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PAST and PRESENT!
GAIUS GLENN ATKINS-

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Jerusalem Past and Present

General Allenby entering Jerusalem on foot, through
the Jaffa Gate.

Jerusalem Past
And Present

THE CITY OF UNDYING
MEMORIES

By
GAIUS GLENN ATKINS, D. D.

New York Chicago
Fleming H. Revell Company
London and Edinburgh

Copyright, 1918, by
FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY

A

New York : 1 58 Fifth Avenue
Chicago • 1 7 North Wabash Ave.
London : 2 1 Paternoster Square
Edinburgh : 75, Princes Street

Contents
I. Introductory  y
II. Jerusalem, the Glory of the Great
King ...... 17
III. Jerusalem, the Desire of the Exile 47
IV. Jerusalem, the Despair of Our
Lord  73
V. Jerusalem, the Goal of the Cru
sader  99
VI. Jerusalem, the Hope of the Soul . 143

I
Introductorv

INTEODUCTOBY
AT noon on the eighth of December,
191 7, a representative of General
Allenby, Commander-in-chief of the
British forces operating in Palestine, received
from the Mayo»- ot jerusaiem the surrender
of the city.
On December 10th, at noon, General
Allenby made his official entry into the city
by the Jaffa Road. As upon the occasion of
another Triumphal Entry, the people threw
flowers and palm-leaves in the way; and
though there were no " Hosannas " shouted
as to One Who came in the name of the
Lord, the welcome of the populace was
significant and their joy most marked.
General Allenby entered the town on foot.
Small detachments of infantry and cavalry,
drawn from England's far-flung battle line,
were drawn up outside, while French and
9

10 JERUSALEM PAST AND PRESENT
Italian soldiers were marshalled inside the
Jaffa gate as the Commander-in-chief, ac
companied by representatives of America,
France and Italy passed through it.
The breach in the wall, made for the
Kaiser's entry in 1898 — a breach still un
repaired — is near by. But General Allenby
came in by the door. There is a profound
significance in the contrasting ways in which
England and Germany entered the city, for
the open gate stands for order and obedience
to law, while the breached wall represents
pride, arrogance and force. There is, more
over, an ancient saying as to the character
of those who prefer some other way of com
ing in than by the door.
No blood stained the streets as the Allies
entered. Only one other occupation in the
history of the city had been so humane and
that was the entry of the Mohammedans
under Omar in 637, five years after the death
of their Prophet. All the world rejoiced
save those who lost the city. The Jerusalem
of Christ had come back to the standards of
the Cross, the city of the Jew had come back

INTRODUCTORY 11
to those whom the Jew can trust, and the
shrine of humanity's faith had come back to
those who keep faith with humanity.
War-time prophecy is hazardous enough,
but we are at least permitted to hope that
Jerusalem will never again pass into Turkish
hands. The Turk has no right there. His
administration of Asia Minor has been a long
agony of subject-peoples — a long outrage on
humanity. There is nothing in the temper
or the history of the Ottoman to justify his
possession of a land which he has, from the
first, profaned. And by so much the less
ought the Holy Land to come under the
control of the German-Turkish alliance.
There have been earlier alliances of Turkish
and Christian powers which have, in every
case, been shamed by the outcome, contribut
ing nothing but further complications to the
Eastern Question ; but there has never been
an alliance like the present between any
Christian power and the Ottoman Turk. It
was conceived in falsehood and brought forth
in massacre. The blood of slaughtered
Armenia cries up to God against it. Jeru-

12 JERUSALEM PAST AND PRESENT
salem must not come under that control
again. There would be a fine historical fitness in
making Palestine again a Jewish State,
guaranteed as to its integrity by a concert
of the Christian Powers. Failing that, the
country should be administered by a Power
great enough to protect it, devout enough to
honour its shrines, and tolerant enough to
keep its gates open to all who would come
in peace or reverence, for the lordship of
that city is a holy trust and should be so
administered. We may trace back to Jeru
salem many of the ideals for which the allied
nations are fighting to-day. We seek a
world whose " officers shall be peace and its
exactors righteousness." We would make
the spirit of Jesus the dominant spirit in the
contact of nations. Surely we may see with
the taking of Jerusalem by the Allies, the
prophecy of the triumph of the ideals we up
hold. It is right that those who are most
loyal to what is most true to the spirit of
Jerusalem should possess the city.
The renewed interest in Jerusalem created

