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Discovering Diverse Content Through
Random Scribd Documents
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
PAGE
Introductory Letter from General Lewis Wallace, v
Introduction, ix
Author’s Preface, xxxi
BOOK I
CHAPTER
I.— Salathiel Doomed to Immortality, 3
II.— An Awakening and a Summons, 10
III.— Salathiel’s Resolution in the Temple, 15
IV.— Salathiel Journeys Far from Jerusalem, 22
V.— Eleazar Learns of Salathiel’s Renunciation, 28
VI.— Salathiel and His People, 35
VII.— The Loss of a Life, 41
VIII.— Salathiel Confronts the Shade of Antiochus, 47
IX.— The Romans Driven from the Holy City, 56
X.— The Fall of Onias, 62
XI.— The Strength of Judea, 69
XII.— The Prince of Naphtali Confronts Desolation, 78
XIII.— The Wandering of a Mind Diseased, 84
XIV.— The Fury of a Tempest, 92
XV.— The Appeal of Miriam, 101
XVI.— The Heart of Salome, 112
XVII.— A Declaration of Love, 121
XVIII.— Salathiel Faces a Roman, 132
XIX.— On Board a Trireme, 138
XX.— The Burning of Rome, 145
XXI.— The Death of a Martyr, 157
 BOOK II
XXII.— The Year of Jubilee, 173
XXIII.— Preparing for an Attack, 181
XXIV.— The Departure of Constantius, 189
XXV.— Salathiel in Strange Company, 197
XXVI.— In the Lions’ Lair, 205
XXVII.— The Escape of Salathiel the Magician, 215
XXVIII.— The Power of a Beggar, 221
XXIX.— Prisoners in a Labyrinth, 232
XXX.— The Revenge of a Victor, 242
XXXI.— The Difficulties of a Leader, 251
XXXII.— “Never Shalt Thou Enter Jerusalem,” 258
XXXIII.— Jubal’s Warning, 265
XXXIV.— The Pursuit of an Enemy, 272
XXXV.— The Lapse of Years, 276
XXXVI.— Death in a Cavern, 284
XXXVII.— A Pirate Band, 291
XXXVIII.— Salathiel and the Pirate Captain, 300
XXXIX.— A Sea Fight, 310
XL.— A Burning Trireme, 317
XLI.— The Granddaughter of Ananus, 323
BOOK III
XLII.— Naomi’s Story, 333
XLIII.— Before Masada, 339
XLIV.— Among Roman Soldiers, 346
XLV.— The Reign of the Sword, 353
XLVI.— A Cry of Wo, 358
XLVII.— The Struggle for Supremacy, 362
XLVIII.— The Sting of a Story, 372
XLIX.— Salathiel’s Strange Quarters, 377
L.— After the Struggle, 383
LI.— A Man of Mystery, 389
 LII.— The Prophecy of Evil, 396
LIII.— A Fatal Sign, 401
LIV.— Concerning Septimius, 411
LV.— Salathiel a Prisoner, 417
LVI.— A Narrow Escape, 425
LVII.— Onias, the Enemy of Salathiel, 435
LVIII.— Eleazar the Convert, 445
LIX.— The Clemency of Titus, 455
LX.— The Treatment of a Prisoner, 466
LXI.— A Steward’s Narrative, 474
LXII.— A Prisoner in the Tower, 487
LXIII.— A Minstrel’s Power of Speech, 496
LXIV.— The Destruction of Jerusalem, 512
APPENDIX
Annotations, 537
Jesus of Nazareth from the Present Jewish Point of View—
Letters from over Thirty Representative Jewish Scholars, 551
Other Testimony to Jesus, 570
The Second Coming of Christ—A Succinct History, by D. S.
Gregory, D.D., LL.D., 574
Reasons for the Belief that Christ may Come Within the Next
Twenty Years, by Arthur T. Pierson, D.D., 582
 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
PAGE
“Tarry thou till I come!” Frontispiece
“All in the Temple was confusion,” 20
“The archer dropped dead, with the arrow still on his
bow,” 64
“‘Read the Scriptures. I have prayed for you. Read—’” 104
“‘Let your guard come,’ cried I,” 136
“I heard the gnashing of his white fangs above me,” 168
“The lions, made more furious by wounds, sprang
upon the powerful horses,” 208
“I gave the word—fell upon the guard at the gate, and
cast it open!” 240
“‘Now for glory!’ they cried,” 268
“The solitary voyager of the burning trireme,” 318
“I had rescued Constantius!” 356
“The Roman rushed at him with his drawn falchion,” 396
“‘Esther is gone!’ was her answer,” 424
“‘Now, my beloved brothers, beloved in the Lord, go
forth,’ said Eleazar,” 452
“Titus rode at the head of his stately company, himself
the most stately of them all,” 488
“Judea must fall,” 508
“I heard the shouts of the conquerors, and the fall of
the pillars of the Temple,” 532
 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

