“Tarry thou till I come!”

[[see page 3.]

COPYRIGHT 1901 BY FUNK & WAGNALLS CO.

THULSTRUP ILLUSTRATED EDITION

TARRY THOU
TILL I COME
OR
SALATHIEL, THE WANDERING JEW

By
GEORGE CROLY

Introductory Letter by
Gen. LEWIS WALLACE

With Twenty Full-Page Drawings
by
T. de THULSTRUP

NEW YORK & LONDON
FUNK & WAGNALLS COMPANY
·M·C·M·I·

Copyright, 1901
By FUNK & WAGNALLS COMPANY

Published May, 1901
[Registered at Stationers’ Hall, London]
Printed in the United States of America

PUBLISHERS’ NOTE

This remarkable historical romance is closely associated by the author in his brief Preface with the early Second Coming of Christ, a belief that is held to-day by a rapidly increasing number of people in all parts of Christendom.

The story was first published in 1827, and was issued at different times under different titles, as “Salathiel, a Story of the Past, the Present, and the Future”; and “Salathiel, the Immortal, or the Wandering Jew.” It had wide popularity for a generation or more, the leading critical journals in England and America giving it great praise.

In the present revival of the story, many typographical, and some other errors, that crept into the various editions, have been carefully corrected, chapter and marginal headings have been added, and the dialogs have been generally broken up into paragraphs in harmony with the fashion of to-day, and the whole book has been carefully annotated.

We are glad in the belief that we have carried out successfully General Lewis Wallace’s wish, that the story be worthily illustrated. We were fortunate in securing a masterful artist who shared the great enthusiasm of the author of “Ben Hur” for this story of Croly’s, and in his drawings Mr. de Thulstrup has spared neither time nor labor, spending many months, both here and in Europe, in the study of the details necessary to perfect the pictures. We feel assured that General Wallace will now wish to recast the closing sentence of his Introductory Letter.

The words that doomed Salathiel to immortality on earth, “Tarry Thou Till I Come,” so fit the story that we have ventured to make them the chief title, and have so combined the new with the old that no one will be misled. The colored frontispiece by Mr. de Thulstrup happily illustrates the new title.

In the Appendix will be found a series of letters written for this publication by thirty or more representative Jewish scholars, on “Jesus of Nazareth from the Present Jewish Point of View.” The Appendix contains other matter suggested by the legend of “The Wandering Jew,” prepared by D. S. Gregory, LL.D., and by Arthur T. Pierson, D.D. The general Introduction is self-explanatory.

It is believed that no book now before the public can be made nearly so helpful as this one in interesting the minds of readers, young and old, in the events that closely followed in Palestine the Crucifixion, and marked the conflict between early Judaism and Christianity, and ended in the final destruction of Jerusalem.

The reader will now and then be reminded of some of the more striking passages in two or three of the popular religious novels published in the past decade. But, as it is not given even to great geniuses to remember forward, our author will scarcely be exposed to the accusation of having borrowed from these later writers.

All existing rights in this book, held in this country or England, have been purchased by us.

Funk and Wagnalls Company.

New York and London.

INTRODUCTORY LETTER

From General Lewis Wallace
(Author of “Ben Hur”)

Crawfordsville, Ind., September 1, 1900.

Gentlemen: I have learned that you have in mind the issuance of a new edition of Croly’s story of “The Wandering Jew.” Perhaps you will lend a willing ear to a suggestion or two, so much is the book in my love.

In my judgment, the six greatest English novels are “Ivanhoe,” “The Last of the Barons,” “The Tale of Two Cities,” “Jane Eyre,” “Hypatia,” and this romance of Croly’s. If Shakespeare had never been born; if Milton, Byron, and Tennyson were singers to be, and Bacon, Darwin, and Ruskin unknown; if there had been no British dramatists, no British historians, no works in British libraries significant of British science and philosophy, no alcoves glutted with bookish remains of British moralists and preachers, still the six works named would of themselves suffice to constitute a British literature.

This is bold, I know: bold in assertion, and even bolder in the lift of Croly’s story from the ground to a place in the upper sky. Can I justify the classification? Certainly, if only your patience and my time permitted.

Here, to begin, is a broad adverse generality,—the very worst of possible arguments against the book is, that of the five great classics with which I have thrust it into association, it is the least known to-day by the general public. Yet the admission is not in the least decisive of merits; in inquisitorial phrase it serves merely to put objections to question.