INTRODUCTORY 13
by the recent capture offers an occasion for
some retelling of th* long history of the city.
Few towns in the world have had so event
ful a story and none is so related to the
spiritual interests of humanity. More than
that the very history of Jerusalem has given
character and direction to the faiths it has
cradled. Humanly speaking, had its history
been other than it was, the Prophets and the
Psalmists would have been other than they
are. Religion grows out of life as it returns
upon and reshapes life. Faith and experi
ence can never be divorced and experience
gives body to faith as faith gives meaning
to experience. There is no chapter in history
which so proves and illustrates this as the
story of Jerusalem. Judaism in any phase
of its development answered to the changing
fortunes of Jerusalem — though this statement
must be made broad enough to include the
Northern Kingdom — as a river follows the
determining contours of its bed, while, in
turn, this religion gave character to the his
tory of Israel as the river wears its own
channel.

14 JERUSALEM PAST AND PRESENT
The chapters which follow, then, attempt
to outline the history of Jerusalem during the
last forty centuries, not only for the retelling
of a story which is rich in every kind of
human interest but in the hope of making
plain the spiritual consequences of that his
tory both in Judaism and Christianity. We
can never understand the faith and vision of
the prophets of Israel, or the passion of the
exile, or the fierce temper of the Jewish
patriot, or the experience of Jesus, or the
devotion of Christianity save as we see how
all this is rooted in Jewish and early Chris
tian history as Jewish and early Christian
history became concrete in Jerusalem. There
is little in the changing fortunes of this battle-
scarred town since the beginning which has
not passed into the region of deathless con
fidences, memories and hopes. This is why
Jerusalem and not Rome is the true " Eternal
City." I have gathered the facts which follow
from general, but I trust, dependable sources.
We are all nowadays so influenced by Sir
George Adam Smith in our interpretation of

INTRODUCTORY 15
Hebrew thought and the relation of history
and prophecy, that it is almost superfluous
to acknowledge our debt to him.
I am greatly in debt, also, to my dear
friend, Edward Chapman, — himself the fine
interpreter of literature in terms of the Spirit
— for the entire supervision of this little book
as it has gone through the press during the
Author's absence from the country. The
resume of the history which faces Chapters
II, III, IV and V is also from his hand.

II
Jerusalem, the Glory of the Great King

The origin of Jerusalem is unknown, but probably long ante
dates the entrance of Israel into Canaan. During this period
it seems to have been the object of both Egyptian and Baby
lonian desire and influence. When the Hebrew Kingdom was
organized it was a Jebusite stronghold. David captured it not
far from 1000 B. C. As Israel's capital it was strengthened and
beautified by Solomon. He built the Temple about the middle
of the tenth century B. c. and put Jerusalem in the way of be
coming the centre of Hebrew worship and religious thought.
Upon the division of the kingdom about 937 B. C. Jerusalem
remained the capital of Judah. Though threatened again and
again during the wars of the three and a half centuries follow
ing, and besieged on several occasions, it survived the waves
of Assyrian conquest that laid all Palestine under tribute in the
latter half of the eighth century and overwhelmed Samaria in
721 b. c. Indeed it survived Assyria itself, and it was not until
after the destruction of Nineveh in 607 B. c. that Nebuchad
rezzar of Babylon utterly shattered the power of Judah in
60 1 b. c. and completed his work by the destruction of Jeru
salem itself in 586 B. c.

