in the closet, in the silence of the inner chamber of the soul. Every man must find himself, and be himself; the new birth and growth in Christ make perfect each man’s individuality. But there must be another conception of God than that against which the Buddhists warn us, that He is a “cow to be milked.”

God hid Himself behind the world of our physical senses that we, free of all compulsion, might develop the spiritual man. When that is developed, God can safely reveal His infinite power and wisdom and goodness. Who could make free choice in the conscious presence of an infinite One?

Evolution is a sword that cuts both ways. It chooses, it condemns. The fittest survive. There are many called, but few chosen. The most pathetic and pitiful thing in all the world is to see the multitudes striving to get out of the kingdom of the natural man what is not in it.

Punishment comes—it, too, is natural; and it is largely within. Degeneracy, through persistent wrong-choosing, is the law of nature—fixed, inevitable. If a man will not choose to ascend, he loses his power to choose.

IV

The scientist is short-sighted and narrow-sighted who walls science in at the boundary of his senses—a mole accounting for phenomena, and leaving out the eye; a Laura Bridgeman accounting for whatever came into her life by her two or three physical senses.

Foolish wise men, not to know that the surest of all proofs is to be looked for in inner experience; that the most real things in the world are made clear not by physical proof, but by life! Darwin reached the point where poetry and music were little to him; yet the world of music and of beauty are more certain than is Mont Blanc or Mount Washington; but there is only one way to know them, and that is to grow the faculties of music and beauty. To the Roman soldiers who may have heard it, how unsubstantial was the Sermon on the Mount; yet its truths of the brotherhood of man, of the fatherhood of God, of meekness, of loving, of justice, of faith in the inner things, outlasted the Roman armies, saw the empire ground to dust, and their speaker, one thousand nine hundred years afterward, by far the most potent personality that ever lived. The mother’s love will outpull gravity, and yet what scientist has chemically analyzed it, or what dissecting-knife has revealed its whereabouts? There are brute women to whom this love is “unthinkable,” “unknowable,” but let them grow the mother-heart, and then they can think it, know it.

Foolish wise men, ye can discern the shadow of things; look up and behold the substance! Rochefort said to Gambetta: “Deafness is not politics.” When will scientists learn that true science must have eyes and ears open to all experience within as well as without.

Once scientists among moles held a congress, and learnedly resolved that they would believe in nothing that could not be submitted for proof to their four senses. One learned mole with bated breath said: “There must be something above our four senses. I one day broke through the crust of the earth and felt strange sensations, and had a glimmering in the rudiments called eyes by our older philosophers.” “Nonsense!” said a grayhead among them. “Let us have no transcendentalism; everything that is must be explained by sound, or by touch, or by smell, or by the taste. All this talk of a great central sun with light, making landscapes and from which all things come, we have no way of proving; and hence to believe it, or to admit it as an element in accounting for things, is unscientific. The scientific method, let us never forget, is to account for all things by the elements which come within the range of our four senses and the reasoning based upon these perceptions.”

So it happens that to this day in the cosmic science accepted among moles the sun has nothing to do with the growth of plants, the formation of coal-beds, and the rotation of the seasons.

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How imperfect that history that would content itself with writing a biography of the acorn, and never take into account the oak that comes from the acorn and for which the acorn exists! The oak reveals the acorn; without the oak the acorn is not explicable. How can any one understand the evolution of man and not consider the vastly greater segment of his nature, which is the non-material and spiritual? The scientist believes in the indestructibility of matter. The step is a short one to the belief in the indestructibility of spirit. He believes in substance infinitely extended; the step is not a long one to belief in the personality that is infinitely extended. He believes that in all matter is a “thinking substance.” Is it harder to believe that over and in all things is a thinking spirit?[I] The scientist endows matter with the powers it needs to do all these things, and then says it does all these things.

Yet science, when it comes to know, when it comes to take in all the facts, to go deep enough, and wide enough, and far enough, will be the arbiter. Creed, dogma, authority, must give way to it. Magellan said: “The Church declares the world is flat, but I have seen its shadow on the moon, and I had rather believe a shadow than the Church.” That is true only when the Church makes provision for but a part of the truth, and when science is true to itself. The assumptions of science and the assumptions of the Church will have to be corrected by experience, the experience of the whole man.

V

Christ is not an idealism, but a living, throbbing, visible, audible Being—the real Christ; the body in Galilee was the shadow, the outward shell that could be crushed. The One now coming is the Mighty One who is out of the reach of stones and spears, the type-life and potent King of the kingdom of the spiritual man. And he who hath Him also hath power. “Ye shall receive power” (Acts i. 8). “Stephen, full of faith and power” (Acts vi. 8). “The kingdom of God is not in word, but in power” (1 Cor. iv. 20). Says Paul of those at Corinth who found fault with him: I will not know their speech, but their power (1 Cor. iv. 19). He who has not power is not of the kingdom of the spiritual man, for “whatsoever is born of God overcometh the world.” This Christ is a present force in the world, producing changes, quickening and directing energies, and must be reckoned with. Christian civilization also proves itself by its power.

* * * * *

But to see Him this time we must have eyes and ears fitted to recognize the manifestations of the inner kingdom—the kingdom of all first causes and real forces. He is not coming with the noise of trumpets, nor with whirlwinds, nor with earthquakes; but with the silence of the growth of the mustard-seed, of the leaven, of the grain of corn reaching up to the blade and full corn in the ear.

There can be nothing more manifest to-day to the optic nerve of the spiritual man than is this coming. The lightning flashing from the east to the west is not nearly so manifest.

Every event is alive with His appearing. His presence is the most evident thing in the world, the very splendor of the light hides Him. “Lo, I am with you alway!” is now known by millions to be a vital, stupendous fact. He is nearer to such a heart than the mother to the babe.

This coming is in harmony with recognizable law; belief in it is logic, is common sense. It would be extraordinary, miraculous, if He did not now come. When it is our will to do His will, we become the reincarnation of Christ, for “Christ is formed in us.” When the dominating ones in a community, in a church, in a nation, in the world, are of this sort, you see Christ reincarnated in all these. Moses, David, John, Plato, Augustine, Savonarola, Bunyan, were great ideal dreamers, but they were also geniuses of common sense. These men were primarily men of faith and great good sense, not of credulity. They had the power and common sense to know that there were voices within, and to withdraw their attention from the voices without and give the real world a chance to be heard. They knew that the universe would fall into chaos and that stars would be ground to dust if these worlds were disobedient to law. They knew that there was an inner universe, and that there were inner laws infinitely more important. They knew it to be the A B C of common sense to conform to these inner laws. Christ was and is the embodiment of common sense; and so His followers become as they grow into the new creatures of the kingdom of the spiritual man.

* * * * *

There are voices within distinct and clear to those who have ears to hear; clearer than silver bells ringing up in air at midnight. One who has grown this spiritual nature ceases to talk about the inward world being silent or hid—yet there are clouds and doubts. These things must needs be—these assailed Christ to the last. And if angels do not also follow, ministering to us, it is because we have not reached the plane of spiritual seeing. Help is always near, and it should not be necessary for a prophet’s hand to touch our eyes to enable us to see the mountains covered with heavenly allies, or to enable us to know the signs of the times. There is no room for fear. Bismarck spoke with the accents of a prophet when he said: “Germany fears nothing but God.” The cry is gone out to the ends of the earth: “Great is the soul of man; make way, make way!”

These signs of a mighty change are deepening and multiplying as we swing into the new century. The Jewish people were to be trodden underfoot until the inner kingdom of love should be established; that barbarism of hate is now rapidly dying.

Were we wise enough, events all around us would be to us prophecies of the coming of the triumphant God, of the kingdom of the spiritual man.

Watch! By watching we develop the ability to discern things beyond the senses.

Above every cloud the light is now breaking; the earth is rolling into the dawn of a marvelous day.

* * * * *

The yoke of ecclesiasticism is giving way to the yoke of Christ. Creed is the memory of the Church. The real yoke of Christ is not a burden; it has wings. He is sweetness and light. Let criticism have its way. The testing-time has come, give it welcome. A man must now stand a vital Christian, or a hypocrite, or an open enemy—that will be a great gain. Creeds to-day are trying to understand one another. Christianity is being reduced to its least common denominator, a living Christ. The church is finding it harder and harder to think of itself as a great-great-grandchild. It is coming to believe in its present experiences, and to write its own creeds for to-day, and not for to-morrow. Since God is, the Church and the world will not necessarily fall to pieces if they let go their props and scaffoldings. If there be no God, creeds and forms and ceremonies are necessities. A living God is efficient and sufficient.

* * * * *

There is no more unfailing sign of the nearness of Christ than the growth of loving beyond the provincialism of the family, the clan, the class, the nation. “Ye are brethren.” All things in common, was not an impracticable dream, but a fundamental law of the kingdom of the spiritual Man. We must organize sooner or later on that basis. We are speeding onward toward that sun. We feel its growing heat. If we do not love our brethren whom we have seen, how can we love God whom we have not seen? What do ye mean by the communion of saints, ye who pray it Sunday by Sunday? Spell it out. Brotherhood is not a fiction of the imagination. Communion is not a Pentecostal fantasy. A living Christ is to-day more than ever on earth an aggressively unifying force. Immensely human was Christ’s message to man—Brotherhood and Fatherhood, and by those tokens we recognize His present footsteps.

Judge these things as you would the motions of the hands of the clock. Look back a half dozen centuries and make comparisons. War is recognized more and more as a barbarism, and its end is over yonder hill. The court of nations to settle wrongs is looming above the horizon. The nation that loves its fellow nations is also born of God.

* * * * *

The humanities are in order. Over one hundred and ten million dollars were contributed in the United States for educational and other charities within the last two years.[J] Nearly two million dollars were given to suffering Galveston; and Carnegie’s immense benefactions are but one of the many indications of the full dawning of the day of living for others.

A single individual the other day, a member of an unpopular race, is wronged in France, and all the world is aroused, and flashes thunderbolts of wrath under oceans and across continents until there is a beginning to right the wrong. Mankind is rapidly becoming

“… One in spirit, and in instinct bears along Around the earth’s electric circle the swift flash of right and wrong.”

The marvelous sowing about the Sea of Galilee is reaching its ripening. The leaven is leavening the whole lump. The mustard-seed reappears in hundreds and hundreds of millions of seed. Cuba is helped to freedom for its own sake; the Russian Czar—he at least—in sincerity says: “War should end.” In business it is ceasing to be a maxim that the benefit of the one is ever opposed to the benefit of the many. We are learning that the Golden Rule and the law of self-preservation run parallel. Applied to commercialism, the Golden Rule is so to make money as to give a benefit also to him from whom you make it; and that, too, is common sense. The children of the inner kingdom never crowd: the more, the more room.

In all these things we see just the beginnings of the results of His coming: all men of one family, God the Father, and Christ the eldest Brother; the sacredness of truth, of the soul, of all life; the reality of the inner world.

* * * * *

Man has climbed up in countless ages by the slow processes of evolution to where he can use the powers of nature through his brain—becoming a coworker with God in guiding the processes of evolution. Now, being reborn into the inner kingdom, he starts on a new and infinitely higher destiny. Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, the things that are laid up for those thus born.

With a boundless universe within and without, and an infinite God, and with an eternity to live and work in, many, many things can take place, and it is God’s good pleasure that they shall never take place to our hurt. The creature of the kingdom of the spiritual man is injury-proof.

And the command is: “Be ye perfect as your Father is perfect”; ever approaching Him in countless ages and reaching Him at the end of eternity, had eternity an end; but since it has no end, in whatever distant period and however great the distance between us, God is still the Infinite One and we the finite ones.

Ah, how men err! The Roman Emperor, after his awful massacre of Christians, set up a column in memory of the extinction of the last Christian. But the Roman empire is in dust, and now the world is rapidly becoming wholly Christian; and were that Emperor alive, he, quite likely, would applaud the result. God’s steppings are from star to star. Who knoweth His counsel?

We look back over the conflict of the ages of evolution; we now see, in the changing of the dunghill into shrubs and roses and into food, the prophecy of all, and we marvel at our blindness in not knowing that the most manifest thing in all the world, and at all times, was God the Father working for good, whom again and again we have compelled to cry out in pain (for God can suffer pain): The reproaches of men have broken my heart. Looking backward, we begin to see the good in everything, that there has not been a fall of a sparrow without accompanying provision for the sparrow, and we grow enthusiastic and shout with the martyr of old: “Glory be to God for everything that happens!” Hand-in-hand we walk with the great Father over the ages of history, riding victorious over mountain-tops.

We see, modifying the words of John Fiske, that in the roaring loom of time, out of the endless web of events, strand by strand, was woven more and more clearly the living garment of God.

* * * * *

When Christ had passed beyond the grave, He said “Mary,” and Mary said “Master”; they spake, they understood, tho death and the grave intervened. The world of the physical senses has no barrier that hinders knowing in the kingdom of the spiritual man.

* * * * *

“The Wandering Jew” is near the end of his wanderings.

As reasoned the Apostle:[K] If the Gentiles were cut out of the olive-tree which is wild by nature, and were grafted contrary to nature into a good olive-tree, how much more shall the Jews, which be the natural branches, be grafted into their own olive-tree? For God is able to graft them in again. For I would not, brethren, that you should be ignorant of this mystery, lest ye should be wise in your own conceits: that blindness in part has happened to Israel, until the fulness of the Gentiles be come in. AND SO ALL ISRAEL SHALL BE SAVED.

I. K. F.

NEW YORK, April 15, 1901.

FOOTNOTES

[A] It has been believed by many from the early ages of the Christian era that among the signs of Christ’s coming would be the recognition of Him by the Jews, as “one sent of the Father,” and that they would then be restored to the Father’s favor; that this recognition would be accompanied by a recolonization of the Jews in Palestine; that from this vantage-ground, they, as a nation among nations—the “inherent genius of the Jews for things religious” again reasserting itself—would lead the nations of earth in final triumph into the kingdom of the spiritual man.

Prof. R. Gottheil, of Columbia University, and president of the Federation of American Zionists, said, before the Zionist Congress, in the summer of 1900, in London: “It is time the nations understood our motives. Our purpose is gradually to colonize Palestine. We political Zionists desire a charter from the Sultan authorizing us to settle in our Holy Land, and we ask the powers to approve and protect this charter.”

[B] This is simply a name: both kingdoms, that of the natural man and that of the spiritual man, are in harmony with the laws of sequence.

[C] “There is not a shadow of trustworthy direct evidence that abiogenesis [spontaneous generation] does take place or has taken place within the period during which the existence of life on the globe is recorded.”—Huxley, under “Biology,” Encyclopedia Britannica, vol. iii., page 689. “These are the generations of every plant of the field before it was in the earth.”—Gen. ii. 4, 5.

“That it [human consciousness] can not possibly be the product of any cunning arrangement of material particles is demonstrated beyond peradventure by what we now know of the correlation of physical forces.”—Fiske, “The Destiny of Man,” page 42. “By no possibility can thought and feeling be in any sense the products of matter.”—Idem., page 109.

[D] Alfred Russel Wallace, who was joint discoverer with Darwin of evolution, and is its greatest living exponent, in his book “Darwinism,” page 474, shows the fallacy as to new causes involving any breach of continuity—these new causes embracing vegetable life, animal life, and the higher powers of man. He says, page 476: “Still more surely can we refer to it [the spiritual world] those progressive manifestations of life in the vegetable, the animal, and man.” Also, in “Natural Selection,” page 185: “The higher powers in man are surest proof that there are other and higher existences than ourselves, from whom these qualities may have been derived, and toward whom we may be ever tending.”

[E] After watching the process hour by hour (in the semi-fluid globule of protoplasm of the embryo), one is almost involuntarily possessed by the notion that some more subtle aid to vision than an achromatic would show the hidden artist, with his plan before him, striving with skilful manipulation to perfect his work.—Huxley, “Lay Sermons,” page 261.

[F] Romanes, in “Darwin and After Darwin,” chapter iv., says that the embryo is a résumé or recapitulation of the successive phases through which the being has been developed, with explainable omissions. On page 102 he tells of the young salamander that is so complete in its gills shortly before birth that if it is removed from the womb and placed in water it will be able to live, breathing like a fish through its gills.

[G] “The Destiny of Man,” page 110.

[H] “It is an inevitable deduction from the hypothesis of evolution that races of sentient creatures could have come into existence under no other conditions [than those of pains and pleasures].”—“Data of Ethics,” Herbert Spencer, section 33.

[I] “We adhere firmly to the pure, unequivocal monism of Spinoza: Matter, or infinitely extended substance, and spirit (or energy), or sensitive and thinking substance, are the two fundamental attributes or principal properties of the all-embracing divine essence of the world, the universal substance.”—“The Riddle of the Universe,” Ernst Haeckel, p. 21.

[J] From advance sheets of “Appleton’s Annual Cyclopædia” for 1901.

[K] Rom. xi.

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Author’S Preface

There has appeared from time to time in Europe, during the past thousand years, a mysterious individual—a sojourner in all lands, yet a citizen of none; professing the profoundest secrets of opulence, yet generally living in a state of poverty; astonishing every one by the vigor of his recollections, and the evidence of his intercourse with the eminent characters and events of every age, yet connected with none—without lineage, possession, or pursuit on earth—a wanderer and unhappy!

A number of histories have been written about him; some purely fictitious, others founded on ill-understood records. Germany, the land of mysticism, has toiled the most in this idle perversion of truth. Yet those narratives have been in general but a few pages, feebly founded on the fatal sentence of his punishment for an indignity offered to the Author of the Christian faith.

That exile lives! that most afflicted of the people of affliction yet walks this earth, bearing the sorrows of eighteen centuries on his brow—withering in soul for the guilt of an hour of madness. He has long borne the scoff of man in silence; he has heard his princely rank degraded to that of a menial, and heard without a murmur; he has heard his unhappy offense charged to deliberate malice, when it was but the misfortune of a zeal inflamed by the passions of his people; and he has bowed to the calumny as a portion of his punishment. But the time for this forbearance is no more. He feels himself at last wearing away; and feels, with a sensation like that of returning to the common fates of mankind, a desire to stand clear with his fellow men. In their presence he will never move again; to their justice, or their mercy, he will never again appeal. The wound of his soul rests, never again to be disclosed, until that day when all beings shall be summoned and all secrets be known.

In his final retreat he has collected these memorials. He has concealed nothing; he has dissembled nothing; the picture of his hopes and fears, his weaknesses and his sorrows, is stamped here with sacred sincerity.

Other narratives may be more specious or eloquent, but this narrative has the supreme merit of reality. It may be doubted; it may even be denied. But this he must endure. He has been long trained to the severity of the world!