“Tarry thou till I come.”[1] The words shot

through me—I felt them like an arrow in my heart Salathiel
—my brain whirled—my eyes grew dim. The Feels
troops, the priests, the populace, the world, Remorse
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.
Accursed be the night in which I fell before the
tempter! Blotted out from time and eternity be the Salathiel’s
hour in which I took part with the torturers! Every Former
fiber of my frame quivers, every drop of my blood Triumph
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!
Immortality on Earth!—The compulsion of
perpetual existence in a world made for change; A Ceaseless
to feel thousands of years bowing down my Wanderer
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!
Overwhelmed with despair, I rushed through
Jerusalem, with scarcely a consciousness of He Passes
whither I was going. It was the time of the through
Passover, when the city was crowded with the Jerusalem
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.
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 And Comes
stood the Holy of Holies; the Saracen destroying upon a Scene
even its ruins; the last, worst devastator, the Magnificent
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!”
Then, when the impulse passed away, my eyes
have turned into fountains of tears, and I have Salathiel
wept until morning came, and the sounds of the Bemoans
world called back its recollections; and for the
sacred hills and valleys that I had imagined in the Jerusalem’s
darkness I saw only the roofs of some melancholy Desecration
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!
But those were the thoughts of after-times. On
that memorable and dreadful day I had no Beyond the
perception but of some undefinable fate which City’s Gate
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

Terror had exhausted me; and throwing myself

on the ground, under the shade of the palm-trees Salathiel’s
that crowned the summit of the hill, I fell into an Dream
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.
My eyes suddenly opened, yet my dream
appeared only to be realized by my waking. Thick On the Mount
clouds of heavy and heated vapor were rapidly of Corruption
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!”
While I lay upon the summit of the mountain, in
a state which gave me the deepest impression of A Call to Duty
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.
I hurried to the city gate. To my astonishment, I
found the road, that I had left, so choked up with Salathiel
the multitude, almost empty. The camels stood Returns to
tethered in long trains under the trees, with His Home
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?
The city was still more a subject of
astonishment. A panic might have driven away the Salathiel
concourse of strangers, at a time when the Hears
violences of the Roman sword had given every Familiar
Jew but too frequent cause for the most sensitive Sounds
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

Of all the labors of human wealth and power

devoted to worship, the Temple within whose Before the
courts I then stood was the most mighty. In the Temple
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.”
The grandeur of the worship was worthy of this
glory of architecture. Four-and-twenty thousand An
Levites ministered by turns—a thousand at a time. Interruption
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.
There was a subterranean passage from the
interior of the sanctuary to the High Priest’s The High
cloister, through which I conceived that he had Priest in
gone. But, on passing near the porch, at the close Terror
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.
But a tumult, of which I could scarcely
conjecture the cause, checked me. The trampling An Attack by
of multitudes, and cries of fury and fear, echoed the Romans
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.
Through the solid gloom, and among heaps of
men and sacred things cast under my feet, like In the Midst
the spoil of some stormed camp, I made my way of Confusion
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!
Throwing off my robe of priesthood, as I then
thought, forever, I went forth, followed by my Salathiel and
heroic wife and bearing my child in my arms. I Miriam
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.
Without impediment or error, I made my way
over and among the crowds that strewed the A Scene of
court of the Gentiles. I heard many a prayer and Disaster
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

When I recovered my senses, all was so much

changed round me that I could scarcely be Salathiel
persuaded that either the past or the present was Returns to
not a dream. I had no consciousness of any Consciousnes
interval between them, more than that of having s
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?
In this perplexity I closed my eyes to collect my
thoughts, and probably exhibited some strong And Learns
emotion of countenance, for I was roused by a of His Narrow
cry: “He lives! He lives!” I looked up—Miriam Escape
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
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