II
JERUSALEM, THE GLORY OP THE
GREAT KING
THE cities of a people must be always
their glory or their shame; their
glory if they are rich in beauty,
order and high human meanings ; their
shame if they are ugly, sordid or lawless.
For a city more than most else which men
create together is the revelation of their
vision and their power. The bare enumer
ation of a half score of cities carries us clear
across recorded history and every name is a
trumpet call quickening the imagination or
a window through which we look down the
vista of the years.
Thebes, Nineveh, Babylon, Athens, Rome,
Constantinople, Venice, Florence, Paris, Lon
don, and, lo, you have spanned the centuries
and gathered up millenniums in a sentence.
Some of these have been the capitals of
19

20 JERUSALEM PAST AND PRESENT
mighty conquerors, enriched with plunder,
walled with pride, cemented in blood, glori
ous for a little and falling into ruin with
the ruin of the dynasties which built them.
Some of them are remembered for builders,
philosophers, scholars, poets and artists, as
serting even in their decay a deathless
dominance over the imagination. Some of
them have been the creation of tenacious
races reflecting through the centuries their
culture and vitality. Some of them have
stood at the crossroads of the world's com
merce, built up by trade, industry and
finance. Babylon and Nineveh are now
but shapeless mounds on the marshy banks
of rivers that long ago repossessed the sites
from which they were for a little fenced out.
Thebes is overlain by the drifting sands of
the desert; Athens lives in her ruined rem
nant of the glory that was Greece. The
time-worn palaces of Venice look down in
sad retrospect upon the tides of the Adriatic,
and Florence keeps only what may endure
of the creative power of her sons of other
centuries. Others of the world's great cities

THE GLORY OP THE GREAT KING 21
are still populous and in the full tide of a
mighty life, but each has been created, un
done or maintained by far-flung forces and
each has become a symbol of wealth or
beauty, vision, folly or power.
But there is one city almost as old as
Thebes, and venerable before the foundations
of imperial Rome were laid, with but little
beauty that man may desire it or much wealth
or any commerce, high and lonely, a city
which has again and again been captured
and destroyed, its site plowed and sown with
salt, and yet which has again and again
risen deathless from her ashes. That city
is Jerusalem.
Jerusalem has for 3,000 years now, rising
from its gray rocks as though a part of the
rock itself, been built, rebuilt and maintained
by three great forces ; a strong strategic posi
tion, the passionate loyalty of the peculiar
people whose capital city it became, and the
faith and reverence of all the Disciples of
Jesus Christ.
Palestine is a limestone shoulder of West
ern Asia thrust 2,000 feet above the level of

22 JERUSALEM PAST AND PRESENT
the sea, between the coast of the Mediter
ranean and the valley of the Jordan and the
Dead Sea. It is bounded on the north by
the mountains of Lebanon, on the south and
southeast by the desert of Arabia and the
strange desolation of the Sinaitic peninsula.
It has beneath it a great depth of limestone
rock of varying degrees of hardness, much
worn and weathered, and because of its
uneven power of resistance, broken into
rough and always changing surfaces. It
has above it the light drenched blue of the
Syrian sky, and beyond that all which the
vision of the prophet could discern as to
the meanings of unseen and eternal things.
This limestone shoulder, by one of those
coincidences which make history, lies in the
path of competing empires, hard by the
crossroads where the races meet.
One can best appreciate the strategic posi
tion of Jerusalem and its surrounding terri
tory by taking any map representing on a
reasonable scale the shores of the western
Mediterranean with their hinterlands, and
drawing certain straight lines which, when

THE GLORY OF THE GREAT KING 23
one has joined them, make a group of tri
angles. The first line should be drawn from
the delta of the Nile td Babylon, the second
from the delta of the Nile to Nineveh. Now
Nineveh and Babylon should be joined by a
third line and we have a right-angled tri
angle, with the Nile-Babylon line for its base,
and the Nile-Nineveh line for its hypothenuse.
The base is about 700 miles long, the hy
pothenuse 750, while the line from Babylon to
Nineveh measures something like 300 miles.
The hypothenuse passes through Damascus ;
the base runs within 50 miles of Jerusalem,
and the old Semitic world is largely included
within the triangle itself. What history has
been made within the limits thus marked out
needs all the records of Egypt, the clay tab
lets of Assyria and Babylon, strangely sculp
tured slabs, the Old and the New Testaments,
the story of Alexander and Mohammed and
much else to tell.
Now, draw a line from the delta of the Nile
to Antioch and from Antioch one more line
passing a little east of Damascus to the base
line first drawn between Thebes and Baby-