THE AUTHOR.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

PAGE

INTRODUCTORY LETTER FROM GENERAL LEWIS WALLACE, v

INTRODUCTION, ix

AUTHOR’S PREFACE, xxxi

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I. CHAPTER

I.—Salathiel Doomed to Immortality, 3

II.—An Awakening and a Summons, 10

III.—Salathiel’s Resolution in the Temple, 15

IV.—Salathiel Journeys Far from Jerusalem, 22

V.—Eleazar Learns of Salathiel’s Renunciation, 28

VI.—Salathiel and His People, 35

VII.—The Loss of a Life, 41

VIII.—Salathiel Confronts the Shade of Antiochus, 47

IX.—The Romans Driven from the Holy City, 56

X.—The Fall of Onias, 62

XI.—The Strength of Judea, 69

XII.—The Prince of Naphtali Confronts Desolation, 78

XIII.—The Wandering of a Mind Diseased, 84

XIV.—The Fury of a Tempest, 92

XV.—The Appeal of Miriam, 101

XVI.—The Heart of Salome, 112

XVII.—A Declaration of Love, 121

XVIII.—Salathiel Faces a Roman, 132

XIX.—On Board a Trireme, 138

XX.—The Burning of Rome, 145

XXI.—The Death of a Martyr, 157

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Book II

XXII.—The Year of Jubilee, 173

XXIII.—Preparing for an Attack, 181

XXIV.—The Departure of Constantius, 189

XXV.—Salathiel in Strange Company, 197

XXVI.—In the Lions’ Lair, 205

XXVII.—The Escape of Salathiel the Magician, 215

XXVIII.—The Power of a Beggar, 221

XXIX.—Prisoners in a Labyrinth, 232

XXX.—The Revenge of a Victor, 242

XXXI.—The Difficulties of a Leader, 251

XXXII.—“Never Shalt Thou Enter Jerusalem,” 258

XXXIII.—Jubal’s Warning, 265

XXXIV.—The Pursuit of an Enemy, 272

XXXV.—The Lapse of Years, 276

XXXVI.—Death in a Cavern, 284

XXXVII.—A Pirate Band, 291

XXXVIII.—Salathiel and the Pirate Captain, 300

XXXIX.—A Sea Fight, 310

XL.—A Burning Trireme, 317

XLI.—The Granddaughter of Ananus, 323

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Book III

XLII.—Naomi’s Story, 333

XLIII.—Before Masada, 339

XLIV.—Among Roman Soldiers, 346

XLV.—The Reign of the Sword, 353

XLVI.—A Cry of Wo, 358

XLVII.—The Struggle for Supremacy, 362

XLVIII.—The Sting of a Story, 372

XLIX.—Salathiel’s Strange Quarters, 377

L.—After the Struggle, 383

LI.—A Man of Mystery, 389

LII.—The Prophecy of Evil, 396

LIII.—A Fatal Sign, 401

LIV.—Concerning Septimius, 411

LV.—Salathiel a Prisoner, 417

LVI.—A Narrow Escape, 425

LVII.—Onias, the Enemy of Salathiel, 435

LVIII.—Eleazar the Convert, 445

LIX.—The Clemency of Titus, 455

LX.—The Treatment of a Prisoner, 466

LXI.—A Steward’s Narrative, 474

LXII.—A Prisoner in the Tower, 487

LXIII.—A Minstrel’s Power of Speech, 496

LXIV.—The Destruction of Jerusalem, 512

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Appendix

Annotations, 537

Jesus of Nazareth from the Present Jewish Point of View—Letters from over Thirty Representative Jewish Scholars, 551

Other Testimony to Jesus, 570

The Second Coming of Christ—A Succinct History, by D. S. Gregory, D.D., LL.D., 574

Reasons for the Belief that Christ may Come Within the Next Twenty Years, by Arthur T. Pierson, D.D., 582

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

PAGE

“Tarry thou till I come!” Frontispiece

“All in the Temple was confusion,” 20

“The archer dropped dead, with the arrow still on his bow,” 64

“‘Read the Scriptures. I have prayed for you. Read—’” 104

“‘Let your guard come,’ cried I,” 136

“I heard the gnashing of his white fangs above me,” 168

“The lions, made more furious by wounds, sprang upon the powerful horses,” 208

“I gave the word—fell upon the guard at the gate, and cast it open!” 240

“‘Now for glory!’ they cried,” 268

“The solitary voyager of the burning trireme,” 318

“I had rescued Constantius!” 356

“The Roman rushed at him with his drawn falchion,” 396

“‘Esther is gone!’ was her answer,” 424

“‘Now, my beloved brothers, beloved in the Lord, go forth,’ said Eleazar,” 452

“Titus rode at the head of his stately company, himself the most stately of them all,” 488

“Judea must fall,” 508

“I heard the shouts of the conquerors, and the fall of the pillars of the Temple,” 532

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Book I

TARRY THOU TILL I COME

The superior numbers appearing throughout the text refer to “Explanatory Notes” in the first pages of the Appendix.

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Chapter I

Salathiel Doomed to Immortality

[Sidenote: Salathiel Feels Remorse]

“Tarry thou till I come.”[1] The words shot through me—I felt them like an arrow in my heart—my brain whirled—my eyes grew dim. The troops, the priests, the populace, the world, passed away from before my senses like phantoms.

But my mind had a horrible clearness. As if the veil that separates the visible and invisible worlds had been rent in sunder, I saw shapes and signs for which mortal language has no name. The whole expanse of the future spread under my mental gaze. A preternatural light, a new power of mind, seemed to have been poured into my being; I saw at once the full guilt of my crime—the fierce folly—the mad ingratitude—the desperate profanation. I lived over again in frightful distinctness every act and instant of the night of my unspeakable sacrilege. I saw, as if written with a sunbeam, the countless injuries that in the rage of bigotry I had accumulated upon the victim; the bitter mockeries that I had devised; the cruel tauntings that my lips had taught the rabble; the pitiless malignity that had forbidden them to discover a trace of virtue where all virtue was. The blows of the scourge still sounded in my ears. Every drop of the innocent blood rose up in judgment against me.

[Sidenote: Salathiel’s Former Triumph]

Accursed be the night in which I fell before the tempter! Blotted out from time and eternity be the hour in which I took part with the torturers! Every fiber of my frame quivers, every drop of my blood curdles, as I still hear the echo of the anathema, that on the night of wo sprang first from my lips, “HIS BLOOD BE UPON US, AND UPON OUR CHILDREN!”

I had headed the multitude; where others shrank, I urged; where others pitied, I reviled; I scoffed at the feeble malice of the priesthood; I scoffed at the tardy cruelty of the Roman; I swept away by menace and by scorn the human reluctance of the few who dreaded to dip their hands in blood. Thinking to do God service, and substituting my passions for my God, I threw firebrands on the hearts of a rash, jealous, and bigoted people—I triumphed!

In a deed which ought to have covered earth with lamentation, which was to make angels weep, which might have shaken the universe into dust, I triumphed! The decree was passed; but my frenzy was not so to be satiated. I loathed the light while the victim lived. Under the charge of “treason to Cæsar,” I demanded instant execution of the sentence.—“Not a day of life must be given,” I exclaimed, “not an hour;—death, on the instant; death!” My clamor was echoed by the roar of millions.

But in the moment of my exultation I was stricken. He who had refused an hour of life to the victim was, in terrible retribution, condemned to know the misery of life interminable. I heard through all the voices of Jerusalem—I should have heard through all the thunders of heaven—the calm, low voice, “Tarry thou till I come!”

I felt my fate at once! I sprang away through the shouting hosts as if the avenging angel waved his sword above my head. Wild songs, furious execrations, the uproar of myriads stirred to the heights of passion, filled the air; still, through all, I heard the pursuing sentence, “Tarry thou till I come,” and felt it to be the sentence of incurable agony! I was never to know the shelter of the grave!

[Sidenote: A Ceaseless Wanderer]

Immortality on Earth!—The compulsion of perpetual existence in a world made for change; to feel thousands of years bowing down my wretched head; alienated from all the hopes, enjoyments, and pursuits of man, to bear the heaviness of that existence which palls even with all the stimulants of the most vivid career of man; life passionless, exhausted, melancholy, old. I was to be a wild beast; and a wild beast condemned to pace the same eternal cage! A criminal bound to the floor of his dungeon forever! I would rather have been blown about on the storms of every region of the universe.

Immortality on Earth!—I was still in the vigor of life; but must it be always so? Must not pain, feebleness, the loss of mind, the sad decay of all the resources of the human being, be the natural result of time? Might I not sink into the perpetual sick-bed, hopeless decrepitude, pain without cure or relaxation, the extremities of famine, of disease, of madness?—yet this was to be borne for ages of ages!

Immortality on Earth!—Separation from all that cheers and ennobles life. I was to survive my country; to see the soil dear to my heart violated by the feet of barbarians yet unborn, her sacred monuments, her trophies, her tombs, a scoff and a spoil. Without a resting-spot for the soles of my feet, I was to witness the slave, the man of blood, the savage of the desert, the furious infidel, rioting in my inheritance, digging up the bones of my fathers, trampling on the holy ruins of Jerusalem!

Immortality on Earth!—I was to feel the still keener misery of surviving all whom I loved; wife, child, friend, even to the last being with whom my heart could imagine a human bond; all that bore a drop of my blood in their veins were to perish in my sight, and I was to stand on the verge of the perpetual grave, without the power to sink into its refuge. If new affections could ever wind their way into my frozen bosom, it must be only to fill it with new sorrows; for those I loved must still be torn from me.—In the world I must remain, and remain alone!

Immortality on Earth!—The grave that closes on the sinner, closes on his sin. His weight of offense is fixed. No new guilt can gather on him there. But I was to know no limit to the weight that was already crushing me. The guilt of life upon life, the surges of an unfathomable ocean of crime, were to roll in eternal progress over my head. If the judgment of the great day was terrible to him who had passed but through the common measure of existence, what must be its terrors to the wretch who was to appear loaded with the accumulated guilt of a thousand lives!

[Sidenote: He Passes through Jerusalem]

Overwhelmed with despair, I rushed through Jerusalem, with scarcely a consciousness of whither I was going. It was the time of the Passover, when the city was crowded with the multitude come to the great festival of the year. I felt an instinctive horror of the human countenance, and shunned every avenue by which the tribes came in. I at last found myself at the Gate of Zion, that leads southward into the open country. I had then no eyes for that wondrous portal which had exhausted the skill of the most famous Ionian sculptors, the master-work of Herod the Great. But I vainly tried to force my way through the crowds that lingered on their march to gaze upon its matchless beauty; portal alone worthy of the wonders to which it led, like the glory of an evening cloud opening to lead the eye upward to the stars.

On those days the Roman guard was withdrawn from the battlements, which I ascended to seek another escape; but the concourse, gathered there to look upon the entrance of the tribes, fixed me to the spot. Of all the strange and magnificent sights of earth, this entrance was the most fitted to swell the national pride of country and religion. The dispersion, ordained by Heaven for judgment on the crimes of our idolatrous kings, had, through that wonder-working power by which good is brought out of evil, planted our law in the remotest extremities of the world. Among its proselytes were the mighty of all regions, the military leaders, the sages, the kings; all, at least once in their lives, coming to pay homage to the great central city of the faith; and all coming with the pomp and attendance of their rank. The procession amounted to a number which threw after-times into the shade. Three millions of people have been counted at the Passover.

The diversities of the multitude were not less striking. Every race of mankind, in its most marked peculiarities, there passed beneath the eye. There came the long train of swarthy slaves and menials round the chariot of the Indian prince, clothed in the silks and jewels of regions beyond the Ganges. Upon them pressed the troop of African lion-hunters, half naked, but with their black limbs wreathed with pearl and fragments of unwrought gold. Behind them, on camels, moved patriarchal groups, the Arab sheik, a venerable figure with his white locks flowing from beneath his turban, leading his sons, like our father Abraham, from the wilderness to the Mount of Vision. Then rolled on the glittering chariot of the Assyrian chieftain, a regal show of purple and gems, convoyed by horsemen covered with steel. The Scythian Jews, wrapped in the furs of wolf and bear, iron men of the North; the noble Greek, the perfection of the human form, with his countenance beaming the genius and beauty of his country; the broad and yellow features of the Chinese rabbins; the fair skins and gigantic forms of the German tribes; strange clusters of men unknown to the limits of Europe or Asia, with their black locks, complexions of the color of gold, and slight yet sinewy limbs, marked with figures of suns and stars struck into the flesh; all marched crowd on crowd; and in strong contrast with them, the Italian on the charger or in the chariot, urging the living stream to the right and left, with the haughtiness of the acknowledged master of mankind. The representative world was before me. But all those distinctive marks of country and condition, though palpably ineradicable by human means, were overpowered and mingled by the one grand impression of the place and the time. In their presence was the City of Holiness; the Hill of Zion lifted up its palaces; above them ascended, like another city in a higher region of the air, that TEMPLE to whose majesty the world could show no equal, to which the eyes of the believer were turned from the uttermost parts of the earth, in whose courts Solomon, the king of earthly kings for wisdom, had called down the blessing of the Most High, and it had descended on the altar in fire; in whose sanctuary the King whom heaven and the heaven of heavens can not contain was to make His future throne, and give glory to His people.

[Sidenote: And Comes upon a Scene Magnificent]

O Jerusalem, Jerusalem! when I think of what I saw thee then, and of what I have since seen thee—the spoiled, the desolate, the utterly put to shame; when I have seen the Roman plow driven through the soil on which stood the Holy of Holies; the Saracen destroying even its ruins; the last, worst devastator, the barbarian of the Tatar desert, sitting in grim scorn upon the ramparts of the city of David; violating the tombs of the prophet and the king; turning up for plunder the soil, every blade of whose grass, every atom of whose dust, was sacred to the broken heart of Israel; trampling with savage cruelty my countrymen that lingered among its walls only that they might seek a grave in the ashes of the mighty,—I have felt my spirit maddened within me. I have made impious wishes; I have longed for the lightning to blast the tyrant. I still start from my bed when I hear the whirlwind, and send forth fierce prayers that its rage may be poured on the tents of the oppressor. I unconsciously tear away my white locks, and scatter them in bitterness of soul toward the East. In the wildness of the moment I have imagined every cloud that sailed along the night a minister of the descending vengeance. I have seen it a throne of terrible shapes flying on the wings of the wind, majestic spirits and kings of wrath hurrying through the heavens to pour down sulfurous hail and fire, as upon the cities of the Dead Sea. I have cried out with our prophet, as the vision swept along, “Who is he that cometh from Edom? with dyed garments from Bozra? he that is glorious in his apparel, traveling in the greatness of his strength! Wherefore art thou red in thine apparel, and thy garments like him that treadeth the winepress?” and I have thought that I heard the answer: “I, that speak in righteousness, mighty to save! I will tread them in mine anger, and trample them in my fury, and their blood shall be sprinkled upon my garments, and I will stain all my raiment; for the day of vengeance is in mine heart, and the year of my redeemed is come!”

[Sidenote: Salathiel Bemoans Jerusalem’s Desecration]

Then, when the impulse passed away, my eyes have turned into fountains of tears, and I have wept until morning came, and the sounds of the world called back its recollections; and for the sacred hills and valleys that I had imagined in the darkness I saw only the roofs of some melancholy city, in which I was a forlorn fugitive; or a wilderness, with but the burning sands and the robber before me; or found myself tossing on the ocean, not more fruitless than my heart, nor more restless than my life, nor more unfathomable than my we. Yet to the last will I hope and love. O Jerusalem, Jerusalem! even in my mirth, if I forget thee!

[Sidenote: Beyond the City’s Gate]

But those were the thoughts of after-times. On that memorable and dreadful day I had no perception but of some undefinable fate which was to banish me from mankind. I at length forced my way through the pressure at the gate, turned to none of the kinsmen who called to me as I passed their chariots and horses, overthrew with desperate and sudden strength all who impeded my progress, and scarcely felt the ground till I had left the city behind, and had climbed, through rocks and ruins, the mountain that rose drearily before me, like a barrier shutting out the living world.

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Chapter II

An Awakening and a Summons

[Sidenote: Salathiel’s Dream]

Terror had exhausted me; and throwing myself on the ground, under the shade of the palm-trees that crowned the summit of the hill, I fell into an almost instant slumber. But it was unrefreshing and disturbed. The events of the day again came before me, strangely mingled with those of my past life, and with others of which I could form no waking remembrance. I saw myself sometimes debased below man, like the great Assyrian king, driven out to feed upon the herb of the forest, and wandering for years exposed to the scorching sun by day and the dews that sank chilling upon my naked frame by night; I then seemed filled with supernatural power, and rose on wings till earth was diminished beneath me, and I felt myself fearfully alone. Still, there was one predominant sensation: that all this was for punishment, and that it was to be perpetual. At length, in one of my imaginary flights, I found myself whirled on the wind, like a swimmer down a cataract, in helpless terror into the bosom of a thunder-cloud. I felt the weight of the rolling vapors round me; I saw the blaze; I was stunned by a roar that shook the firmament.

[Sidenote: On the Mount of Corruption]

My eyes suddenly opened, yet my dream appeared only to be realized by my waking. Thick clouds of heavy and heated vapor were rapidly rolling up from the precipices below; and at intervals a sound that I could not distinguish from distant thunder burst on the wind. But the sun was bright, and the horizon was the dazzling blue of the eastern heaven. As my senses slowly returned, for I felt like a man overpowered with wine, I was enabled to discover where I was. The discovery itself was terror. I had in my distraction fled to the mountain on which no Jew ever looked without shame and sorrow for the crimes of the greatest king into whose nostrils the Almighty ever poured the spirit of life, but which a Jewish priest, as I was, could not touch without being guilty of defilement. I sat on the Mount of Corruption,[2] so-called from its having once witnessed the idolatries of our mighty Solomon, when, in his old age, he gave way to the persuasions of his heathen wives—that irreparable crime for which the kingdom was rent, and the strength of Israel scattered. I saw in the hollows of the hill the spaces, still bearing the marks of burning, and barren forever, on which the temples of Moloch, Chemosh, and Ashtaroth had stood in sight of the House of the living God. The very palm-trees under which I had snatched that wild and bitter sleep were the remnant of the groves in which the foul rites of the goddesses of Phenicia and Assyria once filled the air with midnight abomination, and horrid yells of human sacrifice, almost made more fearful by the roar of barbarian revel, the wild dissonance of timbrel and horn, the bacchanalian chorus of the priesthood and people of impurity.

The vapors that rose hot and sickly before me were the smokes from the fires kindled in the valley of Hinnom; where the refuse of the animals slaughtered for the use of the city, and the other pollutions and remnants of things abominable to the Jew, were daily burned. The sullen and perpetual fires, the deadly fumes, and the aspects of the beings, chiefly public criminals, who were employed in this hideous task, gave the idea of the place of final evil. Our prophets, in their threats against the national betrayers, against the proud and the self-willed, the polluted with idols, and the polluted with that still darker and more incurable idolatry, the worship of the world, pointed to the valley of Hinnom! The Pharisee, when he denounced the unbelief and luxury of the lordly Sadducee, pointed to the valley of Hinnom! All—the Pharisee, the Essene, the Sadducee, in the haughty spirit that forgot the fallen state of Jerusalem, and the crimes that had lowered her; the hypocrite, the bigot, and the skeptic, alike mad with hopeless revenge, when they saw the Roman cohorts triumphing with their idolatrous ensigns through the paths once trod by the holy, or were driven aside by the torrent of cavalry, and the gilded chariot on which sat some insolent proconsul fresh from Italy,—pointed to the valley of Hinnom! How often, as the days of Jerusalem hurried toward their end and by some fatality the violences of the Roman governors became more frequent and intolerable, have I seen the groups of my countrymen, hunted into some byway of the city by the hoofs of the Roman horse, consuming with that inward wrath which was soon to flame out in such horrors, flinging up their wild hands, as if to upbraid the tardy heavens, gnashing their teeth, and with the strong contortions of the Oriental countenance, and lip scarcely audible from the force of its own convulsion, muttering conspiracy. Or, in despair of shaking off that chain which had bound the whole earth, how often have I seen them appealing to the endless future, and shrouding their heads in their cloaks, like sorcerers summoning up demons, each with his quivering hand stretched out toward the accursed valley, and every tongue groaning “Hinnom!”

