VII. This appalling condemnation was, as it were, the CHAP. final declaration of war against the prevailing religion; it declared that the new doctrines could not harmonise with minds so inveterately wedded to their own narrow bigotry; but even yet the people were not altogether estranged from Jesus, and in that class in which the Pharisaic interest had hitherto despotically ruled, it appeared as it were trembling for its existence. vour, in the fate of Jesus. And now every thing indicated the approaching, The crisis, the immediate crisis. Although the populace were so decidedly, up to the present instant, in his fathough many of the ruling party were only withholden by the dread of that awful sentence of excommunication, which inflicted civil, almost religious death, from avowing themselves his disciples,-yet Jesus never entered the Temple again the next time he appeared before the people, was as a prisoner, as a condemned malefactor. As he left the Temple, a casual expression of admiration from some of his followers, at the magnificence and solidity of the building, and the immense size of the stones of which it was formed, called forth a prediction of its impending ruin; which was expanded, to four of his Apostles, into a more detailed and circumstantial description of its appalling fate, as he sate, during the evening, upon the Mount of Olives. t It is impossible to conceive a spectacle of greater Jesus on natural or moral sublimity, than the Saviour seated the mount * See Hist. of the Jews, vol. iii. p. 111-147. + Matt. xxiv. xxv.; Mark, xiii. Luke, xxi. 5-38. of Olives. CHAP. Evening view of Jerusalem and the Temple. on the slope of the Mount of Olives, and thus looking down, almost for the last time, on the whole Temple and city of Jerusalem, crowded as it then was with near three millions of worshippers. It was evening, and the whole irregular outline of the city, rising from the deep glens, which encircled it on all sides, might be distinctly traced. The sun, the significant emblem of the great Fountain of moral light, to which Jesus and his faith had been perpetually compared, may be imagined sinking behind the western hills, while its last rays might linger on the broad and massy fortifications on Mount Sion, on the stately palace of Herod, on the square tower, the Antonia, at the corner of the Temple, and on the roof of the Temple, fretted all over with golden spikes, which glittered like fire; while below, the colonnades and lofty gates would cast their broad shadows over the courts, and afford that striking contrast between vast masses of gloom, and gleams of the richest light, which only an evening scene, like the present, can display. Nor, indeed, (even without the sacred and solemn associations connected with the holy city,) would it be easy to conceive any natural situation in the world of more impressive grandeur, or likely to be seen with greater advantage under the influence of such accessaries, than that of Jerusalem, seated, as it was, upon hills of irregular height, intersected by bold ravines, and hemmed in almost on all sides by still loftier mountains, and itself formed, in its most conspicuous parts, of gorgeous ranges of Eastern architecture, in all its VII. lightness, luxuriance, and variety. The effect may CHAP. have been heightened by the rising of the slow volumes of smoke from the evening sacrifices, while even at the distance of the slope of Mount Olivet, the silence may have been faintly broken by the hymns of the worshippers. for the Temple at Yet the fall of that splendid edifice was inevit- Necessity able; the total demolition of all those magnificent destruction and time-hallowed structures might not be averted. of the It was necessary to the complete development of Jerusalem. the designs of Almighty Providence for the welfare of mankind in the promulgation of Christianity. Independent of all other reasons, the destruction certainly of the Temple, and if not of the city, at least of the city as the centre and metropolis of a people, the only true and exclusive worshippers of the one Almighty Creator, seemed essential to the progress of the new faith. The universal and comprehensive religion to be promulgated by Christ and his Apostles, was grounded on the abrogation of all local claims to peculiar sanctity, of all distinctions of one nation above another, as possessing any especial privilege in the knowledge or favour of the Deity. The time was come when "neither in Jerusalem nor on the mountain of Gerizim," was the great Universal Spirit to be worshipped with circumscribed or local homage. As long, however, as the Temple on Mount Moriah remained hallowed by the reverence of ages, sanctified, according to the general belief, for perpetuity, by the especial command of God, as his peculiar dwellingplace; so long, among the Jews at least, and even VII. CHAP. among other nations, the true principle of Christian worship might be counteracted by the notion of the inalienable sanctity of this one place. Judaism would scarcely be entirely annulled, as long as the Temple rose in its original majesty and Jesus contemplates with sadness the future ruin of Jerusalem. veneration. Yet, notwithstanding this absolute necessity for its destruction, notwithstanding that it thus stood, as it were, in the way of the progress of human improvement and salvation, the Son of Man does not contemplate its ruin without emotion. And in all the super-human beauty of the character of Jesus, nothing is more affecting and impressive, than the profound melancholy with which he foretels the future desolation of the city, which, before two days were passed, was to reek with his own blood. Nor should we do justice to this most remarkable incident in his life, if we should consider it merely as a sudden emotion of compassion, as the natural sensation of sadness at the decay or dissolution of that which has long worn the aspect of human grandeur. It seems rather a wise and far-sighted consideration, not merely of the approaching guilt and future penal doom of the city, but of the remoter moral causes, which, by forming the national character, influenced the national destiny; the long train of events, the wonderful combination of circumstances, which had gradually wrought the Jewish people to that sterner frame of mind, which was about to display itself with such barbarous, such fatal ferocity. Jesus might seem not merely to know what was in man, but how it entered into man's heart and mind. His was divine charity, enlightened by infinite wisdom. СНАР. VII. the Jews their In fact, there was an intimate moral connection between the murder of Jesus and the doom of the Jewish city. It was the same national temperament, the same characteristic disposition of the people, which now morally disqualified them "from knowing," in the language of Christ, "the things which belonged unto their peace," which forty years afterwards committed them in their deadly and ruinous struggle with the masters of the world. Christianity alone could have subdued or mitigated that stub- The ruin of born fanaticism, which drove them at length to their the consedesperate collision with the arms of Rome. As quence of Christians, the Jewish people might have subsided character. into peaceful subjects of the universal empire. They might have lived, as the Christians did, with the high and inalienable consolations of faith and hope under the heaviest oppressions; and calmly awaited the time when their holier and more beneficent ambition might be gratified by the submission of their rulers to the religious dominion. founded by Christ and his Apostles. They would have slowly won that victory by the patient heroism of martyrdom, and the steady perseverance in the dissemination of their faith, which it was madness to hope that they could ever obtain by force of arms. As Jews, they were almost sure, sooner or later, to provoke the implacable vengeance of their foreign rulers. The same vision of worldly dominion, the same obstinate expectation of a temporal Deliverer, which made them unable to compre |