24 JERUSALEM PAST AND PRESENT
Ion. Jerusalem, Damascus, Tyre and Sidon,
Antioch and much of the Roman Empire of
Asia Minor lie within this second triangle.
It also has an old and fascinating history.
Now draw a line from Constantinople and the
Bosphorus to the heart of the Mesopotamian
valley and Jyou have the line of imperial
movement as between the West and the
East ; then one last line across the Mediter
ranean and the Islands of the ^Egean from
Alexandria to Constantinople ; and these
with your first base line from the Nile to
Babylon include all the rest. One of the
strategic regions of the world is thus indi
cated and Jerusalem is strangely and signifi
cantly included in it all. It would be impos
sible to maneuver an army through these
territories without occupying Palestine in the
course of its operations, and Palestine can
never safely be held without Jerusalem.
Jerusalem belongs to the meeting place of
the continents and so has shared the rise and
fall of empires and the stormy mutations of
history. Any fortress which crowned the
gray Judean rocks above these roads, worn

THE GLORY OF THE GREAT KING 25
by the contact of ancient rival states, could
not be ignored.
How long ago all this began we are just
beginning to find out, for Jerusalem has a
history which far antedates its possession by
the Jew. " It was a city of importance in
the days when Babylonish influence was felt
as far west as the shores of the Mediterra
nean." Its very name indicates its long
descent. In the early language of Canaan,
" Uru meant city and Salim means peace."
Uru-Salim is then the city of the God of
Peace. Fifteen hundred years before Christ
its rulers kept a royal state and corresponded
as king to king with the Egyptian Pharaohs.
At this time the city was under the influence
of Babylonish culture. Abraham, when he set
out from Ur of the Chaldees seeking the city
which hath foundations, did not altogether go
into a strange land in coming to Palestine.
We do not know to what Semitic group
Jerusalem belonged at this early time.
There were Hittites, Jebusites and Amorites
in the hill country long after the Jewish oc
cupation of the land. We may be sure that

26 JERUSALEM PAST AND PRESENT
they fought much among themselves, for the
Tel-El-Amarna tablets record among other
things a petition of the king of Uru-Salim
to Pharaoh, asking for help against certain
enemies, Khabiri or confederates, but Pharaoh
was in no position to send him aid, and
Jerusalem, captured by the confederation, be
came in the end a Jebusite fortress. All
this is very largely a matter of names, but it
does at least help us to understand how
ancient a stronghold Jerusalem really is, and
how long ago it was that those tides of inva
sion and conquest, which have brought such
changing fortunes to the city, really began
to beat about its walls.
Our real interest in the city begins with
the Hebrew invasion of Palestine. Thirteen
hundred years before Christ (we cannot be
too certain of dates) wandering Jewish tribes
who had been long in the bitter country to
the south of Palestine succeeded in crossing
the Jordan and fought their way towards the
uplands of Judea. They came under a great
sense of divine leadership, conscious of a mis
sion and different from all their neighbours in

THE GLORY OF THE GREAT KING 27
the pure austerity and intensity of their re
ligious faith. They did battle with the
Canaanites for the possession of the land, de
feating among others the league of the five
kings of Gibeon about three miles northwest
of Jerusalem, and established themselves
gradually in its strongholds, coming, through
the very price which they paid for it, to have
such an affection for it as scarce any people
has had for any land before or since. They
were not able at once to conquer Jerusalem
owing to the strength of its natural position.
It is really a kind of citadel built by nature
upon two rocks separated in olden times by
a rather deep ravine. One of these is higher
than the other and both fall away so sheerly
on three sides as only to be taken with the
instruments of ancient warfare when ap
proached from the north and not at all easily
even then. More than that, even though the
lower rock were captured, there still remained
above it the higher level space which had
been from of old the seat of the citadel and
palace. During the confused time of the Book of