[Sidenote: A Call to Duty]

While I lay upon the summit of the mountain, in a state which gave me the deepest impression of the parting of soul and body, I was startled by the sound of a trumpet. It was from the Temple, which, as the fires below sank with the growing heat of the day, was now visible to me. The trumpet was the signal of the third hour, when the first daily sacrifice was to be offered. It was the week of the class of Abiah, of which I was, and this day’s service fell to me. Though I would have given all that I possessed on earth to be allowed to rest upon that spot, polluted as it was, and there molder away into the dust and ashes that I had made my bed, I dared not shrink from that most solemn duty of the priesthood.

I rose, but it was not until after many efforts that I was able to stand. I struggled along the summit of the ridge, holding by the stems of the palm-trees. The second trumpet sounded loudly, and was reechoed by the cliffs. I had now no time for delay, and was about to spring downward toward a path which wound round the head of the valley and beyond the fires, when my ears were again arrested by the peal that had disturbed me in my sleep, and my glance, which commanded the whole circuit of the hills round Jerusalem, involuntarily looked for the thunder-cloud. The sky was without a stain; but the eminences toward the west, on whose lovely slopes of vineyard, rose, and orange grove my eye had so often reposed as on a vast Tyrian carpet tissued with purple and gold, were hung with gloom; a huge and sullen cloud seemed to be gathering over the heights, and flashes and gleams of malignant luster burst from its bosom. The cloud deepened, and the distant murmur grew louder and more continued.

[Sidenote: Salathiel Returns to His Home]

I hurried to the city gate. To my astonishment, I found the road, that I had left, so choked up with the multitude, almost empty. The camels stood tethered in long trains under the trees, with scarcely an owner. The tents were deserted except by children and the few old persons necessary for their care. The mules and horses grazed through the fields without a keeper. I saw tents full of the animals and other offerings that the tribes brought up to the great feast, almost at the mercy of any hand that would take them away. Where could the myriads have disappeared which had covered the land a few hours before to the horizon?

[Sidenote: Salathiel Hears Familiar Sounds]

The city was still more a subject of astonishment. A panic might have driven away the concourse of strangers, at a time when the violences of the Roman sword had given every Jew but too frequent cause for the most sensitive alarm. But all within the gate was equally deserted. The streets were utterly stripped of the regular inhabitants. The Roman sentinels were almost the only beings whom I could discover in my passage of the long avenue, from the foot of the upper city to the Mount of the Temple. All this was favorable to my extreme anxiety to escape every eye of my countrymen; yet I can not tell with what a throbbing of heart, and variety of feverish emotion, I at length reached the threshold of my dwelling. Though young, I was a husband and father. What might not have happened since the sunset of the evening before? for my evil doings—for which may He, with whom mercy lies at the right hand and judgment at the left, have mercy on me—had fatally occupied the night. I listened at the door, with my heart upon my lips. I dared not open it. My suspense was at length relieved by my wife’s voice; she was weeping. I fell on my knees, and thanked Heaven that she was alive.

But my infant! I thought of the sword that smote the first-born in the land of bondage, and felt that Judah, guilty as Egypt, might well dread its punishment. Was it for my first-born that the sobs of its angel mother had arisen in her loneliness? Another pause of bitter suspense—and I heard the laugh of my babe as it awoke in her arms. The first human sensation that I had felt for so many hours was almost overpowering; and without regarding the squalidness of my dress, and the look of famine and fatigue that must have betrayed where I had been, I should have rushed into the chamber. But at that moment the third trumpet sounded. I had now no time for the things of this world. I plunged into the bath, cleansed myself from the pollution of the mountain, hastily girt on me the sacerdotal tunic and girdle; and with the sacred fillet on my burning brow, and the censer in my shaking hand, passed through the cloisters and took my place before the altar.

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Chapter III

Salathiel’s Resolution in the Temple

[Sidenote: Before the Temple]

Of all the labors of human wealth and power devoted to worship, the Temple within whose courts I then stood was the most mighty. In the years of my unhappy wanderings, far from the graves of my kindred, I have seen all the most famous shrines of the great kingdoms of idolatry. Constrained by cruel circumstance, and the still sterner cruelty of man, I have stood before the altar of the Ephesian Diana, the masterpiece of Ionian splendor; I have strayed through the woods of Delphi, and been made a reluctant witness of the superb mysteries of that chief of the oracles of imposture. Dragged in chains, I have been forced to join the procession round the Minerva of the Acropolis, and almost forgot my chains in wonder at that monument of a genius which ought to have been consecrated only to the true God, by whom it was given. The temple of the Capitoline Jove, the Sancta Sophia of the Rome of Constantine, the still more stupendous fabric in which the third Rome still bows before the fisherman of Galilee—all have been known to my step, that knows all things but rest; but all were dreams and shadows to the grandeur, the dazzling beauty, the almost unearthly glory, of that Temple which once covered the “Mount of Vision” of the City of JEHOVAH.

At the distance of almost two thousand years, I have its image on my mind’s eye with living and painful fulness. I see the court of the Gentiles circling the whole; a fortress of the purest marble, with its wall rising six hundred feet from the valley; its kingly entrance, worthy of the fame of Solomon; its innumerable and stately buildings for the priests and officers of the Temple, and above them, glittering like a succession of diadems, those alabaster porticoes and colonnades in which the chiefs and sages of Jerusalem sat teaching the people, or walked, breathing the pure air, and gazing on the grandeur of a landscape which swept the whole amphitheater of the mountains. I see, rising above this stupendous boundary, the court of the Jewish women separated by its porphyry pillars and richly sculptured wall; above this, the separated court of the men; still higher, the court of the priests; and highest, the crowning splendor of all, the central TEMPLE,[3] the place of the Sanctuary and of the Holy of Holies, covered with plates of gold, its roof planted with lofty spear-heads of gold, the most precious marbles and metals everywhere flashing back the day, till Mount Moriah stood forth to the eye of the stranger approaching Jerusalem what it had been so often described by its bards and people, “a mountain of snow studded with jewels.”

[Sidenote: An Interruption]

The grandeur of the worship was worthy of this glory of architecture. Four-and-twenty thousand Levites ministered by turns—a thousand at a time. Four thousand more performed the lower offices. Four thousand singers and minstrels, with the harp, the trumpet, and all the richest instruments of a land whose native genius was music, and whose climate and landscape led men instinctively to delight in the charm of sound, chanted the inspired songs of our warrior king, and filled up the pauses of prayer with harmonies that transported the spirit beyond the cares and passions of a troubled world.

I was standing before the altar of burnt-offerings, with the Levite at my side holding the lamb; the cup was in my hand, and I was about to pour the wine on the victim, when I was startled by the sound of hurried feet. In another moment the gate of the court was abruptly thrown back, and a figure rushed in; it was the High Priest,[4] but not in the robes of ceremony which it was customary for him to wear in the seasons of the greater festivals. He was covered with the common vesture of the priesthood, and was evidently anxious to use it for total concealment. His face was buried in the folds of his cloak, and he walked with blind precipitation toward the sanctuary. But he had scarcely reached it when a new feeling stopped him, and he turned to the altar, where I was standing in mute surprise. The cloak fell from his visage; it was pale as death; the habitual sternness of feature which rendered him a terror to the people had collapsed into feebleness; and while he gazed on the flame, I thought I saw the glistening of a tear on a cheek that had never exhibited human emotion before. But no time was left for question, even if reverence had not restrained me. He suddenly grasped the head of the lamb, as was customary for those who offered up an expiation for their own sins; his lip, ashy white, quivered with broken prayer; then, snatching the knife from the Levite, he plunged it into the animal’s throat, and with his hands covered with blood, and with a groan that sounded despair, again rushed distractedly to the porch of the Holy House, flung aside in fierce irreverence the veil of the sanctuary, and darted in.

[Sidenote: The High Priest in Terror]

There was a subterranean passage from the interior of the sanctuary to the High Priest’s cloister, through which I conceived that he had gone. But, on passing near the porch, at the close of the sacrifice, I heard a cry of agony from within that penetrated my soul.

I had never loved the head of our priesthood. He was a haughty and hard-hearted man; insolent in his office, which he had obtained by no unsuspicious means, and a ready tool alike of the popular caprice and of the tyranny of our foreign masters. But he was a man; was a man of my own order; and was it for one like me to triumph over even the most abject criminal of earth? I ascended the steps of the porch, and, with a sinking heart and trembling hand, entered the sanctuary.

But—what I saw there I have no power to tell! To this moment the recollection overwhelms my senses. Words were not made to utter it. The ear of man was not made to hear it. Before me moved things mightier than of mortal vision, thronging shapes of terror, mysterious grandeurs, essential power, embodied prophecy! The Veil was rent in twain! How could man behold and live! When I lifted my face from the ground again, I saw but the High Priest. He was kneeling, with his hands clasped upon his eyes; his lips strained wide, as if laboring to utter a voice; and his whole frame rigid and cold as a corpse. I vainly spoke, and attempted to rouse him; terror, or more than terror, had benumbed his powers; and, unwilling to suffer him to be seen in this extremity, I bore him in my arms to the subterranean.

[Sidenote: An Attack by the Romans]

But a tumult, of which I could scarcely conjecture the cause, checked me. The trampling of multitudes, and cries of fury and fear, echoed round the Temple; and in the sudden apprehension, the first and most fearful to the priest of Judah, that the Romans were about to commence their often-threatened plunder, I laid down my unhappy burden beside the door of the passage and returned to defend, or die with, our perishing glory. The sanctuary in which I stood was wholly lighted by the lamps round its walls. But when, at length, unable to suppress my alarm at the growing uproar, I went to the porch, I left comparative day behind me; a gloom deeper than that of tempest and sicklier than that of smoke overspread the sky. The sun, which I had seen like a fiery buckler hanging over the city, was utterly gone. Even while I looked the darkness deepened, and the blackness of night, of night without a star, fell far and fearful upon the horizon.

It has been my fate, and an intense part of my punishment, always to conceive that the calamities of nature and nations were connected with my crime.[5] I have tried to reason away this impression, but it has clung to me like an iron chain; nothing could tear it away that left the life; I have felt it hanging over my brain with the weight of a thunder-cloud. As I glanced into the gloom, the thought smote me that it was I who had brought this Egyptian plague, this horrid privation of the first element of life, upon my country, perhaps upon the world, perhaps never to be relieved; for it came condensing, depth on depth, till it seemed to have excluded all possibility of the existence of light; it was, like that of our old oppressors, darkness that might be felt, the darkness of a universal grave.

I formed my fierce determination at once, and resolved to fly from my priesthood, from my kindred, from my country; to linger out my days—my bitter, banished days—in some wilderness, where my presence would not be a curse, where but the lion and the tiger should be my fellow dwellers, where the sands could not be made the more barren for my fatal tread, nor the fountains more bitter for my desperate and eternal tears. The singular presence of mind found in some men in the midst of universal perturbation—one of the most effective qualities of our nature, and attributed to the highest vigor of heart and understanding—is not always deserving of such proud parentage. It is sometimes the child of mere brute ignorance of danger, sometimes of habitual ferocity; in my instance it was that of madness—the fierce energy that leads the maniac safe over roofs and battlements. All in the Temple was confusion. The priests lay flung at the feet of the altar; or, clinging together in groups of helplessness and dismay, waited speechless for the ruin that was to visit them in this unnatural night. I walked through all, without a fear or a hope under heaven.

[Sidenote: In the Midst of Confusion]

Through the solid gloom, and among heaps of men and sacred things cast under my feet, like the spoil of some stormed camp, I made my way to my dwelling, direct and unimpeded, as if I walked in the light of day. I found my wife in deeper terror at my long absence than even at the darkness. She sprang forward at my voice, and, falling on my neck, shed the tears of joy and love. But few words passed between us, for but few were necessary, to bid her with her babe to follow me. She would have followed me to the ends of the earth.

O Miriam, Miriam! how often have I thought of thee, in my long pilgrimage! How often, like that of a spirit descended to minister consolation to the wanderer, have I seen, in my midnight watching, thy countenance of more than woman’s beauty! To me thou hast never died. Thy more than man’s loftiness of soul; thy generous fidelity of love to a wayward and unhappy heart; thy patient treading with me along the path that I had sowed with the thorn and thistle for thy feet, but which should have been covered with the wealth of princes, to be worthy of thy loveliness and thy virtue—all rise in memory, and condemnation, before the chief of sinners. Age after age have I traveled to thy lonely grave; age after age have I wept and prayed upon the dust that was once perfection. In all the hardness forced upon me by a stern world; in all the hatred of mankind that the insolence of the barbarian and the persecutor has bound round my bosom like a mail of iron, I have preserved one source of feeling sacred—a solitary fount to feed the little vegetation of a withered heart: the love of thee; perhaps to be a sign of that regenerate time when the curse shall be withdrawn; perhaps to be in mercy the source from which that more than desert, thy husband’s soul, shall be refreshed, and the barrenness nourish with the flowers of the paradise of God!

[Sidenote: Salathiel and Miriam]

Throwing off my robe of priesthood, as I then thought, forever, I went forth, followed by my heroic wife and bearing my child in my arms. I had left behind me sumptuous things, wealth transmitted from a long line of illustrious ancestry. I cared not for them. Wealth a thousand times more precious was within my embrace. Yet, when I touched the threshold, the last sensation of divorce from all that I had been came over my mind. My wife felt the trembling of my frame, and, with a gentle firmness which in the hour of trouble often exalts the fortitude of woman above the headlong and inflamed courage of the warrior, she bade me be of good cheer. I felt her lips on my hand at the moment—the touch gave new energy to my whole being—and I bounded forward into the ocean of darkness.

[Illustration: “All in the Temple was confusion.”

[see page 19.

Copyright, 1901, by Funk & Wagnalls Company, N. Y. and London.]

[Sidenote: A Scene of Disaster]

Without impediment or error, I made my way over and among the crowds that strewed the court of the Gentiles. I heard many a prayer and many a groan; but I had now no more to do with man, and forced my way steadily to the great portal. Thus far, if I had been stricken with utter blindness, I could not have been less guided by the eye. But, on passing into the streets of the lower city, a scattered torch, from time to time, struggling through the darkness, like the lamp in a sepulcher, gave me glimpses of the scene. The broad avenue was encumbered with the living, in the semblance of the dead. All were prostrated or were in those attitudes into which men are thrown by terror beyond the strength or spirit of man to resist. The cloud that, from my melancholy bed above the valley of Hinnom, I had seen rolling up the hills, was this multitude. A spectacle had drawn them all by a cruel, a frantic, curiosity out of Jerusalem, and left it the solitude that had surprised me. Preternatural eclipse and horror fell on them, and their thousands madly rushed back to perish, if perish they must, within the walls of the City of Holiness. Still the multitude came pouring in; their distant trampling had the sound of a cataract, and their outcries of pain, and rage, and terror were like what I have since heard, but more feebly, sent up from the field of battle.

I struggled on, avoiding the living torrent, and slowly treading my way wherever I heard the voices least numerous; but my task was one of extreme toil, and but for those more than the treasures of the earth to me, whose lives depended on my efforts, I should willingly have lain down and suffered the multitude to trample me into the grave. How long I thus struggled I know not. But a yell of peculiar and universal terror that burst round me made me turn my reluctant eyes toward Jerusalem. The cause of this new alarm was seen at once.

A large sphere of fire fiercely shot through the heavens, lighting its track down the murky air, and casting a disastrous and pallid illumination on the myriads of gazers below. It stopped above the city and exploded in thunder, flashing over the whole horizon, but covering the Temple with a blaze which gave it the aspect of a huge mass of metal glowing in the furnace. Every outline of the architecture, every pillar, every pinnacle, was seen with a livid and terrible distinctness. Again, all vanished. I heard the hollow roar of an earthquake; the ground rose and heaved under our feet. I heard the crash of buildings, the fall of fragments of the hills, and, louder than both, the groan of the multitude. I caught my wife and child closer to my bosom. In the next moment I felt the ground give way beneath me, a sulfurous vapor took away my breath, and I was swept into the air in a whirlwind of dust and ashes!

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Chapter IV

Salathiel Journeys Far from Jerusalem

[Sidenote: Salathiel Returns to Consciousness]

When I recovered my senses, all was so much changed round me that I could scarcely be persuaded that either the past or the present was not a dream. I had no consciousness of any interval between them, more than that of having closed my eyes at one instant, to open them at the next. Yet the curtains of a tent waved round me, in a breeze fragrant with the breath of roses and balsam-trees. Beyond the gardens and meadows, from which those odors sprang, a river shone, like a path of lapis lazuli, in the calm effulgence of the western sun. Tents were pitched, from which I heard the sounds of pastoral instruments; camels were drinking and grazing along the riverside; and turbaned men and maidens were ranging over the fields, or sitting on the banks to enjoy the cool of the delicious evening.

While I tried to collect my senses and discover whether this was more than one of those sports of a wayward fancy which tantalize the bed of the sick mind, I heard a low hymn, and listened to the sounds with breathless anxiety. The voice I knew at once—it was Miriam’s. But in the disorder of my brain, and the strange circumstances which had filled the latter days, in that total feebleness too in which I could not move a limb or utter a word, a persuasion seized me that I was already beyond the final boundary of mortals. All before me was like that paradise from which the crime of our great forefather had driven man into banishment. I remembered the convulsion of the earth in which I had sunk, and asked myself, Could man be wrapped in flame and the whirlwind that tore up mountains like the roots of flowers, and yet live?

[Sidenote: And Learns of His Narrow Escape]

In this perplexity I closed my eyes to collect my thoughts, and probably exhibited some strong emotion of countenance, for I was roused by a cry: “He lives! He lives!” I looked up—Miriam stood before me, clasping her lovely hands with the wildness of joy unspeakable, and shedding tears that, large and lustrous, fell down her glowing cheeks like dew upon the pomegranate. She threw herself upon my pillow, kissed my forehead with lips that breathed new life into me; then, pressing my chill hand between hers, knelt down and with a look worthy of that heaven on which it was fixed, radiant with beauty, and holiness, and joy as the face of an angel, offered up her thanksgiving.

The explanation of the scene that perplexed me was given in a few words, interrupted only by tears and sighs of delight. With the burst of the earthquake the supernatural darkness had cleared away. I was flung under the shelter of one of those caves which abound in the gorges of the mountains round Jerusalem. Miriam and her infant were flung by my side, yet unhurt. While I lay insensible in her arms, she, by singular good fortune, found herself surrounded by a troop of our kinsmen returning from the city, where terror had suffered but few to remain. They placed her and her infant on their camels. Me they would have consigned to the sepulcher of the priests; but Miriam was not to be shaken in her purpose to watch over me until all hope was gone. I was thus carried along—and they were now three days on their journey homeward. The landscape before me was Samaria.