It is a religious novel, says one, sneering. That used to be urged against the “Pilgrim’s Progress”; yet the Pilgrim goes marching on, and I fancy his progress will stop only when the world stops. And how is it that of late years, at least, several novels religious in tone and spirit have been more than well received? Indeed, is it not a fact that some of them have attained extraordinary popularity, thus gainsaying the narrow Puritanism which less than a century ago put the novel under ban, regardless of kind and excellence?

Another objection. The style is somewhat too exalted; and then the critic makes haste to stretch the alleged defect to the author’s want of art. Now, I would not like to be dogmatic or unkind, but such points certainly disclose a lamentable comprehension. Why, coiled up in that objection lie the very excellencies of the book. How, pray, could exaltation be avoided? Who does not know that in description the sublime always imposes its own laws? Imagine, if you can, the commonplace used by a narrator struggling to convey an idea of the tremendous in a hurricane at sea.

And as to a want of art, I would like to say mildly that the absence of art in the book is its main charm. Any, the slightest show of premeditation or design would have been gross treason to nature. Does a woman, struck to the heart, utter her grief by measure as a singer sings or a poet writes? And how is it with a man in rage or pain? Yet, verily, there was never a woman or a man in speech so impelled by a sting of soul as Salathiel.

Passing, now, the matter of criticism and mere negative dealing, I choose to be affirmative. Salathiel, the subject of the book, was a Jew, and in rank a Prince of the Tribe of Naphtali. In the persecution of Christ, his arrest, his trial, his scourging, Salathiel was the leading insatiate; and such, doubtless, he would have continued down to the last minute of the third hour of the Crucifixion but that the victim stopped him. At what stage of the awful crime the stoppage took place, the author leaves to inference; but how the incident befell and its almost inconceivable effect upon Salathiel, no man should again try to describe. This is from Croly, his words:

“But in the moment of 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!’”

Such the retribution; now the effect.

“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!”

And then follow five paragraphs, each beginning with the same words uttered, as I imagine, in the tone of a shriek of anguish, “Immortality on earth!” And of those paragraphs, regarded as a dissection of the moral part of a man by virtue of which he is susceptible of infinite happiness or infinite misery, I say that for completeness and eloquence they are without parallel in the language. Nor is that all. In those paragraphs, one reading will find the definition of a punishment which in subtlety, in torture, and in duration is as far out of range of human origin as in execution it is out of range of human power. Yet more. Instantly with the comprehension of the punishment defined, the immeasurable difference between the agonies of death on a cross, though of days in duration, and the agonies of immortal life under curse on earth, becomes discernible. In that difference there is a divine thought in anger, an avenging impulse. The superiority in misery of the punishment of Salathiel, its term of sentence, its depth of suffering, its superhuman passion of vengeance, seem impossible to the all-patient Christ; and while we are considering its possibility, the book carries us to the question, Is there a wandering Jew?

I think so. Let smile now who will; yet, as I see, a whole race is the multiple of the man, just as the man is the incarnation of the race. Israel, the plural, merges in Salathiel, the singular, insomuch that to think of the one is to think of the other. In this instance, also, the similitudes become creative, and life, nature, history, and doom, sinking the race, make room for the wandering Jew.

Not only do I think there is a wandering Jew, but I know him intimately. To Croly he was a young man, a warrior; to me, he came an old man, a philosopher. Croly beheld him irate, passionate, vengeful. I saw him wiser by many hundreds of years, and repentant, and trying vainly to bring about a brotherhood of man by preaching the unity of God. With Croly, he was the Prince of Naphtali; with me, he was the Prince of India.

Returning now—with such a subject, dealt with so magnificently, I can not see how the great reading public in America can be indifferent to a new edition of Croly’s romance. Only take us into your faith, gentlemen, and see to it that the issue be worthy the theme. Be even luxurious with it; give it fine paper, wide margins, large type, and choice binding; and, if Gustave Doré were living, I would further beg you to have the edition illustrated by him.

Very respectfully,

Lewis Wallace

To Funk & Wagnalls Company.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

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.

CHAPTER I
Salathiel Doomed to Immortality

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.

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!

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!

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.

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!”

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!

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.

CHAPTER II
An Awakening and a Summons

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.

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!”

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.

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?

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.

CHAPTER III
Salathiel’s Resolution in the Temple

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

“All in the Temple was confusion.”

[[see page 19.]

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

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!

CHAPTER IV
Salathiel Journeys Far from Jerusalem

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?

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

CHAPTER V
Eleazar Learns of Salathiel’s Renunciation

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]

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.