28 JERUSALEM PAST AND PRESENT
Judges while Israel was gaining a measure
of national unity and was gradually being
transformed from a nomadic to a field-tilling
people, we catch from time to time glimpses
of Jerusalem as one sees a mountain summit
through changing clouds. The Jews seem
to have gained a foothold in the city and to
have shared it with its ancient possessors,
but the records are not clear. Very likely
the city shared the changing fortunes of war,
now gained, now lost, but in the main held
by the Jebusites. For nearly 300 years " the
city was regarded by the Israelites as the
' city of the stranger,' where it was neither
desirable nor safe for an Israelite to tarry."
David, shepherd, poet and warrior-king,
finally captured it. Those who defended the
city were so contemptuous of his power and
so sure of the natural strength of their posi
tion that they did not even take the trouble
to put their strongest warriors upon its walls,
but manned them as in scorn with the halt
and the lame. David's veterans made their
way up the ravines by which the city may
be approached, stormed its defenses, carried

THE GLORY OF THE GREAT KING 29
and possessed them. This probably took
place during the eleventh century B. c.
Thereafter the kings of Judea made it their
capital city. We have no means of knowing
how large it was then or how well built. It
was probably rather simply built, for the
Jews were never really great builders when
left to themselves; but David extended its
wall, fortified it more strongly, built himself
a palace and made it the religious centre of
his people's life. He was not permitted to
erect the temple, but he bought the threshing
floor of Araunah for the site of it, prepared a
place for the foundation, and set aside much
treasure against the day of its building.
Under Solomon, who greatly adorned Jeru
salem and crowned its high place with the
temple, it became the capital of a Jewish
state which reached substantially from the
Mediterranean to the land east of Jordan and
from the desert to the crests of Mount
Lebanon. It was no great empire as em
pires go, for the Jew was no empire builder.
His power was in the region of the spirit.
But the city showed and reflected the glory of

30 JERUSALEM PAST AND PRESENT
the king. The king was doubtless in debt
to Egypt for the suggestion of the lines of the
temple, though it had many features peculiar
to the Hebrew faith and worship. It was
massively built and richly adorned. Its Holy
of Holies, not to be entered save by the High
Priest, and then only once a year, in its
silence and darkness appealed to the rev
erent imagination as no idol-filled shrine
could ever appeal, and taught worshipping
congregations a purer monotheism than any
temple in that ancient world. Its outer
room filled with incense deepened the spirit
of worship, and its courts and altars smoky
with sacrifice anticipated the purer sacrifice
of a broken and contrite heart, and the
redemptive love of the Son of God.
Solomon reared for himself such a palace as
oriental monarchs love, and filled it with the
daughters of heathen kings. He brought
water into the city from the valley of the
Urtas, improved the roads, sent out his
caravans over the ways he built for them,
and "made silver to be in Jerusalem as
stones."

THE GLORY OF THE GREAT KING 31
The glory of Jerusalem as the city of the
great king was all too brief. The very
geography of Palestine is against national
unity and Solomon embittered and divided
his people by extravagance and wearing
taxation. Under his successor the kingdom
was divided, never thereafter to be reunited.
The divided people were not strong enough
to stand against either the Egyptian or the
Assyrian, and, because during the centuries
which follow Egypt and Assyria were much
at war and the fierce kings of Mesopotamia
were constantly going out on cruel expedi
tions, Judea was caught as the grain between
the upper and nether millstones. Less than
thirty years after Solomon's palace was
finished, Jerusalem was attacked by the king
of Egypt and both the royal and the temple
treasures were carried away. The story of
this conquest is written in stone in the records
of Egypt. Egypt waned, and the Jew won
his independence again but made a poor
use of it. His chronicles thereafter are in
the main only the record of wicked or in
capable kings on thrones unstable as ice in a

32 JERUSALEM PAST AND PRESENT
summer sea, and of idolatry and gross moral
lapses on the part of an undisciplined people.
It is saved from being merely the record of a
petty monarchy with all the meanness and
little of the charm of the Orient only by the
light of religious faith which falls across the
pages of its history.
Prophecy, in the high sense of supreme
spiritual insight and searching moral judg
ment, is the peculiar contribution of Israel to
the world, a religiously creative force whose
influence cannot be overestimated. " Predic
tion of the future," says Sir George Adam
Smith, " is only a part and often a subordi
nate and accidental part of an office whose
full function is to declare the character and
the will of God. But the prophet does this
in no systematic or abstract form. He brings
his revelation point by point, and in connec
tion with some occasion in the history of his
people, or some phase of their character.
His message is never out of touch with
events. These form either the subject-
matter or the proof or the execution of
every oracle he utters. It is therefore