[Sidenote: The Power of Art]

My natural destination would have been the cities of the priests[6] which lay to the south, bordering upon Hebron. In those thirteen opulent and noble residences allotted to the higher ministry of the Temple, they enjoyed all that could be offered by the munificent wisdom of the state—wealth that raised them above the pressures of life, yet not so great as to extinguish the desire of intellectual distinction or the love of the loftier virtues. The means of mental cultivation were provided for them with more than royal liberality. Copies of the sacred books, multiplied in every form, and adorned with the finest skill of the pencil and the sculptor in gold and other precious materials, attested at once the reverence of the nation for its law, and the perfection to which it had brought the decorative arts. The works of strangers eminent for genius or knowledge, or even for the singularity of their subject, were not less to be found in those stately treasure-houses of mind. There the priest might relax his spirit from the sublimer studies of his country by the bold and brilliant epics of Greece, the fantastic passion and figured beauty of the Persian poesy, or the alternate severity and sweetness of the Indian drama—that startling union of all lovely images of nature, the bloom and fragrance of flowers, the hues of the Oriental heaven, and the perfumes of isles of spice and cinnamon, with the grim and subterranean terrors of a gigantic idolatry. There he might spread the philosophic wing from the glittering creations of Grecian metaphysics, to their dark and early oracles in the East; or, stopping in his central flight, plunge into the profound of Egyptian mystery, where science lies, like the mummy, wrapped in a thousand folds that preserve the form, but preserve it with the living principle gone.

Music, of all pleasures the most intellectual, that glorious painting to the ear, that rich mastery of the gloomier emotions of our nature, was studied by the priesthood with a skill that influenced the habits of the country. How often have my fiercest perturbations sunk at the sounds that once filled the breezes of Judea! How often, when my brain was burning and the blood ran through my veins like molten brass, have I been softened down to painless tears by the chorus from our hills, the mellow harmonies of harp and horn blending with the voices of the youths and maidens of Israel! How often have I in the night listened, while the chant, ascending with a native richness to which the skill of other nations was dissonance, floated upward like a cloud of incense, bearing the aspirations of holiness and gratitude to the throne of Him whom man hath not seen nor can see!

[Sidenote: The Glory of the Past]

But those times are sunk deep in the great gulf that absorbs the happiness and genius of man. I have since traversed my country in its length and breadth; I have marked with my weary feet every valley, and made my restless bed upon every hill from Idumea to Lebanon, and from the Assyrian sands to the waters of the Mediterranean; yet the harp and voice were dead. I heard sounds on the hills, but they were the cries of the villagers flying before some tyrant gatherer of a tyrant’s tribute. I heard sounds in the midnight, but they were the howl of the wolf and the yell of the hyena reveling over the naked and dishonored graves, which the infidel had given, in his scorn, to the people of my fathers.

But the study to which the largest expenditure of wealth and labor was devoted was, as it ought to be, that of the sacred books of Israel. It only makes me rebellious against the decrees of fate to think of the incomparable richness and immaculate character of the volumes over which I have so often hung, and look upon the diminished and degraded exterior in which their wisdom now lies before man. Where are now the cases covered with jewels, the clasps of topaz and diamond; the golden arks in which the volume of the hope of Israel lay, too precious not to be humiliated by the contact with even the richest treasure of earth? Where are the tissued curtains, which hid, as in a sanctuary, that mighty roll, too sacred to be glanced on by the casual eye? But, the spoiler—the spoiler! The Arab, the Parthian, the human tiger of the north, that lies crouching for a thousand years in the sheepfold of Judah! Is there not a sword? Is there not a judgment? Terribly will it judge the oppressor.

The home of my kinsmen was in the allotment of Naphtali. The original tribe had revolted in the general schism of the kingdoms of Judah and Israel, and was swept into the Assyrian captivity. But on the restoration by Cyrus, fragments of all the captive tribes returned and were suffered to resume their lands. Misfortune wrought its moral on them; the chief families pledged their allegiance once more to Judah, and were exemplary in paying homage to the spirit and ordinances of their religion.

[Sidenote: The Alertness of the Roman]

We hastened through Samaria. The rancorous enmity borne by the Samaritans to the subjects of Judah, for ages made all intercourse between Jerusalem and the north difficult. It was often totally interrupted by war; it was dangerous in peace, and the ferocious character of the population and the bitter antipathy of the government made it to the Jew a land of robbers.[7] But among the evils of the Roman conquest was mingled this good, that it suffered no subordinate tyranny. Its sword cut away at a blow all those minor oppressions which make the misery of provincial life. If the mountain robber invaded the plain, as was his custom of old, the Roman cavalry were instantly on him with the spear, until he took refuge in the mountains; if he resisted in his native fastnesses, the legionaries pursued him with torch and sword, stifled him if he remained in his cave, or stabbed him at its entrance. If quarrels arose between villages, the cohorts burned them to the ground; and the execution was done with a promptitude and completeness that less resembled the ordinary operations of war than the work of superhuman power. The Roman knowledge of our disturbances was instantaneous. Signals established on the hills conveyed intelligence with the speed of light, from the remotest corners of the land to their principal stations. Even in our subsequent conspiracies, the first knowledge that they had broken out was often conveyed to their partizans in the next district by the movement of the Roman troops. Well had they chosen the eagle for their ensign. They rushed with the eagle’s rapidity on their victim; and when it was stretched in blood they left the spot of vengeance, as if they had left it on the wing. Their advance had the rapidity of the most hurried retreat and the steadiness of the most secure triumph. Their retreat left nothing behind but the marks of their irresistible power.

[Sidenote: Salathiel Passes through Samaria]

All the armies of the earth have since passed before me. I have seen the equals of the legions in courage and discipline, and their superiors in those arms by which human life is at the caprice of ambition. But their equals I have never seen, in the individual fitness of the soldier for war; in his fleetness, muscular vigor, and expertness in the use of his weapons; in his quick adaptation to all the multiplied purposes of the ancient campaign—from the digging of a trench or the management of a catapult to the assault of a citadel; in his iron endurance of the vicissitudes of climate; in the length and regularity of his marches; or in the rapidity, boldness, and dexterity of his maneuver in the field. Yet it is but a melancholy tribute to the valor of my countrymen to record the Roman acknowledgment, that of all the nations conquered by Rome Judea bore the chain with the haughtiest dignity, and most frequently and fiercely contested the supremacy of the sword.

Under that stern supremacy, the Samaritan had long rested and flourished in exemption from the harassing cruelty of petty war. We now passed with our long caravan unguarded, and moved at will through fields rich with the luxuriance of an Eastern summer, where our fathers would have scarcely ventured but with an army. I made no resistance to being thus led away to a region so remote from my own. To have returned to the cities of the priests would have but given me unceasing agony. Even the gates of Jerusalem were to my feelings anathema. The whole fabric of my mind had undergone a revolution. Like a man tossed at the mercy of the tempest, I sought but a shore—and all shores were alike to him who must be an exile forever.

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Chapter V

Eleazar Learns of Salathiel’s Renunciation

[Sidenote: Salathiel’s Journey Continued]

The country through which we passed, after leaving the boundaries of Samaria—where, with all its peace, no Jew could tread but as in the land of strangers—was new to me. My life had been till now spent in study or in serving the altar; and I had heard, with the usual and unwise indifference of men devoted to books, the praise of the picturesque and stately provinces that still remained to our people. I was now to see for myself, and was often compelled, as we advanced, to reproach the idle prejudice that had so long deprived me, and might forever deprive so many of my consecrated brethren, of an enjoyment cheering to the human heart and full of lofty and hallowed memory to the men of Israel. As we passed along, less traveling than wandering at pleasure, through regions where every winding of the marble hill or descent of the fruitful valley showed us some sudden and romantic beauty of landscape, my kinsmen took a natural pride in pointing out the noble features that made Canaan a living history of Providence.[8]

[Sidenote: A Prayer in the Valley]

What were even the trophy-covered hills of Greece or the monumental plains of Italy to the hills and plains where the memorial told of the miracles and the presence of the Supreme? “Look to that rock,” they would exclaim; “there descended the angel of the Presence! On the summit of that cloudy ridge stood Ezekiel, when he saw the vision of the latter days. Look to yonder cleft in the mountains; there fell the lightning from heaven on the Philistine.” In our travel we reached a valley, a spot of singular beauty and seclusion, blushing with flowers and sheeted with the olive from its edge down to a stream that rushed brightly through its bosom. There was no dwelling of man in it, but on a gentler slope of the declivity stood a gigantic terebinth-tree. More than curiosity was attracted to this delicious spot, for the laughter and talk of the caravan had instantly subsided at the sight. All, by a common impulse, dismounted from their horses and camels; and though it was still far from sunset, the tents were pitched and preparations made for prayer. The spot reminded me of the valley of Hebron, sacred to the Jewish heart as the burial-place of Abraham, Sarah, and Isaac. May they sleep in the bosom of the Lord! The terebinth-tree, under which the greatest of the patriarchs sat and talked with the angels—the fountain—the cave of Macpelah, in which his mortal frame returned to the earth, to come again in glory, appeared to lie before me.

From the day of my unspeakable crime, I had never joined in prayer with my people. Yet, I was still a believer in the faith of Israel. I even clung to it with the nervous violence of one who, in a shipwreck, feels that his only hope is the plank in his grasp, and that some more powerful hand is tearing even that plank away. But the sight of human beings enjoying the placid consolations of prayer had from the first moment overwhelmed me with so keen a sense of my misfortune—the pious gentleness of attitude and voice, the calm uplifted hand, and low and solemn aspiration were in so deep a contrast to the involuntary wildness and broken utterings of a heart bound in more than adamantine chains, that I shrank from the rebuke and groaned in solitude.

[Sidenote: Eleazar, the Brother of Miriam]

I went forth into the valley, and was soon lost in its thick vegetation. The sound of the hymn that sank down in mingled sweetness with the murmuring of the evening air through the leaves, and the bubbling of the brook below, alone told me that I was near human beings. I sat upon a fragment of turf, embroidered as never was kingly footstool and with my hands clasped over my eyes, to remove from me all the images of life, gave way to that visionary mood of mind in which ideas come and pass in crowds without shape, leaving no more impression than the drops of a sun-shower on the trees. I had remained long in this half-dreaming confusion, and had almost imagined myself transported to some intermediate realm of being, where a part of the infliction was that of being startled by keen flashes of light from some upper world, when I was roused by the voice of Eleazar, the brother of Miriam, at my side. His manly and generous countenance expressed mingled anxiety and gladness at discovering me. “The whole camp,” said he, “have been alarmed at your absence, and have searched for these three hours through every part of our day’s journey. Miriam’s distraction at length urged me to leave her, and it was by her instinct that I took my way down the only path hitherto unsearched, and where, indeed, from fear or reverence of the place, few but myself would have willingly come.” He called to an attendant, and, sending him up the side of the valley with the tidings, we followed slowly, for I was still feeble. As we emerged into a more open space, the moon lying on masses of cloud, like a queen pillowed on couches of silver, showed me, in her strong illumination of the forest, the flashes which had added to the bewildered pain of my reverie. While I talked with natural animation of the splendor of the heavens, and pointed out the lines and figures on the moon’s disk, which made it probable that it was, like earth, a place of habitation, he suddenly pressed my hand, and stopping, with his eyes fixed on my face: “How,” said he, “does it happen, my friend, my brother Salathiel?” I started, as if my name, the name of my illustrious ancestor, direct in descent from the father of the faithful, were an accusation. He proceeded, with an ardent pressure of my quivering hand: “How is it to be accounted for that you, with such contemplations and the knowledge that gives them the dignity of science, can yet be so habitually given over to gloom? Serious crime I will not believe in you, though the best of us are stained. But your character is pure; I know your nature to be too lofty for the degenerate indulgence of the passions, and Miriam’s love for you, a love passing that of women, is in itself a seal of virtue. Answer me, Can the wealth, power, or influence of your brother and his house, nay of his tribe, assist you?”

[Sidenote: Speaks of Salathiel’s Gloom]

I was silent. He paused, and we walked on a while, without a sound but that of our tread among the leaves; but his mind was full, and it would have way. “Salathiel,” said he, “you do injustice to yourself, to your wife, and to your friends. This gloom that sits eternally on your forehead must wear away all your uses in society; it bathes your incomparable wife’s pillow in tears, and it disheartens, nay distresses, us all. Answer me as one man of honor and integrity would another. Have you been disappointed in your ambition? I know your claims. You have knowledge surpassing that of a multitude of your contemporaries; you have talents that ought to be honored; your character is unimpeached and unimpeachable. Such things ought to have already raised you to eminence. Have you found yourself thwarted by the common artifice of official life? Has some paltry sycophant crept up before you by the oblique path that honor disdains? Or have you felt yourself an excluded and marked man, merely for the display of that manlier vigor, richer genius, and more generous and sincere impulse of heart which to the conscious inferiority of the rabble of understanding is gall and wormwood? Or have you taken too deeply into your resentment the common criminal negligence that besets common minds in power, and makes them carelessly fling away upon incapacity, and guiltily withhold from worth, the rewards which were entrusted to them as a sacred deposit for the encouragement of national ability and personal virtue?”

I strongly disavowed all conceptions of the kind, and assured him that I felt neither peculiar merits nor peculiar injuries. “I have seen too much of what ambition and worldly success were made of, to allow hope to excite or failure to depress me. I am even,” added I, “so far from being the slave of that most vulgar intemperance of a deranged heart, the diseased craving for the miserable indulgences of worldly distinction, that would to Heaven I might never again enter the gates of Jerusalem!”

[Sidenote: Beside the Tomb of Isaiah]

He started back in surprise. The confession had been altogether unintended, and I looked up to see the burst of Jewish wrath descending upon me. I saw none. My kinsman’s fine countenance was brightened with a lofty joy. “Then you have renounced. But no, it is yet too soon. At your age, with your prospects, can you have renounced the career offered to you among the rulers of Israel?”

“I have renounced.”

“Sincerely, solemnly, upon conviction?”

“From the bottom of my soul, now and forever!”

We had reached the open space in front of the terebinth-tree that stood in majesty, extending its stately branches over a space cleared of all other trees, a sovereign of the forest. In silence he led me under the shade to a small tomb, on which the light fell with broken luster. “This,” said he, “is the tomb of the greatest prophet on whose lips the wisdom of Heaven ever burned. There sleeps Isaiah! There is silent the voice that for fifty years spoke more than the thoughts of man in the ears of a guilty people. There are cold the hands that struck the harp of more than mortal sounds to the glory of Him to whom earth and its kingdoms are but as the dust of the balance. There lies the heart which neither the desert, nor the dungeon, nor the teeth of the lion, nor the saw of Manasseh, could tame—the denouncer of our crimes—the scourge of our apostasy—the prophet of that desolation which was to bow the grandeur of Judah to the grave as the tree of the mountain in the whirlwind. Saint and martyr, let my life be as thine; and if it be the will of God, let my death be even as thine!”

[Sidenote: Salathiel’s Renunciation]

He threw himself on his knees and remained in prayer for a time. I knelt with him, but no prayer would issue from my heart. He at length rose, and, leading me into the moonlight, said in a low voice: “Is there not, where the holy sleep, a holiness in the very ground? I waive all the superstitious feelings of the idolater, worshiping the dust of the creature, for the King alike of all. I pass over the natural human homage for the memory of those who have risen above us by the great qualities of their being. But if there are supernal influences acting upon the mind of man; if the winged spirits that minister before the throne still descend to earth on missions of mercy, I will believe that their loved place is round the grave where sleeps the mortal portion of the holy. In all our journeys to the Temple, it has been the custom of our shattered and humiliated tribe to pause beside this tomb, and offer up our homage to that Mightiest of the mighty who made such men for the lights of Israel!” He then earnestly repeated the question: “Have you abandoned your office?” “Yes,” was the answer, “totally, with full purpose never to resume it. In your mountains I will live with you, and with you I will die.” Memory smote me as I pronounced the word; the refuge of the grave was not for me!

“Then,” said he, “you have relieved my spirit of a load; you are now my more than brother.” He clasped me in his arms. “Yes, Salathiel, I know that your high heart must have scorned the prejudices of the Scribe and the Pharisee; you must have seen through and loathed the smiling hypocrisy, the rancorous bigotry, and the furious thirst of blood that are hourly sinking us below the lowest of the heathen. Hating the tyranny of the Roman, as I live this hour, I would rather see the city of David inhabited by none but the idolater, or delivered over to the curse of Babylon and made the couch of the lion and the serpent, than see its courts filled with those impious traitors to the spirit of the law, those cruel extortioners under the mask of self-denial, those malignant revelers in human torture under the name of insulted religion, whose joy is crime, and every hour of whose being but wearies the long-suffering of God and precipitates the ruin of my country.”

He drew from his bosom and unrolled in the moonlight a small copy of the Scriptures. “My brother,” said he, “have you read the holy prophecies of him by whose grave we stand?” My only answer was a smile; they were the chief study of the priesthood. “True,” said he; “no doubt, you have read the words of the prophet. But wisdom is known of her children, and of them alone. Read here.”

I read the famous Haphtorah:[9] “Who hath believed our report? and to whom is the arm of the Lord revealed? For he shall grow up before him as a tender plant, and as a root out of a dry ground; he hath no form nor comeliness; and when we shall see him, there is no beauty that we should desire him. He is the despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows!”

[Sidenote: The Future Deliverer of Judah]

He stopped me, laying his hand on my arm; I felt his strong nerves tremble like an infant’s. “Of whom hath the prophet spoken?” uttered he in a voice of intense anxiety. “Of whom? Of the Deliverer that is to restore Judah; Him that is to come,” was my answer. “Him that is to come—still to come?” he exclaimed. “God of heaven, must the veil be forever on the face of Thy Israel? When shall our darkness be light, and the chain of our spirit be broken!” The glow and power of his countenance sank; he took the roll with a sigh, and replaced it in his robe; then with his hands clasped across his bosom, and his head bowed, he led our silent way up the side of the valley.

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Chapter VI

Salathiel and His People

[Sidenote: The Position of the Jew]

We soon reached the hill country, and our road passed through what were once the allotments of Issachar, Zebulun, and Asher, but by the Roman division was now Upper Galilee. My health had been rapidly restored by the exercise and the balmy air. My more incurable disease was prevented by the journey from perhaps totally engrossing my mind. Of all the antagonists to mental depression, traveling is the most vigorous; not the flight from place to place, as if evil were to be outrun, nor the enclosure of the weary of life in some narrow vehicle that adds fever and pestilence to heaviness of heart, but the passing at our ease through the open air and bright landscape of a new country. To me the novelty and loveliness of the land were combined with the memory of the most striking events in human record. I had, too, the advantage of a companionship which would have enlivened travel through the wilderness—brave and cheerful men and women on whose minds and forms nature laid her finest stamp of beauty.

[Sidenote: The Semitic Type of Beauty]

The name of Jew is now but another title for humiliation. Who that sees that fallen thing, with his countenance bent to the ground and his form withered of its comeliness, tottering through the proud streets of Europe in some degrading occupation, and clothed in the robes of the beggared and the despised, could imagine the bold figures and gallant bearing of the lion-hunters, with whom, in the midst of shouts and songs of careless joy, I spurred my barb up the mountain-paths of Galilee! Yet, fallen as he is, the physiognomy of the Jew retains a share of its original beauty, sufficient to establish the claim of the people to have been the handsomest race on earth. Individuals of superior comeliness may often be found among the multitudes of mankind. But no nation, nor distinct part of any nation, can rival an equal number of the unhappy exiles of Israel in the original impress of that hand which made man only a little lower than the angels. To conceive the Jew as he was, we should picture the stern and watchful contraction of the dark eye expanded; the fierce and ridgy brow lowering no more; the lip no longer gathered in habitual fear or scorn; the cheek no longer sallow with want or pining, and the whole man elevated by the returning consciousness that he has a rank among nations. All his deformities have been the birth of his misfortunes. What beauty can we demand from the dungeon? What dignity of aspect from the hewers of wood and drawers of water for mankind? Where shall we seek the magnificent form and illumined countenance of the hero and the sage—from the heart cankered by the chain, from the plundered, the enslaved, the persecuted of two thousand years?

Of the daughters of my country I have never seen the equals in beauty. Our blood was Arab, softened down by various changes of state and climate, till it was finally brought to perfection in the most genial air and the most generous soil of the globe. The vivid features of the Arab countenance, no longer attenuated by the desert, assumed, in the plenty of Egypt, that fulness and fine proportion which still belongs to the dwellers by the Nile; but the true change was on our entrance into the promised land. Peace, the possession of property, days spent among the cheerful and healthful occupations of rural life, are in themselves productive of the finer developments of the human form—a form whose natural tendency is to beauty. But our nation had an additional and an unshared source of nobleness of aspect: it was free.

The state of man in the most unfettered republics of the ancient world was slavery compared with the magnanimous and secure establishment of the Jewish commonwealth. During the three hundred golden years, from Moses to Samuel—before we were given over to the madness of innovation for our sins, and the demand of an earthly diadem—the Jew was free in the loftiest sense of freedom; free to do all good; restricted only from evil; every man pursuing the unobstructed course pointed out by his genius or his fortune; every man protected by laws inviolable, or whose violation was instantly visited with punishment by the Eternal Sovereign alike of ruler and people.

[Sidenote: Freedom, Twin Sister of Virtue]

Freedom! twin sister of Virtue, thou brightest of all the spirits that descended in the train of Religion from the throne of God; thou that leadest up man again to the early glories of his being; angel, from the circle of whose presence happiness spreads like the sunrise over the darkness of the land; at the waving of whose scepter, knowledge and peace and fortitude and wisdom descend upon the wing; at the voice of whose trumpet the more than grave is broken and slavery gives up her dead,—when shall I see thy coming? When shall I hear thy summons upon the mountains of my country, and rejoice in the regeneration and glory of the sons of Judah? I have traversed nations, and, as I set my foot upon their boundary, I have said, “Freedom is not here!” I saw the naked hill, the morass steaming with death, the field covered with weedy fallow, the sickly thicket encumbering the land; I saw the still more infallible signs, the downcast visage, the form degraded at once by loathsome indolence and desperate poverty; the peasant, cheerless and feeble in his field, the wolfish robber, the population of the cities crowded into huts and cells, with pestilence for their fellow; I saw the contumely of man to man, the furious vindictiveness of popular rage, and I pronounced at the moment, “This people is not free!”

In the various republics of heathen antiquity, the helot living under the yoke of oppression, and the born bondsman lingering out life in thankless toil, at once put to flight all conceptions of freedom. In the midst of altars fuming to liberty, of harangues glowing with the most pompous protestations of scorn for servitude, of crowds inflated with the presumption that they disdained a master, the eye was insulted with the perpetual chain. The temple of Liberty was built upon the dungeon. Rome came, and unconsciously avenged the insulted name of freedom; the master and the slave were bowed down together, and the dungeon was made the common dwelling of all.

[Sidenote: Where Freedom Reigned in Name Alone]

In the Italian republics of after ages, I saw the vigor that, living in the native soil of empire, has always sprung up on the first call. The time has changed since Italy poured its legions over the world. The volcano was now sleeping; yet the fire still burned within its womb, and threw out in its invisible strength the luxuriant qualities of the land of power. The innate Roman passion for sovereignty was no longer to find its triumphs in the field; it rushed up the paths of a loftier and more solid glory, with a speed and a strength that left mankind wondering below. The arts, adventure, legislation, literature in all its shapes, of the subtle, the rich, and the sublime, were the peaceful triumphs whose laurels will entwine the Italian brow when the wreath of the Cæsars is remembered but as a badge of national folly and individual crime.

But those republics knew freedom only by name. All, within a few years from their birth, had abandoned its living principles—justice, temperance, and truth. I saw the soldiery of neighbor cities marching to mutual devastation, and I said, “Freedom is not here!” I saw abject privation mingled with boundless luxury; in the midst of the noblest works of architecture, the hovel; in the pomps of citizens covered with cloth of gold, gazing groups of faces haggard with beggary and sin; I saw the sold tribunal, the inexorable state prison, the established spy, the protected assassin, the secret torture; and I said, “Freedom is not here!” The pageant filled the streets with more than kingly blazonry, the trumpets flourished, the multitude shouted, the painter covered the walls with immortal emblems, in honor of Freedom; I pointed to the dungeon, the rack, and the dagger! Bitterer and deeper sign than all, I pointed to the exile of exiles, the broken man, whom even the broken trample, of all the undone the most undone—my outcast brother in the blood of Abraham!

I am not about to be his defender; I am not regardless of his tremendous crime; I can not stand up alone against the voice of universal man, which has cried out that thus it shall be; but I say it from the depths of my soul, and as I hope for rest to my miseries, that I never saw freedom survive in that land which loved to smite the Jew!

[Sidenote: The Women of Judea]

I saw one republic more, the mightiest and the last; for the justice of Heaven on the land, the most terrible; for the mercy of Heaven to mankind, the briefest in its devastation. But there all was hypocrisy that was not horror; the only equal rights were those of the equal robber; the sacred figure of Liberty veiled its face; and the offering on its violated shrine was the spoil of honor, bravery, and virtue.

The daughters of our nation, sharing in the rights of its sons, bore the lofty impression that virtuous freedom always stamps on the human features. But they had the softer graces of their sex in a degree unequaled in the ancient world. While the woman of the East was immured behind bolts and bars, from time immemorial a prisoner, and the woman of the West was a toy, a savage, or a slave, our wives and maidens enjoyed the intercourses of society, which their talents were well calculated to cheer and adorn. They were skilled on the harp; their sweet voices were tuned to the richest strains of earth; they were graceful in the dance; the writings of our bards were in their hands; and what nation ever possessed such illustrious founts of thought and virtue! But there was another and a still higher ground for that peculiar expression which makes their countenance still lighten before me, as something of more than mortal beauty. The earliest consciousness of every Jewish woman was, that she might, in the hand of Providence, be the sacred source of a blessing and a glory that throws all imagination into the shade; that of her might be born a Being, to whom earth and all its kings should bow—the more than man! the more than angel! veiling for a little time His splendors in the form of man, to raise Israel to the scepter of the world, to raise that world into a renewed paradise, and then to resume His original glory, and be Sovereign, Creator, God—all in all!

[Sidenote: The Passing Glory of Judah’s Daughters]

This consciousness, however dimmed, was never forgotten; the misfortunes of Judah never breaking the strong link by which we held to the future. The reliance on predictions perpetually renewed, and never more vividly renewed than in the midst of our misfortunes—a reliance commemorated in all the great ceremonies of our nation, in our worship, in our festivals, in every baptism, in every marriage—must have filled a large space in the susceptible mind of woman. And what but the mind forms the countenance? And what must have been the molding of that most magnificent and elevating of all hopes, for centuries, on the most plastic and expressive features in the world?

Sacredly reserved from intermixture with the blood of the stranger, the hope was spread throughout Israel. The line of David was pure, but its connection had shot widely through the land. It was like the Indian tree taking root through a thousand trees. Every Jewish woman might hope to be the living altar on which the Light to lighten the Gentiles was to descend! The humblest might be the blessed among women—the mother of the Messiah! But all is gone! Ages of wandering, wo, poverty, contumely, and mixture of blood have done their work of evil. The loveliness may partially remain, but the glory of Judah’s daughters is no more.

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Chapter VII

The Loss of a Life

[Sidenote: A Wolf Chase among the Mountains]

We continued ascending through the defiles of the mountain range of Carmel. The gorges of the hills gave us alternate glimpses of Lower Galilee, and of the great sea which lay bounding the western horizon with azure. The morning breezes from the land, now in the full vegetation of the rapid spring of Palestine, scarcely ceased to fill the heavens with fragrance, when the sea-wind sprang up and, with the coolness and purity of a gush of fountain-waters, renewed the spirit of life in the air and made the whole caravan forget its fatigue. Our bold hunters spurred down the valleys and up the hills with the wildness of superfluous vigor, tossed their lances into the air, sang their mountain songs, and shouted the cries of the chase and the battle.

On one eventful day a wolf was started from its covert, and every rein was let loose in a moment; nothing could stop the fearlessness of the riders or exhaust the fire of the steeds. The caravan, coming on slowly with the women and children and lengthening out among the passes, was forgotten. I scorned to be left behind, and followed my daring companions at full speed. The wolf led us a long chase; and on the summit of a rock, still blazing in the sunlight like a beacon, while the plain was growing dim, he fought his last fight, and, transfixed with a hundred lances, died the death of a hero. But the spot which we had reached supplied statelier contemplations: we were on the summit of Mount Tabor; the eye wandered over the whole glory of the Land of Promise. To the south extended the mountains of Samaria, their peaked summits glowing in the sun with the colored brilliancy of a chain of gems. To the east lay the lake of Tiberias, a long line of purple. Northward, like a thousand rainbows, ascended, lit by the western flame, the mountains of Gilboa, those memorable hills on which the spear of Saul was broken, and the first curse of our obstinacy was branded upon us in the blood of our first king. Closing the superb circle, and soaring into the very heavens, ascended step by step the Antilibanus.

[Sidenote: Salathiel’s View from Mount Tabor]

Of all the sights that nature offers to the eye and mind of man, mountains have always stirred my strongest feelings. I have seen the ocean when it was turned up from the bottom by tempest, and noon was like night with the conflict of the billows and the storm that tore and scattered them in mist and foam across the sky. I have seen the desert rise around me, and calmly, in the midst of thousands uttering cries of horror and paralyzed by fear, have contemplated the sandy pillars coming like the advance of some gigantic city of conflagration flying across the wilderness, every column glowing with intense fire and every blast with death; the sky vaulted with gloom, the earth a furnace. But with me, the mountain—in tempest or in calm, whether the throne of the thunder or with the evening sun painting its dells and declivities in colors dipped in heaven—has been the source of the most absorbing sensations: there stands magnitude, giving the instant impression of a power above man—grandeur that defies decay—antiquity that tells of ages unnumbered—beauty that the touch of time makes only more beautiful—use exhaustless for the service of man—strength imperishable as the globe; the monument of eternity—the truest earthly emblem of that ever-living, unchangeable, irresistible Majesty by whom and for whom all things were made!

I was gazing on the Antilibanus, and peopling its distant slopes with figures of other worlds ascending and descending, as in the patriarch’s dream, when I was roused by the trampling steed of one of my kinsmen returning with the wolf’s head, the trophy of his superior prowess, at his saddle-bow.

[Sidenote: Jubal’s Tribal Pride]

“So,” said he, “you disdained to share the last battle of that dog of the Galilees? But we shall show you something better worth the chase when we reach home. The first snow that drives the lions down from Lebanon, or the first hot wind that sends the panthers flying before it from Assyria, will have all our villages up in arms; every man who can draw a bow or throw a lance will be on the mountains; and then we shall give you the honors of a hunter in exchange for your philosophy.” He uttered this with a jovial laugh, and a hand grasping mine with the grip of a giant. “Yet,” said he, and a shade passed over his brow, “I wish we had something better to do; you must not look down upon Jubal, and the tribe of your brother Eleazar, as mere rovers after wolves and panthers.”[10]

I willingly declared my respect for the intrepidity and dexterity which the mountain life insured. I applauded its health, activity, and cheerfulness. “Yet,” interrupted Jubal sternly, “what can be done while those Romans are everywhere round us?” He stopped short, reined up his horse with a sudden force that made the animal spring from the ground, flung his lance high in air, caught it in the fall, and having thus relieved his indignation, returned to discuss with me the chances of a Roman war. “Look at those,” said he, pointing to the horsemen who were now bounding across the declivities to rejoin the caravan; “their horses are flame, their bodies are iron, and their souls would be both if they had a leader.” “Eleazar is brave,” I replied. “Brave as his own lance,” was the answer; “no warmer heart, wiser head, or firmer arm moves at this hour within the borders of the land. But he despairs.” “He knows,” said I, “the Roman power and the Jewish weakness.”

“Both—both, too well!” was the reply. “But he forgets the power that is in the cause of a people fighting for their law and for their rights, in the midst of glorious remembrances, nay, in the hope of a help greater than that of the sword. Look at the tract beyond those linden-trees.”

[Sidenote: Jubal, the Jewish Warrior]

He pointed to a broken extent of ground, darkly distinguishable from the rest of the plain. “On that ground, to this moment wearing the look of a grave, was drawn up the host of Sisera; under that ground is its grave. By this stone,” and he struck his lance on a rough pillar defaced by time, “stood Deborah the prophetess, prophesying against the thousands and tens of thousands of the heathen below. On this hill were drawn up the army of Barak, as a drop in the ocean compared with the infidel multitudes. They were the ancestors of the men whom you now see trooping before you; the men of Naphtali, with their brothers of Zebulun. On this spot they gathered their might like the storm of heaven. From this spot they poured down like its whirlwinds and lightnings upon the taunting enemy. God was their leader. They rushed upon the nine hundred scythed chariots, upon the mailed cavalry, upon the countless infantry. Of all, but one escaped from the plain of Jezreel, and that one only to perish in his flight by the degradation of a woman’s hand!” He wheeled round his foaming horse, and appealed to me. “Are the Roman legions more numerous than that host of the dead? Is Israel now less valiant, less wronged, or less indignant? Shall no prophet arise among us again? Shall it not be sung again, as it was then sung to the harps of Israel: ‘Zebulun and Naphtali were a people that jeoparded their lives unto the death in the high places of the field’?”

I looked with involuntary wonder at the change wrought in him by those proud recollections. The rude and jovial hunter was no more; the Jewish warrior stood before me, filled with the double impulse of generous scorn of the oppression and of high dependence on the fate of his nation. His countenance was ennobled, his form seemed to dilate, his voice grew sonorous as a trumpet. A sudden burst of the declining sun broke upon his figure, and threw a sheet of splendor across the scarlet turban, the glittering tunic, the spear-point lifted in the strenuous hand, the richly caparisoned front and sanguine nostrils of his impatient charger. A Gentile would have worshiped him as the tutelar genius of war. I saw in him but the man that our history and our law were ordained beyond all others to have made—the native strength of character raised into heroism by the conviction of a guiding and protecting Providence.

The conversation was not forgotten on either side; and it bore fruit, fearful fruit, in time.

[Sidenote: Salathiel’s Plunge Down the Precipice]

We had reached on our return a commanding point, from which we looked into the depths already filling with twilight, and through whose blue vapors the caravan toiled slowly along, like a wearied fleet in some billowy sea. Suddenly a tumult was perceived below; shouts of confusion and terror rose, and the whole caravan was seen scattering in all directions through the passes. For the first moment we thought that it had been attacked by the mountain robbers. We grasped our lances, and galloped down the side of the hill to charge them, when we were stopped at once by a cry from the ridge which we had just left. It struck through my heart—the voice was Miriam’s. To my unspeakable horror, I saw her dromedary, mad with fear and pouring blood, rush along the edge of the precipice. I saw the figure clinging to his neck. The light forsook my eyes, and but for the grasp of Jubal, I must have fallen to the ground. His voice aroused me. When I looked round again, the shouts had died, the troop had disappeared—it seemed all a dream!

But, again, the shouts came doubling upon the wind, and far as the eye could pierce through the dusk, I saw the white robe of Miriam flying along like a vapor. I threw the reins on my horse’s neck—I roused him with my voice—I rushed with the fearlessness of despair through the hills—I overtook the troop—I outstripped them—still the vision flew before me. At length it sank. The dromedary had plunged down the precipice, a depth of hideous darkness. A torrent roared below. I struck in the spur to follow. My horse wheeled round on the edge; while I strove to force him to the leap, my kinsmen came up, with Eleazar at their head. Bold as they were, they all recoiled from the frightful depth. Even in that wild moment I had time to feel that this was but the beginning of my inflictions, and that I was to be the ruin of all that belonged to me. In consciousness unspeakable, I sprang from my startled steed, and before a hand could check me I plunged in. A cry of astonishment and horror rang in my ears as I fell. The roar of waters was then around me. I struggled with the torrent, gasped, and heard no more.

[Sidenote: The Spring of a Wolf]

This desperate effort saved the life of Miriam. We were found apparently dead, clasped in each other’s arms, at some distance down the stream. The plunge had broken the band by which she was fixed on the saddle. She floated, and we were thrown together by the eddy. After long effort, we were restored. But the lamentations of my matchless wife were restrained beside my couch, only to burst forth when she was alone. We had lost our infant!

The chase of the wolves in the mountain had driven them across the march of the caravan. One of those savages sprang upon the flank of the dromedary. The animal, in the agony of its wounds, burst away; its proverbial fleetness baffled pursuit, and it was almost fortunate that it at length bounded over the precipice, as, in the mountain country, its precious burden must have perished by the lion or by famine. Miriam held her babe with the strong grasp of a mother, but in the torrent that grasp was dissolved. All our search was in vain. My wife wept; but I had in her rescued my chief treasure on earth, and was partially consoled by the same deep feeling which pronounced that I might have been punished by the loss of all.

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Chapter VIII

Salathiel Confronts the Shade of Antiochus

[Sidenote: Salathiel’s Discontent]

Let me hasten through some years.[11] The sunshine of life was gone; in all my desire to conform to the habits of my new career, I found myself incapable of contentment. But the times, that had long resembled the stagnation of a lake, were beginning to be shaken. Rome herself, the prey of conspiracy, gradually held her foreign scepter with a feebler hand. Gaul and Germany were covered with gathering clouds, and their flashes were answered from the Asiatic hills. With the relaxation of the paramount authority, the chain of subordinate oppression, as always happens, was made tighter. As the master was enfeebled, the menials were less in awe; and Judea rapidly felt what must be the evils of a military government without the strictness of military discipline.

[Sidenote: His Painful Recollections]

I protest against being charged with ambition. But I had a painful sense of the guilt of suffering even such powers as I might possess to waste away, without use to some part of mankind. I was weary of the utter unproductiveness of the animal enjoyments, in which I saw the multitude round me content to linger into old age. I longed for an opportunity of contributing my mite to the solid possessions by which posterity is wiser, happier, or purer than the generation before it—some trivial tribute to that mighty stream of time which ought to go on, continually bringing richer fertility as it flowed. I was not grieved by the change which I saw overshadowing the gorgeous empire of Rome. My unspeakable crime may have thrown a deeper tinge on those contemplations. But by a singular fatality, and perhaps for the increase of my punishment, I was left for long periods in each year to the common impressions of life. The wisdom, which even my great misfortune might have forced upon me, was withheld; and the being who, in the conviction of his mysterious destiny, must have looked upon earth and its pursuits as man looks upon the labors and the life of flies—as atoms in the sunshine—as measureless emptiness and trifling—was given over to be disturbed by the impulses of generations on whose dust he was to sit, and to see other generations rise round him, themselves to sink alike into dust, while he still sat an image of endurance, torturing, but imperishable.

There was a season in each year when those recollections returned with overwhelming vividness. If all other knowledge of the approach of the Passover could have escaped me, there were signs, fearful signs, that warned me of that hour of my wo. A periodic dread of the sight of man, a sudden sense of my utter separation from the interests of the transitory beings around me, wild dreams, days of immovable abstraction, yet filled with the breathing picture of all that I had done on the day of my guilt in Jerusalem, rose before me with such intense reality that I lived again through the scene. The successive progress of my crime—the swift and stinging consciousness of condemnation—the flash of fearful knowledge, that showed me futurity—all were felt with the keenness of a being from whom his fleshly nature has been stripped away and the soul bared to every visitation of pain. I stood, like a disembodied spirit, in suffering.