THE GLORY OF THE GREAT KING 33
God, not merely as Truth, but far more
as Providence, whom the prophet reveals.
And although that Providence includes the
full destiny of Israel and mankind, the
prophet brings the news of it for the most
part, piece by piece, with reference to some
present sin or duty, or some impending
crisis or calamity. Yet he does all this, not
merely because the word needed for the day
has been committed to him by itself, and as
if he were only its mechanical vehicle, but
because he has come under the overwhelm
ing conviction of God's presence and of His
character, a conviction often so strong that
God's word breaks through him and God
speaks in the first person to the people."
Now, it is the full development of this
genius for prophecy, which gives its high
significance to the history of Israel from
the eighth century before Christ onward.
Prophecy, like most other great things, began
very simply in fortune-telling, soothsaying,
and the interpretation of oracles, or the read
ing of signs, or the interpretation of dreams.
It grew through such primitive practices as

34 JERUSALEM PAST AND PRESENT
these into a religious ecstasy and from
ecstasy to inspired insight. Samuel was
both priest and prophet, but thereafter
religious forces which had flowed in one
common channel begin to divide and not
only make for themselves separate and
distinct beds but to become upon occasion
actually hostile. We discover this hostility
of priest and prophet often enough in He
brew history, and it explains in the end the
spiritual tragedies of Israel, even the tragedy
of the Cross, The priests, an order set
apart, had a recognized succession, and
privileges of which they were greatly jealous.
If one may press one's figure, the priestly
tide flows on through ordered channels,
quietly and evenly, though strangely enough
tending to sterilize the very religious life
which it was meant to enrich, and often
more concerned with the channels than the
water in them. That is the danger of
authority, uniformity, and privilege always
and everywhere. The form gets the better
of the spirit and in the end crushes the spirit
if it can. But prophecy is like a stream

THE GLORY OF THE GREAT KING 35
drawn from high sources and subject to
strange alterations, now running in full tide,
now drying away until the very channel
seems bare, and then rising to power once
more. Prophecy is free, lonely and greatly
dependent upon select personalities, the
secret of whose intimacy with God is not
easy to discover. But prophecy quickens
and enriches all that it touches ; the tree of
life grows on the banks of that river and the
leaves of the tree are for the healing of the
nations. Israel's God was at first only Israel's God.
They worshipped Him much as their neigh
bours worshipped their own divinities, and
yet always with a difference, for the Hebrew
faith was, from the beginning, searching,
austere and free from the contaminating
suggestions of nature worship. The people
had the consciousness of a unique mission
and their faith was essentially monotheistic,
even where they recognized the divinities of
their neighbours as being gods for their
neighbours, though they could be no gods
for them. It is true they were always falling

36 JERUSALEM PAST AND PRESENT
from grace, since the seductions of nature
worship are many, and it was easier to wor
ship at the shrine of Baal or Astarte than at
the shrine of Jehovah, but there was always
in every time of apostasy a saving remnant
who recalled the wandering people from
their sin. These were the enthusiasts for
Jehovah, and it is among these that we find
the schools of the prophets which followed
Samuel and anticipated Amos.
Prophecy was saved from becoming a
mere religious enthusiasm through the con
nection of the prophet with public affairs.
In the far-off beginnings of prophecy, rulers
and warriors called in the soothsayer for
guidance ; in later times the prophet is the
recognized, though not always welcome, ad
viser of the king. It is true that the prophet
was thus subjected to peculiar temptations ;
he would be asked to prophesy smoothly,
he would be bribed and flattered. The lesser
prophets too often gave way before such
forces as these, but the great prophets found
in their relation to the State the opportunity
to magnify their office. They were com-