Yet I could not be restrained from following my tribe on their annual progress to the Holy City. To see from afar the towers of the Temple was with me like a craving for life—but I never dared to set my foot within its gates. On some pretense or other, and sometimes through real powerlessness, arising from the conflict of my heart, I lingered behind, yet within the distance from which the city could be seen. There among the precipices I wandered through the day, listening to the various uproar of the mighty multitude, or wistfully catching some echo of the hymns in the Temple—sounds that stole from my eye many a tear—till darkness fell, the city slumbered, and the blast of the Roman trumpets, as they divided the night, reminded me of the fallen glories of my country.

[Sidenote: Salathiel Beside the Lake]

In one of those wanderings I had followed the courses of the Kedron, which, from a brook under the walls of Jerusalem, swells to a river on its descent to the Dead Sea. The blood of the sacrifices from the conduits of the altars curdled on its surface and stained the sands purple. It looked like a wounded vein from the mighty heart above. I still strayed on, wrapped in sad forebodings of the hour when its stains might be of more than sacrifice, until I found myself on the edge of the lake. Who has ever seen that black expanse without a shudder? There were the engulfed cities. Around it life was extinct—no animal bounded—no bird hovered. The distant rushing of the Jordan, as it forced its current through the heavy waters, or the sigh of the wind through the reeds, alone broke the silence of this mighty grave. Of the melancholy objects of nature, none is more depressing than a large expanse of stagnant waters. No gloom of forest or wildness of mountain is so overpowering as this dreary, unrelieved flatness—the marshy border, the sickly vegetation of the shore, the leaden color which even the sky above it wears, tinged by its sepulchral atmosphere. But the waters before me were not left to the dreams of a saddened fancy—they were a sepulcher. Myriads of human beings lay beneath them, entombed in sulfurous beds. The wrath of Heaven had been there! The day of destruction seemed to pass again before my eyes, as I lay gazing upon those sullen depths. I saw them once more a plain covered with richness; cities glittering in the morning sun; multitudes pouring out from their gates to sports and festivals; the land exulting with life and luxuriance: Then a cloud gathered above. I heard the thunder: it was answered by the earthquake. Fire burst from the skies: it was answered by a thousand founts of fire spouting from the plain. The distant hills blazed and threw volcanic showers over the cities. Round them was a tide of burning bitumen. The earthquake heaved again. All sank into the gulf. I heard the roar of the distant waters. They rushed into the bed of fire; the doom was done; the cities of the plain were gone down to the blackness of darkness forever!

[Sidenote: A Meeting]

I was idly watching the bursts of suffocating vapor, that shoot up at intervals from the rising masses of bitumen, when I was startled by a wild laugh and wilder figure beside me. I sprang to my feet, and prepared for defense with my poniard. The figure waved its hand, in sign to sheathe the unnecessary weapon, and said, in a tone strange and melancholy: “You are in my power, but I do not come to injure you. I have been contemplating your countenance for some time; I have seen your disturbed features—your wringing hands—your convulsed form—are you even as I am?”

The voice was singularly mild; yet I never heard a sound that so keenly pierced my brain. The speaker was of the tallest stature of man—every sinew and muscle exhibiting gigantic strength; yet with the symmetry of a Greek statue. But his countenance was the true wonder—it was of the finest mold of manly beauty; the contour was Greek, though the hue was Syrian—yet the dark tinge of country gave way at times to a corpse-like paleness. I had full leisure for the view, for he stood gazing on me without a word and I remained fixed on my defense. At length he said: “Put up that poniard! You could no more hurt me than you could resist me. Look here!” He wrenched a huge mass of rock from the ground and whirled it far into the lake, as if it had been a pebble. I gazed with speechless astonishment. “Yes,” pursued the figure, “they throw me into their prisons—they lash me—they stretch me on the rack—they burn my flesh.” As he spoke he flung aside his robe and showed his broad breast covered with scars. “Short-sighted fools! little they know him who suffers or him who commands. If it were not my will to endure, I could crush my tormentors as I crush an insect. They chain me, too,” said he with a laugh of scorn. He drew out the arm which had been hitherto wrapped in his robe. It was loaded with heavy links of iron. He grasped one of them in his hand, twisted it off with scarcely an effort, and flung it up a sightless distance in the air. “Such are bars and bolts to me! When my time is come to suffer, I submit to be tortured! When that time is past, I tear away their fetters, burst their dungeons, and walk forth trampling their armed men.”

[Sidenote: Salathiel Craves Power]

I sheathed the dagger. “Does this strength amaze you?” said the being; “look to yonder dust”—and he pointed to a cloud of sand that came flying along the shore. “I could outstrip that whirlwind; I could plunge unhurt into the depths of that sea; I could ascend that mountain swifter than the eagle; I could ride that thunder-cloud.”

As he threw himself back, gazing upon the sky with his grand form buoyant with vigor and his arm raised, he looked like one to whom height or depth could offer no obstacle. His mantle flew out along the blast, like the unfurling of a mighty wing. There was something in his look and voice that gave irresistible conviction to his words. Conscious mastery was in all about him. I should not have felt surprise to see him spring up into the clouds!

My mind grew inflamed by his presence. My blood burned with sensations for which language was no name—a thirst of power—a scorn of earth—a proud and fiery longing for the command of the hidden mysteries of nature. I felt as the great ancestor of mankind might have felt when the tempter told him, “Ye shall be even as gods.”

“Give me your power!” I exclaimed; “the world to me is worthless; with man all my ties are broken; let me live in the desert, and be even as you are; give me your power.” “My power?” he repeated, with a ghastly laugh that was echoed round the wilderness by what seemed voices innumerable until it died away in a distant groan. “Look on this forehead!”—he threw back the corner of his mantle. A furrow was drawn round his brow, covered with gore, and gaping like a fresh wound. “Here,” cried he, “sat the diadem. I was Epiphanes.”[12]

[Sidenote: Which Antiochus Promises]

“You, Antiochus! the tyrant—the persecutor—the spoiler—the accursed of Israel!” I bounded backward in sudden horror. I saw before me one of those spirits of the evil dead who are allowed from time to time to reappear on earth in the body, whether of the dead or the living. For some cause that none could unfold, Judea had been, within the last few years, haunted by those beings more than for centuries. Strange rites, dangerously borrowed from the idolaters, were resorted to for our relief from this new terror: the pulling of the mandrake at the eclipse of the moon—incantations—midnight offerings—the root of Baaras, that was said to flash flame and kill the animal that drew it from the ground. Our Sadducees and skeptics, wise in their own conceit, declared that possession was but a human disease, a wilder insanity. But, with the range and misery of madness, there were tremendous distinctions, which raised it beyond all the ravages of the hurt mind or the afflicted frame—the look, the language, the horror, of the possessed were above man. They defied human restraint; they lived in wildernesses where the very serpents died; the fiery sun of the East, the inclemency of the fiercest winter, had no power to break down their strength. But they had stronger signs. They spoke of things to which the wisdom of the wisest was folly; they told of the remotest future, with the force of prophecy; they gave glimpses of a knowledge brought from realms of being inaccessible to living man; last and loftiest sign, they did homage to HIS coming, whom a cloud of darkness, the guilty and impenetrable darkness of the heart, had veiled from my unhappy nation. But their worship was terror—they believed and trembled.

“Power,” said the possessed, and his large and unmoving eyes seemed lighting up with fire from within; “power you shall have, and hate it; wealth you shall have, and hate it; life you shall have, and hate it; yet you shall know the heights and depths of man. You shall be the worm among a nation of worms; you shall be steeped in ruin to the lips; you shall undergo the bitterness of death, until——” His brow writhed; he gnashed his teeth, and convulsively sprang from the ground, as if an arrow had shot through him.

The current of his thoughts suddenly changed. Things above man were not to be uttered to the ear unopened by the grave. “Come,” said he, “son of misfortune, emblem of the nation that living shall die, and dying shall live; that, trampled by all, shall trample upon all; that, bleeding from a thousand wounds, shall be unhurt; that, beggared, shall wield the wealth of nations; that, without a name, shall sway the councils of kings; that, without a city, shall inhabit in all kingdoms; that, scattered like the dust, shall be bound together like the rock; that, perishing by the sword, by the chain, by famine, by fire, shall yet be imperishable, unnumbered, glorious as the stars of heaven.”

[Sidenote: Salathiel Overpowered]

Overwhelmed with sensations, rushing in a flood through my heart, I had cast myself upon the ground; the flashing of the fiery eye before me consumed my blood; and, fainting, I lay with my face upon the sand. But his words were deeply heard; with every sound of his searching voice they struck into my soul. He grasped me; and I was lifted up like an infant in his clutch. “Come,” said he, “and see what is reserved for you and for your people.”

He darted forward with a speed that took away my breath; he ran—he bounded—he flew. “Now, behold,” he uttered in an accent as composed as if he had not moved a limb. I looked, and found myself on one of the hills close to the great southern gate of Jerusalem. Years had passed since I ventured so nigh. But I now gazed on the city of pomp and beauty with an involuntary wonder that I could have ever deserted a scene so lovely and so loved.

It was the twilight of a summer evening. Tower and wall lay bathed in a sea of purple; the Temple rose from its center like an island of light; the host of heaven came riding up the blue fields above; the sounds of day died in harmony. All was the sweetness, calmness, and splendor of a vision painted in the clouds.

“There,” said the possessed, “I was once master, conqueror, avenger; yet I was but the instrument to punish your furious dissensions—your guilty abandonment of the law of your leader—your more than Gentile apostasy from the worship of Him who is to be worshiped with more than the blood of bulls and goats. A power hidden from my idolatrous eyes went before me and broke down the courage of your people. I marched through your gates on the neck of the godless warrior; I plundered the wealth of your rich men, made worldly by their wealth; I slew your priesthood, already the betrayers of their altar; I overthrew your places of worship, already defiled; I covered the ruins with the blood of swine; I raised idols in the sanctuary; I bore away the golden vessels of the Temple, and gave them to the insult of the Syrian; I slew your males, I made captives of your women; I abolished your sacrifices, and pronounced in my hour of blasphemy that within the walls of Jerusalem the flame should never again be kindled to the Supreme. The deed was mine, but the cause was the iniquity of your people.”

The history of devastation roused in me those feelings native to the Jew by which I had been taught to look with abhorrence on the devastator.

“Let me be gone,” I exclaimed, struggling from his grasp. “Strange and terrible being, let me hear no more this outrage on God and man. I am guilty, too guilty, in having listened to you for a moment.”

He laid his hand upon my brow, and I felt my strength dissolve at the touch.

[Sidenote: A Prophecy of the Future]

“Go,” said he, “but first be a witness of the future. A fiercer destroyer than Epiphanes shall come, to punish a darker crime than ever stained your forefathers. A destruction shall come to which the past was the sport of children. Tower and wall, citadel and temple, shall be dust. The sword shall do its work—the chain shall do its work—the flame shall do its work. Bad spirits shall rejoice; good spirits shall weep; Israel shall be clothed in sackcloth and ashes for a time, impenetrable by a created eye. The world shall exult, trample, scorn, and slay. Blindness, madness, and misery shall be the portion of the people. Now, behold!”

He stood, with his arm stretched out toward the Temple. All before me was tranquillity itself; night had suddenly fallen deeper than usual; the stars had been wrapped in clouds, that yet gathered without a wind; a faint tinge of light from the summit of Mount Moriah, the gleam of the never-extinguished altar of the daily sacrifice, alone marked the central court of the Temple. I turned from the almost death-like stillness of the scene, with a look of involuntary disbelief, to the face of my fearful guide; even in the deep darkness every feature of it was strangely visible.

[Sidenote: The Beginning of Evil]

A low murmur from the city caught my ear; it rapidly grew loud, various, wild; it was soon intermingled with the clash of arms. Trumpets now rang; I recognized the charging shout of the Romans; I heard the tumultuous roar of my countrymen in return. The darkness was converted into light; torches blazed along the battlements; the Tower of Antonia, the Roman citadel, with its massy bulwarks and immense altitude, rose from a tossing expanse of flame below like a colossal funeral-pile; I could see on its summit the alarm, the rapid signals, the hasty snatching up of spear and shield, the confusion of the garrison which that night’s vengeance was to offer up on the pile. The roar of battle rose, it deepened into cries of agony, it swelled again into furious exultation——

I thought of my countrymen butchered by some new caprice of power; of my kinsmen, perhaps at that instant involved in the massacre; of the city, every stone and beam of which was dear to my embittered heart, given up to the vengeance of the idolater! The prediction of its ruin was in my ears, and I longed to perish with my tribe. I panted with every shout of the battle; every new sheet of flame that rolled upward from the burning houses fevered me; I longed to rush into the uproar with the speed of the whirlwind. But the terrible hand was still upon my forehead, and I was feeble as a broken reed. “Behold,” said the possessed, “those are but the beginnings of evil.” I felt a sudden return of my strength; I looked up; he was gone!

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Chapter IX

The Romans Driven from the Holy City

[Sidenote: A Scene of Desolation]

I plunged into the valley, and found it filled with fugitives, incapable from terror of giving me any account of the conflict. Women and children, hastily thrown on the mules and camels, continued to pour through the country. The road wound through hills, and tho sometimes approaching near enough to the walls to be illuminated by the blaze of the torches and beacons, yet, from its general darkness and intricacy, I was left to make my way by the sounds of the struggle. But I was quickly within reach of ample evidence of what was doing in that night of havoc. The bend of the road, from which the first view of the grand portico was seen, had been the rallying-point for the multitude driven out by the unexpected resistance of the garrison. The tide of fight had thence ebbed and flowed, and I found the spot covered with the dead and dying. In my haste, I fell over one of the wounded; he groaned and prayed me for a cup of water. I knew the voice of Jairus, one of the boldest of our mountaineers, and bore him to the hillside that he might not be trampled by the crowd. He thanked me, and said: “If you be a man of Israel, fly to Eleazar. Take this spear—another moment may be too late.” I seized the spear and sprang forward.

The multitude had repelled the Romans and forced them up the broad central street of the city. But a reenforcement from the Tower of Antonia had joined the troops, and were driving back the victors with ruinous disorder. I heard the war-cries of the tribes as they called to the rescue, and the charge, “Onward, Judah!” “Ho, for Zebulun!” “Glory to Naphtali!” I thought of the times of Jewish triumph, and saw before me the warriors of the Maccabees. Nerved with new sensations, the strong instincts which make the war-horse paw the ground at the trumpet and make men rush headlong upon death, heightened by the stinging recollections of our days of freedom, I forced my path through the multitude that tossed and whirled like the eddies of the ocean. I found my kinsmen in front, battling desperately against the long spears of a Roman column, that, solid as iron, and favored by the higher ground, was pressing down all before it. The resistance was heroic, but unavailing; and when I burst forward, I found at my side nothing but faces dark with despair or covered with wounds. In front was a wall of shields and helmets, glaring in the light of the conflagration that was now rapidly spreading on all sides. The air was scorching, the smoke rolling against us in huge volumes; burning and loss of blood were consuming the multitude. But what is in the strength of the soldier or the bravery of discipline to daunt the desperate energy of men fighting for their country—and, above all men, of the Israelite, fighting in sight of the profaned Temple? The native frame, exercised by the habits of our temperate and agricultural life, was one of surpassing muscular strength; and man for man thrown naked into the field, we could have torn the Roman garrison into fragments for the fowls of the air. But their arms, and the help which they received from the nature of the ground, were too strong for the assault of men fighting with no shield but their cloaks and no arms but a pilgrim’s staff or some weapon caught up from a dead enemy.

[Sidenote: Salathiel Wounded]

Yet on me there came a wild impression that this night was to make or unmake me; an undefined feeling that in the shedding of my blood in sight of the Temple there might be some palliative, some washing away of my crime. I sprang forward between the combatants and defied the boldest of the legionaries; the battle paused for an instant, and my name was shouted in exultation by ten thousand voices. A shower of lances from the battlements was instantly poured upon me. I felt myself wounded, but the feeling only roused me to bolder daring. Tearing off my gory mantle, I lifted it on the point of my javelin, and, with the poniard in my right hand, devoted the Romans to ruin in the name of the Temple.

[Sidenote: The Death of a Roman Tribune]

The enemy, in their native superstition, shrank from a being who looked the messenger of angry Heaven. The naked figure, the blood streaming from my wounds, the wild and mystic sound of my words, might have reminded them of the diviners who had often terrorized their souls in their own land. I burst into the circle of their spears, waving my standard and calling on my nation to follow. I smote to the right and left. The entrance that I had made in the iron bulwark was instantly filled by the multitude. All discipline now gave way. The weight of the Roman armor was ruinous to men grappled hand to hand by the light and sinewy agility of the Jew. We rushed on, trampling down cuirass and buckler, till we drove the enemy like sheep before us to the first gate of the Tower of Antonia. Arrows, lances, stones, in showers from the battlements, then could not stop the valor of the people. We rushed on to assault the gate. Sabinus, the tribune of the legion, rallied the remnant of the fugitives, and under cover of the battlements made a last attempt to change the fortunes of the night. Exhausted as I was, bruised and bleeding, my feet and hands lacerated with the burning ruins, my tongue cleaving to my mouth with deadly thirst, I rushed upon him. He had been known to the Jews as a tyrant and plunderer for the many years of his command. No trophy of the battle could have been so cheering to them as his head. But he had the bravery of his country, and it was now augmented by rage. The despair of being able to clear himself before imperial jealousy for that night’s disasters must have made life worthless to him. He bounded on the drawbridge at my cry. Our meeting was brief; my poniard broke on his cuirass; his falchion descended with a blow that would have cloven a headpiece of steel. I sprang aside and caught it on the shaft of my javelin standard, which it cut clear in two. I returned the blow with the fragment. The iron pierced his throat; he flung up his hands, staggered back, and dropped dead. The roar of Israel rent the heavens!

Scarcely more alive than the trunk at my feet, I fell back among the throng. But whatever may be the envy of courts, no injustice is done in the field. The successful leader is sure of his reward from the gallant spirits that he has conducted to victory. I was hailed with shouts—I was lifted on the shoulders of the multitude; the men of Naphtali proudly claimed me for their own, and when I clasped the hand of my brave friend Jubal, whom I found in the foremost rank, covered with dust and blood, he exclaimed: “Remember Barak; remember Mount Tabor!”

I looked round in vain for one with whom I had parted but a few days before, and without whom I scarcely dared to meet Miriam. Her noble brother was not to be seen. Had he fallen? Jubal understood my countenance, and mournfully pointed to the citadel, which rose above us, frowning down on our impotent rage.

[Sidenote: Eleazar a Prisoner]

“Eleazar is a prisoner?” I asked.