THE GLORY OF THE GREAT KING 37
pelled to deal with events ; that kept their
feet upon the ground, but their faces were
always towards the sky. They appraised
life in terms of its relation to God; they
found God in the facts and events of life. It
is impossible to overestimate the importance
of all this. It has persisted through the cen
turies. Every prayer which we put up for
the help of God in grave national situations is
some echo of the prophet's persuasion that
the destiny of the nation is in the hands of
God. As we find rebuke or discipline in
misfortune or defeat, we are only sitting at
the feet of the prophets. When we seek to
discern through the play of events the move
ment of the divine will, we follow the proph
ets, and when we search through all the cir
cumstances of life for some anticipation of
that " far-off divine event towards which the
whole creation moves " we are still in debt to
the Hebrew prophets for the very impulse
which directs us and the vision by which we
are guided.
After the eighth century a new element
entered into the prophet's message as he be-

38 JERUSALEM PAST AND PRESENT
came the spokesman of the forgotten and the
champion of the oppressed. The eighth
century in Israel was a time of prosperity
and city building. Before this the Jewish
people had been for the most part farmers
and warriors, but now they became city
dwellers and tradesmen, prosperous and
luxurious. The social problem is born of
wealth and luxury along with selfishness and
moral blindness. The Hebrew prophet was
the first to see the significance of all this.
He saw how luxury eats the heart out of a
people, how injustice embitters the down
trodden, how poverty demoralizes both the
poor and the rich, and what a mockery relig
ion becomes when it goes complacently
about its formal business with no passion for
justice and no protest against social unright
eousness. We are in debt to the Hebrew
prophet for our social passion. It roots in
the soil which he created, or it roots nowhere.
In all our protest against the unrighteousness
of our social life, in our biting sense of failure
in the conduct of our common affairs, in our
persuasion that this also is God's concern, and

THE GLORY OF THE GREAT KING 39
that we are no true children of His save as
we correct it and make His fatherhood not
only a name but a blessed reality for all men,
we are continuing the work of the prophet
and revoicing his message.
One thing further happened to Israel dur
ing these years, — their contact with alien
civilizations and the menace of conquering
imperialism beyond their borders. This
widened the prophet's horizons. He had to
consider not only Israel but Egypt and
Assyria as well. These also were the instru
ments of the Divine will. The providence of
God therefore far transcended the narrow
limits of Israel's own country. He was no
tribal God, but the God of the nations. His
tory is His revelation, international politics
His concern, empires ride like ships upon the
tides of His power. The endeavour to in
terpret a weltering world in terms of Divine
sovereignty carried the Hebrew prophet to
his last lonely summit of vision. He stood
at the listening outposts of the battle lines of
that ancient world, interpreted the ebb and
flow of the tides of conquest in terms of the

40 JERUSALEM PAST AND PRESENT
mercy or wrath of God, and heard the voice
of God above the roar of every storm, as he
heard the voice of God in the quiet places of
his own soul. This too is our inheritance
from him. As we strive to find God in the
flow of history, to discover His judgments
in the rise and fall of peoples and to discern
moral meanings in the shock of embattled
nations, we are only doing for our own time
what the prophet did for his, and something
which without the prophet we should never
have done at all.
Instructed by the prophet the historians
of the Northern and Southern Kingdoms
wrote and rewrote the story of their people
in terms of the will of God. Misfortune was
His discipline, good fortune His signal mercy,
and their entire national life His supreme
concern. The historians of the Northern
Kingdom naturally enough gave their colour
to their national history ; the historians of the
South did the same, but that only adds to
the depth and rich variety of the picture.
The impulse to write history in the light of
the prophet's vision gave us the Pentateuch,

THE GLORY OF THE GREAT KING 41
and more than that, has influenced the writ
ing of all history from that day to this. His
tory can never for a moment be the mere
record of events ; it is the attempt to reach
the sources of things, to connect cause and
effect, and to discover the moral meanings
of human experience as seen through the
strangely clarifying power of the years which
are past, for the guidance and direction of
the years which are to come.
I have dwelt at length upon all this be
cause we cannot understand Jerusalem unless
we understand the prophets, nor understand
the prophets unless we understand Jerusalem.
True enough, the prophets are rarely city-
born and the greater of the earlier prophets
belong to the Northern Kingdom rather than
to the Southern, but this does not greatly
affect the real situation. From the division
of the kingdom to the period of the exile,
Jerusalem suffered changing fortunes. It
was more than once threatened by invading
armies, more than once providentially de
livered, and more than once entered and
plundered. Under good kings it prospered,