“There can be no hope for him from the hypocritical clemency of those barbarians of Italy,” was the answer; “it was with him that the insurrection began. Some new Roman insolence had commanded that our people should offer a sacrifice to the image of the emperor—to the polluted, bloodthirsty tyrant of Rome and mankind. Eleazar shrank from this act of horror. The tribune, that dog of Rome, whose tongue you have silenced—so may perish all the enemies of the Holy City!—commanded that our chieftain should be scourged at the altar. The cords were round his arms; the spearmen were at his back; they marched him through the streets calling on all the Jews to look upon the punishment that was equally reserved for all. Our indignation burst forth in groans and prayers. I hastily gathered the males of our tribe; we snatched up what arms we could, and were rushing to his rescue when we saw him sweeping the guard before him. He had broken his bands by a desperate effort. We fell upon the pursuers. Blood was now drawn, and we knew the vengeance of the Romans. To break up and scatter through the country would have been only to give our throats to their cavalry. Eleazar determined to anticipate the attack. Messengers were sent round to the leaders of the tribes, and the seizure of the Roman fortress was resolved on. We gathered at nightfall and drove in the outposts. But the garrison was now roused. We were beaten down by a storm of darts and javelins, and must have been undone but for your appearance. In the first onset, Eleazar, while cheering us to the charge, was struck by a stone from an engine. I saw him fall among a circle of the enemy, and hastened to his rescue, but when I reached the spot he was gone, and my last sight of him was at yonder gate, as he was borne in, waving his hand—his last farewell to Naphtali.”

[Sidenote: The Moment of Execution]

Deep silence followed his broken accents; he hung his head on his hand, and the tears glistened through his fingers. The circle of brave men round us wrapped their heads in their mantles. I could not contain the bitterness of my soul. Years had cemented my friendship for the virtuous and generous-hearted brother of my beloved. He had borne with my waywardness—he had done all that man could do to soften my heart, to enlighten my darkness, to awaken me to a wisdom surpassing rubies. I lifted up my voice and wept. The brazen blast of a trumpet from the battlements suddenly raised all our eyes. Troops moved slowly along the walls of the fortress; they ascended the central tower. Their ranks opened, and in the midst was seen by the torch-light a man of Israel. They had brought him to that place of exposure, in the double cruelty of increasing his torture and ours by death in the presence of the people. A universal groan burst from below. He felt it, and meekly pointed with his hand to that Heaven where no tortures shall disturb the peace of the departed. The startling sound of the trumpet stung the ear again—it was the signal for execution. I saw the archer advance to take aim at him. He drew the shaft. Almost unconsciously I seized a sling from the hands of one of our tribe. I whirled it. The archer dropped dead, with the arrow still on his bow.

[Sidenote: The Rescue of Eleazar]

To those who had not seen the cause, the effect was almost a miracle. The air pealed with acclamation; a thousand slings instantly swept the escort from the battlements; the walls were left naked—ladders were raised—ropes were slung—axes were brandished; the activity of our hunters and mountaineers availed itself of every crevice and projection of the walls; they climbed on each other’s shoulders; they leaped from point to point, where the antelope could have scarcely found footing; they ran over narrow and fenced walls and curtains, where, in open daylight and with his senses awake to the danger, no man could have moved. Torches without number now showered upon all that was combustible. At length, the central tower took fire. We fought no longer in darkness; the flames rolled sheet on sheet above our heads, throwing light over the whole horizon. We were soon in no want of help; the tribes poured in at the sight of the conflagration, and no valor could resist their enthusiasm. Some cried out that they saw beings mightier than man descending to fight the battle of the favored nation; some that the day of Joshua had returned, and that a light of more than earthly luster was visible in the burning! But the battle was no longer doubtful. The Romans, reduced in number by the struggle in the streets, exhausted by the last attack, and aware, from the destruction of their magazines, that their most successful resistance must be ended by famine, called out for terms. I had but one answer—“The life of Eleazar.”[13] The drawbridge fell and he appeared—the next moment he was in my arms!

The garrison marched out. I restrained the violence of their conquerors, irritated by the memory of years of insult. Not a hair of a Roman head was touched. They were led down to the valley of Kedron, where they were disarmed, and thence sent without delay under a safeguard to their countrymen in Idumea. In one night the Holy City was cleared of every foot of the idolater.

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Chapter X

The Fall of Onias

[Sidenote: After the Conflict]

While the people were in a state of the wildest triumph, the joy of their leaders was tempered by many formidable reflections. The power of the enemy was still unshaken; the surprise of a single garrison, tho a distinguished evidence of what might be done by native valor, was trivial on the scale of a war that must be conducted against the mistress of the civilized world. The policy of Rome was known; she never gave up a conquest while it could be retained by the most lavish and persevering expenditure of her strength. Her treasury would be stripped of every talent, and Italy left without a soldier, before she would surrender the most fruitless spot, an acre of sand or a point of rock in Judea.

I went forth, but not among the leaders nor among the people; I turned away equally from the council and the triumph. A deeper feeling urged me to wander round those courts where my spirit had so often turned in my exile. The battle had reached even there, and the pollution of blood was on the consecrated ground. The Roman soldiers, in their advance, had driven the people to take refuge in the cloisters of the Temple, and the dead lying thickly among the columns showed how fierce even that brief and partial struggle had been. With a torch in my hand, I trod through those heaps of what once was man to have one parting look at the scene where I had passed so many blameless hours. I stood before the porch of my own cloister, almost listening for the sound of the familiar voices within. The long interval of time was compressed into an instant.

[Sidenote: The Return Home of Salathiel]

I awoke from this reverie with something like scorn at the idleness of human fancy, and struck open the door. There was no answer; but the bolts, loosened by time, gave way, and I was again the master of my mansion. It had been uninhabited since my flight; why, I could not conceive. But as I passed from room to room I found them all as if they had been left but the hour before. The embroidery, which Miriam wrought with a skill distinguished even among the daughters of the Temple, was still fixed in its frame before the silken couch; there lay the harp that relieved her hours of graceful toil; the tissued sandals were waiting for the delicate feet; the veil, the vermilion mantle that designated her rank, the tabor, the armlets and necklaces of precious stones, still hung upon the tripods, untouched by the spoiler. There was but one evidence of time among them—but that bore its bitter moral. It was the dust that hung heavy upon the curtains of precious needlework and chilled the richness of the Tyrian purple—decay, that teacher without a tongue, the lonely emblem of what the bustle of mankind must come to at last; the dull memorial of the proud, the beautiful, the brave! All was the silence of the tomb! With the torch in my hand, throwing its red reflection on the walls and remembrances round me, I sat, like the mummy of an Egyptian king in the sepulcher—in the midst of the things that I had loved, yet forever divorced from them by an irresistible law!

I impatiently broke forth into the open air. The stars were waning; a gray streak of dawn was whitening the summit of the Mount of Olives. As I passed by Herod’s palace and lifted my eyes in wonder at the unusual sight of a group of Jews keeping watch, where but the day before the Roman governor lorded it and none but the Roman soldier durst stand, I saw Jubal hurrying out and making signs to me through the crowd, from the esplanade above. I was instantly recognized, and all made way for my ascent up those gorgeous and almost countless steps of porphyry that formed one of the wonders of Jerusalem.

“We have been in alarm about you,” said he hastily; “but come to the council; we have wasted half the night in perplexing ourselves. Some are timid, and call out for submission on any terms; some are rash, and would plunge us unprepared into the Roman camps. There are obviously many who without regard for the hope of freedom or the holiness of our cause, look upon the crisis only as a means of personal aggrandizement. And lastly, we are not without our traitors, who confound all opinions and who are making work for Roman gold and iron. Your voice will decide. Speak at once, and speak our mind; your kinsmen will support it with their lives.”

[Sidenote: A Vast Assemblage]

The council was held in the amphitheater of the palace. The heads of families and principal men of the people had crowded into it until the council, instead of the privacy of a few chieftains, assumed the look of a great popular assembly. Tens of thousands had forced themselves into the seats; every bosom responding to every accent of the orator, a mighty instrument vibrating through all its strings to the master’s hand. Accustomed as I was, by the festivals of our nation, to the sight of great bodies of men swayed by a common impulse, I stopped in astonishment at the entrance of the colossal circle. Three-fourths of it was almost totally dark, giving a shadowy intimation of human beings by the light of a few scattered torches, or the feeble dawn that rounded the extreme height with a ring of pale and moon-like rays. But in the center of the arena a fire blazed, and showed the leaders of the deliberation seated in the splendid chairs once assigned to the Roman governors and legionary tribunes. Eleazar filled the temporary throne.

[Illustration: “The archer dropped dead, with the arrow still on his bow.”

[see page 60.

Copyright, 1901, by Funk & Wagnalls Company, N. Y. and London.]

[Sidenote: The Shadow of Rome]

The chief man of the land of Ephraim was haranguing the assembly as I entered. “Go to war with Rome!”[14] pronounced he; “you might as well go to war with the ocean, for her power is as wide; you might as well fight the storm, for her vengeance is as rapid; you might as well call up the armies of Judea against the pestilence, for her sword is as sweeping, as sudden, and as sure. Who but madmen would go to war without allies? and where are yours to be looked for? Rome is the mistress of all nations. Would you make a war of fortresses? Rome has in her possession all your walled towns. Every tower from Dan to Beersheba has a Roman banner on its battlements. Would you meet her in the plain? Where are your horsemen? The Roman cavalry would be upon you before you could draw your swords, and would trample you into the sand. Would you make the campaign in the mountains? The Roman generals would disdain to waste a drop of blood upon you; they would only have to block up the passes and leave famine to do the rest. Harvest is not come, and if it were, you dare not descend to the plains to gather it. You are told to rely upon the strength of the country. Have the fiery sands of the desert, or the marshes of Germany, or the snows of Scythia, or the stormy waters of Britain defended them? Does Egypt, within your sight, give you no example? A land of inexhaustible fertility, crowded with seven millions of men passionately devoted to their country, opulent, brave, and sustained by the countless millions of Africa, with a country defended on both flanks by the wilderness, in the rear inaccessible to the Roman, exposing the narrowest and most defensible front of any nation on earth; yet Egypt, in spite of the Libyan valor and the Greek genius, is garrisoned at this hour by a single Roman legion! The Roman bird grasping the thunder in its talons, and touching with one wing the sunrise and with the other the sunset, throws its shadow over the world. Shall we call it to stoop upon us? Must we spread for it the new banquet of the blood of Israel?”

[Sidenote: The Influence of Onias]

How different is the power of speech upon men sitting in the common, peaceful circumstances of public assemblage, from its tyranny over minds anxious about their own fates! All that I had ever seen of public excitement was stone and ice to the burning interest that hung upon every word of the orator. The name of Onias was famous in Judea, but I now saw him for the first time. His had been a life of ambition, compassed often by desperate means, and wo be to the man who stood between him and his object. By the dagger and by subserviency to the Roman procurators he had risen to the highest rank below the throne. In the distractions of a time which broke off the regular succession of the sons of Aaron, Onias had even been High Priest; but Eleazar, heading the popular indignation, had expelled him from the Temple after one month of troubled supremacy. I could read his history in the haughty figure and daring yet wily visage that stood in bold relief before the central flame. But to the assemblage his declamation had infinite power; they listened as to the words of life and death; they had come, not to delight their ears with showy periods, but to hear what they must do to escape that inexorable fury which might within a few days or hours be let loose upon every individual head. All was alternately the deepest silence and the most tumultuous agitation. At his strong appeals they writhed their athletic forms, they gnashed their teeth, they tore their hair; some crouched to the ground with their faces buried in their hands, as if shutting out the coming horrors; some started upright, brandishing their rude weapons and tossing their naked limbs in gestures of defiance; some sat bending down and throwing back their long locks, that not a syllable might escape; others knelt, with their quivering hands clasped and their pallid countenances turned up in agony of prayer. Many had been wounded, and their foreheads and limbs, hastily bound up, were still stained with gore. Turbans and robes, rent and discolored with dust and burning, were on every side, and the whole immense multitude bore the look of men who had but just struggled out of some great calamity to find themselves on the verge of one still more irremediable.

The orator found that his impression was made, and he hastened to the close. For this he reserved the sting. “If it be the desire of those who seek the downfall of Judah that we should go to war, let it be the first wisdom of those who seek its safety to disappoint, to defy, and to denounce them.” The words were followed by a visible movement among the hearers. “Let an embassy be instantly sent to the proconsul,” said he, “lamenting the excesses of the night and offering hostages for peace.” The silence grew breathless; the orator, wrapped in his robe, and bending his head, like a tiger crouching, waited for the work of the passions; then suddenly starting up and fixing his stormy gaze full on Eleazar, thundered out: “And at the head of those hostages, let the incendiary who caused this night’s havoc be sent, and sent in chains!”

[Sidenote: Salathiel Turns the Tide]

The words were received with fierce applause by the assemblage, and crowds rushed into the arena to enforce them by the seizure of Eleazar. I glanced at him; his life hung by a hair, but not a feature of his noble countenance was disturbed. I sprang upon the pavement at the foot of the throne; every moment was precious; the multitude were raging with the fury of wild beasts. My voice was at length heard; the name of Salathiel had become powerful, and the tumult partially subsided. My words were few, but they came from the heart. I asked them, was it to be thought of that they should deliver up men of their own nation, of their purest blood, the last scions of the noblest families of Israel, into the hands of the idolater! And for what crime? For an act which every true Israelite would glory to have done: for rescuing the altar of the living God from pollution. I bade them beware of dipping their hands in righteous blood, for the gratification of a revenge that had for twenty years poisoned the breast of a hoary traitor to his priesthood and his country. There was a dead silence. I continued:

“We are threatened with the irresistible power of Rome. Are we to forget that Rome is at this moment torn with internal miseries, her provinces in revolt, her senate decimated, her citizens turned into a mass of jailers and prisoners, and, darkest sign of degradation, that Nero is upon her throne?” The multitude began to be moved.

“Whom,” said I, “have we conquered this night? A Roman garrison. Where have we conquered them? In the midst of their walls and machines. By whom was the conquest achieved? By the unarmed, undisciplined, unguided men of Israel. The shepherd and the tiller of the ground, with but the staff and sling, smote the cuirassed Roman, as the son of Jesse smote the Philistine!”

The native bravery of the people lived again, and they shouted, in the language of the Temple: “Glory to the King of Israel! Glory to the God of David!”

[Sidenote: The Declaration of War]

Onias saw the tide turning, and started from his seat to address the assembly; but he was overpowered with outcries of anger. Furious at the loss of his fame and his revenge, he rushed through the arena toward the spot where I stood. Jubal, ever gallant and watchful, bounded to my side, and seizing the traitor’s hand in the act of unsheathing a dagger, wrested the weapon from him, and was ready to plunge it in his heart at a sign from me. Eleazar’s sonorous voice was then first heard. “Let no violence be done upon that slave of his passions. No Jewish blood must stain our holy cause. Return, Onias, to your tribe, and give the rest of your days to repentance.” Jubal cast the baffled homicide from his grasp far into the crowd.

The universal echo now was “war!” “Ruin to the idolater. War for the Temple.” “War,” I exclaimed, “is wisdom, honor, security. Let us bow our necks again, and we shall be rewarded by the ax. The Romans never forgive until the brave man who resists is either a slave or a corpse; the work of this night has put us beyond pardon, and our only hope is in arms, the appeal to that sovereign justice before which nothing is strong but virtue, truth, and patriotism. War is inevitable.”

My words, few as they were, rekindled the chilled ardor of the national heart. They were followed by shouts for instant battle. “War against the world! liberty to Israel!” Some voices began a hymn; the habits of the people prepared them for this powerful mode of expressing their sympathies. The whole assembly spontaneously stood up and joined in the hymn. The magnificent invocation of David, “Let God arise, and let his enemies be scattered,” ascended in solemn harmonies on the wings of the morning. It was heard over the awaking city, and answered; the chant of glory spread to the encampments on the surrounding hills, and in every pause we heard the responses rolling on the air in rich thunder.

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Chapter XI

The Strength of Judea

[Sidenote: The Spirit of War]

The result of our deliberation was that Israel should be summoned to make a last grand effort; that Jerusalem should be left with a strong garrison, as the center of the armies; and that every chieftain should set forth to stir up the energies of his people.

Eleazar and his kinsmen were instantly upon the road to the mountains, and all was haste and that mixture of anxiety and animation which makes all other life tasteless and colorless to the warrior. With what new vividness did the coming conflict invest the varied and romantic country through which we had already journeyed so often! The hill, the ravine, the superb sweep of forest that we once looked on with but the vague indulgence of the picturesque eye, now filled us with the vision of camps and battles. Hunters of the lion, we had felt something of this interest in tracing the ground where we were to combat the kingly savage. But what were the triumphs of the chase to the mighty chances of that struggle in which a kingdom was to be the field and the Roman glory the prey!

[Sidenote: Salathiel Reflects]

Man is belligerent by nature, and the thought of war summons up sensations and even faculties within him that in the common course of life would have been no more discoverable than the bottom of the sea; the moral earthquake must come to open the heart for all men to gaze upon. Even Eleazar’s calm and grave wisdom felt the spirit of the time, and he reasoned on the probabilities of the struggle with the lofty ardor of a king preparing to win a new throne. Jubal’s sanguine temper was unrestrainable; he was the war-horse in the sight of the banners; his bronzed cheek glowed with hope and exultation. He saw in every cloud of dust a Roman squadron, and grasped his lance and wheeled his foaming charger with the eager joy of a soldier longing to assuage his thirst for battle.

The weight on my melancholy mind was beyond the power of chance or time to remove, but a new strength was in the crisis. The world to me was covered with clouds eternal, but it was now brightened by a wild and keen luster; I saw my way by the lightning. An irresistible conviction still told me that the last day of Israel was approaching, and that no sacrifice of valor or victory could avert the ruin. In the midst of the loudest exhilaration of the fearless hearts around me, the picture of the coming ruin would grow upon my eyes.[15] I saw my generous friends perish one by one; my household desolate; every name that I ever loved passed away. When I bent my eyes round the horizon luxuriating in the golden sunshine of the east, I saw but a huge altar, covered with the fatal offerings of a slaughtered people.

[Sidenote: The Memory of Past Years]

And this was seen, not with the misty uncertainty of a mind prone to dreams of evil, but with a clearness of foresight, a distinct and defined reality, that left no room for conjecture. Yet—and here was the bitterest part of my meditation—what was all this ruin to me? What were those men and women and households and lands but as the leaves on the wind to me! I might strive in the last extremities of their struggle. I might undergo the agonies of death with them a thousand times; and I inwardly pledged myself never to desert their cause while through pain or sorrow I could cling to it; but this devotion, however protracted, must have an end. I must see the final hour of them all, and more unhappy, more destitute, more undone than all, I must be deprived of the consolation of making my tomb with the righteous and laying my weary heart in the slumbers of their grave! Still, I experienced more than the keenest fervor of the impulse which was now burning around me. With me it was not kingly care, nor the animal ardency of the soldier. It was the high stimulation of something like the infusion of a new principle of existence. I felt as if I had become the vehicle of a descended spirit. A ceaseless current of thought ran through my brain. Old knowledge that I had utterly forgotten revived in me with spontaneous freshness. Casual impressions and long past years arose, with their stamps and marks as clear as if a hoard of medals had been suddenly brought to light and thrown before me. I ran over in my recollection persons and names with painful accuracy. The conceptions of those for whom I once felt habitual deference were now seen by me in their nakedness. All that was habitual was passed away; I saw intuitively the vanity and giddiness, the inconsequential reasoning, the bewildering prejudice, that made up what in other days I had called the wisdom of the wise.

As I threw out in the most unpremeditated language the ideas thus glowing and struggling for escape, I found that the impression of some extraordinary excitement in me was universal. Accustomed to be heard with the attention due to my rank, I now saw the eyes of my fellow travelers turned on me with an evident and deferential surprise. When I talked of the hopes of the country, of the resources of the enemy, of the kingdoms that would be ready to make common cause with us against the galling tyranny of Nero, of the glory of fighting for our altars, and of the imperishable honors of those whose blood earned peace for their children, they listened as to something more than man. “Was I the prophet delegated at last to lead Judea to her glory?”

At those discourses, bursting from my lips with unconscious fire, the old men would vow the remnant of their days to the field; the young would sweep over the country performing the evolutions of the Roman cavalry, then return brandishing their weapons and demanding to be let loose on the first cohort that crossed the horizon. With me every pulse now was war. The interest which this new direction of our minds gave to all things grew more intense. I spurred to the barren heath; it had now no deformity, for upon it I saw the spot from which battle might be offered to an army advancing through the valley below. The marsh that spread its yellow stagnation over the plain might be worth a province for the protection of my camp. The thicket, the broken bank of the torrent, the bluff promontory, the rock, the sand, every repellent feature of the landscape was invested with the value of a thing of life and death, a portion of the great stake in the game that was so soon to be played for restoration or ruin.

[Sidenote: The Land of Judea]

Those are the delights of soldiership, the indescribable and brilliant colorings which the sense of danger, the desire for fame, and the hope of triumph throw over life and nature. Yet, if war was ever to be forgiven for its cause, to be justified by the high remembrances and desperate injuries of a people, or to be encouraged by the physical strength of a country, it was this, the final war of Israel. In all my wanderings I have seen no kingdom, for defense, equal to Judea.[16] It had in the highest degree the three grand essentials, compactness of territory, density of population, and strength of frontier. If I were at this hour to be sent forth to select from the earth a kingdom, I should say, even extinguishing the recollections of my being and the love which I bear to the very weeds of my country—for beauty, for climate, for natural wealth, and for invincible security, give me Judea!

The Land of Promise had been chosen by the Supreme Wisdom for the inheritance of a people destined to be unconquerable while they continued pure. It was surrounded on all sides but one by mountains and deserts, and that one was defended by the sea, which at the same time opened to it the intercourse with the richest countries of the west. On the north, opposed to the vast population of Asia Minor, it was protected by the double range of the Libanus and Antilibanus, a region of forests and defiles at all seasons almost impassable to chariots and cavalry, and during winter barred up with torrents and snows. The whole frontier to the east and south was a wall of mountain rising from a desert—a durable barrier over which no enemy, exhausted by the privations of an Asiatic march, could force their way against a brave army waiting fresh within its own confines. But even if the Syrian wastes of sand and the fiery soil of Arabia left the invaders strength to master the mountain defenses, the whole interior was full of the finest positions for defense that ever caught the soldier’s eye.

[Sidenote: The Preparations for War]

All the mountains sent branches through the champaign. As we spurred up the sides of Carmel, we saw an horizon covered with cloud-like hills. Every city was built on an eminence and capable of being instantly converted into a fortress. But while an army kept the field, the larger operations of strategy would have found matchless support in the course of the Jordan, the second defense of Judea; a line passing through the whole central country from north to south, with the lake of Tiberias and the lake Asphaltites at either extreme, at once defending and supplying the movements in front, flank, and rear.

The territory thus defensible had an additional and superior strength in the character and habits of its population. In a space of two hundred miles long by a hundred broad, its inhabitants once amounted to nearly four millions, tillers of the soil, bold tribes, invigorated by their life of industry and connected with one another by the most intimate and frequent intercourse, under the divine command. By the law of Moses—may he rest in glory!—every man from twenty to sixty was liable to be called on for the general defense; and the customary armament of the tribes was appointed at six hundred thousand men!

The munitions of war were in abundance. All the varieties of troops known in the ancient armies were to be found in Judea, in the highest discipline; from the spearsman to the archer and the slinger, from the heavy-armed soldier of the fortress to the ranger of the desert and the mountain. Cavalry was prohibited, for the great purpose of the Jewish armament was defense. The spirit of the Jewish code was peace. By the prohibition of cavalry, no conquests could be made on the bordering kingdoms of interminable plains. The command that the males of the tribes should go up thrice in the year to the great festivals of Jerusalem was equally opposed to the encroachments on the neighboring states. It was not until Israel had abandoned the purity of the original covenant with Heaven that the evils of ambition or tyranny were felt within her borders.

Israel’s whole policy was under a divine sanction, and her whole preservation was distinguished by the perpetual agency of miracle, for the obvious purpose of compelling the people to know the God of their fathers. But the physical strength of such a people in such a territory was incalculable. Severity of climate will not ultimately repel an invader, for that severity scatters and exhausts the native population. Difficulties of country have always been overcome by a daring invader in the attack of a feeble or negligent people. To what nation were their snows, their marshes, or their sands a barrier against the great armies of the ancient or the modern world? The Alps and the Pyrenees have been passed as often as they have been attempted. But no empire can conquer a nation of millions of men determined to resist; no army that could be thrown across the frontier would find the means of penetrating through a compact population, of which every man was a soldier and every soldier was fighting for his own.

[Sidenote: The Effect of Determined Resistance]

The Jew was, by his law, a free proprietor of the soil.[17] He was no serf, no broken vassal. He inherited his portion of the land by an irrevocable title. Debt, misfortune, or time could not extinguish his right. Capable of being alienated from him for a few years, the land was returned to him at the Jubilee. He was then once more a possessor, the master of a competence, and restored to his rank amongst his fellow men. This bond, the most benevolent and the strongest that ever bound man to a country, was the bond of the Covenant. If Israel had held the institutions of her lawgiver inviolate, she would have seen the Assyrian, the Egyptian, and the Roman, with all their multitudes, only food for the vulture. But we were a rebellious people; we sullied the purity of the Mosaic ordinances; we abandoned the sublime ceremonial of divine worship for the profligate rites of paganism; we rejected the Lord of the theocracy for the pomps of an earthly king. Then the mighty protection that had been to us as an eagle’s wings and as a wall of fire was withdrawn. Our first punishment was by our own hand; the union of Israel was a band of flax in the flame. The tribes revolted. The time was come for the hostile idolater to do his work. We were overwhelmed by enemies in alliance with our own blood. The banners of Jacob were seen waving beside the banners of Ashtaroth and Apis. An opening was made into the bosom of the land for all invasion; the barriers of the mountain and the desert were in vain; the proverbial bravery of the Jew only rendered his chain more severe; and the policy that of old united the highest wisdom with the most benevolent mercy became at once the scoff and problem of the pagan world.

[Sidenote: The Land of Invasion]

But opulence, salubrity, and luxuriance of production belonged to the site of the land of Israel. It lay central between the richest regions of the world. It was the natural road of the traffic of India with the west; that traffic which raised Tyre and Sidon from rocks and shallows on a fragment of the shore of Judea into magnificent cities, and which was yet to raise into political power and unrivaled wealth the rocks and shallows of the remotest shore of the Mediterranean. Our mountain ranges tempered the hot winds from the wilderness. The sea cooled the summer heats with the living breeze, and tempered the chill of winter. Our fields teemed with perpetual fruits and flowers.

The extent of the land, tho narrow, when contrasted with the surrounding kingdoms, was yet not to be measured by its lineal boundaries;[18] a country intersected everywhere by chains of hills capable of cultivation to the summit, alike multiplies its surface and varies its climate. We had at the foot of the hill the products of the torrid zone; on its side those of the temperate; on its summit the robust vegetation of the north. The ascending circles of the orange-grove, the vineyard, and the forest covered it with perpetual beauty.

This scene of matchless productiveness is fair and fertile no more. For ages before my eyes opened on the land of my fathers the national misfortunes had impaired its original loveliness. The schism of the tribes, the ravages of successive invaders, and still more, the continued presence of the idolater and the alien in the heart of the land, turned large portions of it into desert. The final fall almost destroyed the traces of its fruitfulness. What can be demanded from the soil lorded over by the tyranny of the Moslem, stripped of its population, and given up to the mendicant, the monk, and the robber?

But more than human evil smote my unhappy country. The curse pronounced by our great prophet three thousand years ago has been deeply fulfilled. “The stranger that shall come from a far land shall say, when he beholdeth the plagues of the land, and the sickness that the Lord hath laid upon it, the land of brimstone and salt and burning, even all nations shall say, Wherefore hath the Lord done this unto this land? What meaneth the heat of this great anger? Then men shall say, Because they have forsaken the covenant of the Lord God of their fathers!”

The soil has been blasted. Sterility has struck into its heart. Whole provinces are covered with sands and ashes. It has the look of an exhausted volcano.

[Sidenote: What Might Have Been]

Yet, what might have been the progress of this people! The glory of Israel is no fine vision of the fancy. The same prophetic word which has given terrible demonstration of its reality in our ruin declares the hope once held forth to our obedience. Judea was to have borne the first rank among nations; to have been an object of universal honor; to have been unconquerable; to have enjoyed unwearied fertility; to have been protected from the casualties of the elements; to have been free from disease, the life of its people continuing to the farthest limit of our nature. A blessing was to be upon the labors, the possessions, and the persons of the tribes; all Israel a holy nation in the highest sense of the word—a sovereign race to which the world should pay a willing and happy homage.

What must have been the operation of this illustrious instance of the preservative power of Heaven on the darkened empires; of the scriptural lights perpetually beaming from Judea; of the living, palpable happiness and obedience to the Supreme; of the perpetual security of the land in the divine protection; of the internal peace, health, plenteousness, and freedom? Man is weak and passionate, but no blindness could have hid from his contemplations this proof of the human value of virtue.

[Sidenote: The Influence of Judea]

We must add to this the direct influence of a governing people, placed in its rank for the express purpose of a guide to nations. Combining the knowledge and devotedness of a priesthood with the actual power and dignity of kings; by its own constitution as safe from all encroachments as prohibited from all aggression; informed by the immediate wisdom and sustained by the visible arm of Omnipotence, Judea might have changed the earth into a paradise, and raised universal man to the highest happiness, knowledge, and grandeur of human nature!

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Chapter XII

The Prince of Naphtali Confronts Desolation

[Sidenote: The Choice of a Leader]

War was now inevitable. Attempts had been made by our rulers to propitiate the Roman emperor, but their answer was the march of a legion to Jerusalem. The seizure of some of the people who had made themselves conspicuous in the late capture of the citadel followed, and an order was despatched to the governor of Galilee for the execution of Eleazar. His tribe instantly assembled and all voices were for resistance. My noble kinsman, still pacific, offered himself as the victim. But this generous sacrifice we all denounced, and called for war. The appointment of a leader was next debated in a hurried assemblage, to which every head of a village came in arms. No man could contest the command with Eleazar. But he declined it from a sense of his inexperience in war in a few simple words.

Then, suddenly bursting into ardor, he exclaimed: “Our war is holy! It is not to be hazarded on the claims of hereditary rank, personal freedom, or even on national favoritism. The only claims which the nation must acknowledge in its extremity are the rights of tried talent, experienced intrepidity, and unquestionable service. Such a leader stands among us at this moment.” Every eye was turned upon me. “Yes,” exclaimed my noble kinsman, “you have already made your choice. Genius, valor, and success have combined to mark one man for the leader of Israel. He is worthy of the diadem.” Then turning to me and lifting his hand, as if he was letting fall the diadem upon my head, “Go forth,” cried he in a tone of almost prophetic grandeur, “Go forth, prince of Naphtali, leader of Israel, to break the chains of Judah and conquer in the cause of man and Heaven!” The words were received with acclamation.

I vainly protested against the general voice, that I was a priest of the Temple of the house of Aaron, of the tribe of Levi, and bound to Naphtali only by ties of kindred and gratitude. I was answered by a multitude of voices that my summons was actually in the service of the Temple; that war extinguished all office but that of defending the country; that I had long retired from the duties of the priesthood; that Moses was at once the priest and the leader; that Samuel was at once the prophet and the sovereign of Israel; above all, that I had shown myself, by daring and success, almost superior to man, the Heaven-elected leader of Israel.

[Sidenote: Salathiel Becomes a Leader]

I acknowledged that my heart was with the answerers, and I at length gave way to what even I believed to be the will of more than man. A thousand falchions, wielded by as sinewy hands as ever drew sword, were instantly moved round my head. I was placed on a shield, and in this ancient fashion of our countrymen I was inaugurated prince of Naphtali. This was one of the blinding flashes that broke in from time to time on my gloomy career. When the assemblage dispersed and I returned toward my mountain home, I was still in the excitement of the scene. I even began to imagine that my terrible sentence was about to be lightened, perhaps to pass away; my station in life was now fixed; services of the highest rank in the noblest cause were before me, and I felt myself exclaiming, even to the solitude, “I am prince of Naphtali!”[19] My exultation was soon to have a fall.

It was the evening of one of the freshest days of the loveliest season of earth, the spring of Palestine. All nature was clothed with its robe of genial beauty; the olives on the higher grounds had put forth their first green, and with every slight gust that swept across them heaved like sheets of emerald; the birds sang in a thousand notes from every bush; the sheep and camels lay in the meadows visibly enjoying the sweet air; the shepherds sat gathered together on the side of some gentle eminence, talking, or listening to the songs of the maidens who came in long lines to the fountains below. The heavens gave prospect of a glorious day in the colors shown only to the Oriental eyes; hues so brilliant that many a traveler stops on the verge of the valleys arrested, in his haste homeward, by the pomp above. All was the loveliness and joy of pastoral life, in the only country where I ever found it realized. The mind is to be medicined by natural loveliness, and mine was doubly cheered. To return to our home is at all times a delight; but the new conjuncture, the high hopes of the future, and the consciousness that a career of the most distinguished honors might be opening before my steps, made this return more vivid than all the past; and when we reached the foot of the long ascent from which my dwelling was visible I felt an impatience beyond restraint, and spurred up the hill with my tidings. How fine the ear becomes when quickened by the heart! As the mountain road, now more difficult by the darkness of the wild pines and cedars that crowned the summit, compelled me to slacken my pace, I thought that I could distinguish the household voices, the barking of my hounds, and the laugh of the retainers and peasantry that during the summer crowded my doors.

[Sidenote: Salathiel’s Daughters]

I pictured the dearer group that had so often welcomed me. The early and cruel loss of my son had not been repaired. I was not destined to be the father of a race; but two daughters were given to me, and in the absence of all ambition, they were more than a recompense. Salome, the elder, was now approaching womanhood; she had the dark eyes and animated beauty of her mother; the foot of the antelope was not lighter; and her wreathed smile, her laugh of innocence, and her buoyancy of soul forbade sorrow in her sight. How changed I afterward saw that face of living joy! What floods of sorrow bathed those cheeks, that once shamed the Persian rose!

The younger was scarcely more than a child; her mind and her form were yet equally in the bud, but she had an eye of the deepest azure, a living star; and even in her playfulness there was an elevation, a lofty and fervent spirit, that made me often forget her years. She was mistress of music almost by nature, and the cadences and rich modulations that poured from her harp, under fingers slight and feeble, as if the stalks of flowers had been flung across the strings, were like secrets of harmony treasured for her touch alone. Our prophets, the true masters of the sublime, were her rapturous study. Their truths might yet be veiled, but their genius blazed broad upon her sensitive soul.

[Sidenote: A Sound in the Thicket]

I pictured my children hastening through the portal, hand in hand with their noble mother, still in the prime of matronly beauty, to give me welcome. The light thickened, and the intricacy of the forest impeded me. At length, wearied by the delay, I sprang from my horse, left him to make his way as best he could, and pushed forward through a thicket which crept round the skirts of the forest. As I struggled onward, listening with sharpened anxiety for every sound of home, I heard a noise like that of a wild beast rustling close at my side. The thicket was now dark. My eyes were useless. I drew my simitar, and plunged it straight before me. The blow was instantly followed by a shriek. Friend or enemy, silence was now impossible, and I demanded who was nigh. I was answered but by groans; my next step was on a human body. Shocked and startled, I lifted it in my arms and bore the dying man to an open space where the moonlight glimmered. To my unspeakable horror, he was one of my most favored attendants, whom I had left in the principal charge of my household; I had slain him. I tore up my mantle to stanch his wound, but he fiercely repelled my hand. In an undefined dread of some evil to my family, I commanded him to speak, if but one word, and tell me that all was safe. He buried his face in his mantle.

In the whirlwind of my thoughts I flung him from me, that I might go forward and know the good or evil; but he clung round my feet, and exerted his last breath to implore me not to leave him to die alone.

“You have killed me,” said he, in broken accents; “but it was only the hand of the Avenger. I was corrupted by gold. You have terrible enemies among the leaders of Jerusalem; a desperate deed has been done.”

My suspense amounted to agony; I made another effort to cast off the trammels of the assassin, but he still implored.

“Evil things were whispered against you. I was told that you had been convicted of a horrible crime.” The sound shot through my senses; he must have felt the trembling of my frame, for he for the first time looked upon my face.

“My sight is gone,” groaned he, and fell back. I dared not meet the glance even of his clouding eyes. “They said that you were condemned to an unspeakable punishment and that the man who swept the world of you and yours did God service. In my hour of sin the tempter met me, and this day from sunrise have I lurked on your road to strike my benefactor and my lord. In the dark I lost my way in the thicket; but vengeance found me.”

“My wife, my children, are they safe?” I exclaimed.

He quivered, relaxed his hold, and uttering “Forgive!” two or three times, with nervous agony, expired.

[Sidenote: Salathiel Finds Ruin]

A single bound from this spot of death placed me on a point of rock from which I had often gazed on my little world in the valley. The moon was now bright and the view unobstructed. I looked down. Were my eyes dim? There was no habitation beneath me; the grove, the garden, were there, sleeping in the moonlight; but all that had the semblance of life was gone! I rushed down and found myself among ruins and ashes still hot. I called aloud—in terror and distraction, I yelled to the night, but no voice answered me. My foot struck upon something in the grass; it was a sword dyed with recent blood. There had been burning, plunder, slaughter here in this treasure-house of my heart; desolation had been busy in the center of what was to me life—more than life. I raved; I flew through the fields; I rushed back, to convince myself that I was not in some frightful dream. What I endured that night I never endured again; that conflict of fear, astonishment, love, and misery could be contained but once even in my bosom; in all others it must have been death. In the moment of reviving hope I had been smitten. While my spirit was ascending on the wings of justified ambition and sacred love of country, I had been dashed down to earth, a desolate and a desperate man.

What I did thenceforth, or how I passed through that night, I know not; but I was found in the morning with my robe fantastically thrown over me like a royal mantle, and a fragment of half-burned wood for a scepter in my hand, performing the part of a monarch, giving orders for the rebuilding of my palace, and marshaling the movements of an army of shrubs and weeds. I was led away with the lofty reluctance of a captive sovereign, to the household of Eleazar.

[Sidenote: A Fruitless Search]

The wrath and grief of my kinsmen were without bounds. Every defile of the mountains was searched—every straggler seized; messengers were despatched across the frontier with offers of ransom to the chiefs of the desert, in case my family should have escaped the sword. Threats of severe retaliation were used by the Roman governor of the province; all was in vain. The only intelligence was from a shepherd, who, two nights before, had seen a troop which he supposed to be Arabs, ride swiftly by the gates of Kuriathim, our nearest city; but this intelligence only added to the misfortune. The habits of those robbers were proverbially savage; they lived by the torch and the sword; they slaughtered the men without mercy; the females they generally sold into endless captivity. To leave no trace of their route, they slaughtered the captives whom they could not carry through their hurried marches. To leave no trace of what they had done, they burned the place of massacre. But this ruin was from other and more malignant hands!

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