42 JERUSALEM PAST AND PRESENT
under evil kings it suffered ; but all the while
it became more deeply saturated with endur
ing associations. Some of its kings strength
ened its walls, some of them built conduits
and pools and brought water into the city.
They adorned it as they could, but the great
ness of it is not in its kings.
Through these centuries the office of the
priesthood was magnified and the temple
worship enriched. We cannot easily over
estimate the degree in which the temple cult
with its festivals to which all the people
came, unified and even spiritualized the re
ligious life of the people; but the glory of
Israel was not in its priests or its temple
courts clouded with the smoke of sacrifices ;
the glory of Jerusalem until it fell before
the Chaldean is the glory of the prophets ;
strange and lonely men not always highly
considered, who brought the life of the palace,
the temple, and the market-place up to the
judgment seat of a just and sovereign God ;
men for whom king, priest and trader were
but instruments in the hands of the Most
High ; men who had no fear of authority

THE GLORY OF THE GREAT KING 43
if it were unjust, and who breathed a sav
ing compassion for poverty and suffering
wherever they saw it; men who stood for
justice, righteousness and spiritual worship,
and whose voices still sound across the years.
If Jerusalem had done nothing else than to
offer an occasion to the prophets and furnish
a deathless illustration of the providence of
God as made manifest through the muta
tions of history, we should ever after be in
debt to that city.
It was for all too brief a time the glory
of a great king, but it remained the brood
ing solicitude of the prophet, — a city which
through both its faith and its denial gave
religion new meanings and new power.
In the end, after 300 years of building,
fighting, worshipping, repenting and going
wrong again, with more than one strange
deliverance in which the prophets found the
sign of God's mercy, the city was captured
by Nebuchadrezzar, the ancient temple of
Solomon was destroyed with the palace and
all the chief buildings, the walls were broken
down and the people led away captive, leav-

44 JERUSALEM PAST AND PRESENT
ing only the poor of the land as vine dressers
and husbandmen. The history of the ruined
city remains a blank for a full seventy years
until, under Cyrus the Great, the Jew was
permitted to rebuild it. But that belongs to
another chapter.
Through the action and interaction of such
forces as I have named, the Jew came to
have for Jerusalem a deathless devotion. It
was his pride and passion ; he clung to it
with all the tenacity of the Jewish spirit,
thereafter never to forget it, always to glorify
it, ever to long for it, and to make the
restoration of its ancient glory the symbol of
all his dreams and hopes. For men do not
truly live in their pomp and power and in
possession ; they live in their understand
ing of unseen and eternal things. Our
true capital cities are built in and by our
faith and whatever becomes the shrine of a
great faith is as deathless as humanity.
Even in the first chapter of its long and
stormy history, Jerusalem had become just
that. We cannot fully understand the full
implication of it all until we follow the

THE GLORY OF THE GREAT KING 45
history through, but just because the
stronger and better life of the old city was
established in the faith of its people, its
kings, its priests, and its prophets, the city
possessed the tenacity of faith itself. It
might be captured but it could not be over
thrown.

Ill
Jerusalem, the Desire of the Exile

Mesopotamia like Egypt was a river product. As early as
3000 B. c. canals seem to have tapped the Euphrates and
bricks of its alluvial soil to have been built into cities. The
Akkadians (a Semitic people) inhabited the northern section
of this Land of the Two Rivers and the Sumerians (probably
non-Semitic) the southern. We have glimpses of their hostil
ity, and their occasional union under some king like Sargon
(? 2500 B. C). Babylon emerges from these mists about 2000
B. c. and the chronicle of Hammurabi a century later affords
an historical point of contact with its life. From about 1600 to
600 B. c. the Assyrians whose capital was Nineveh on the Tigris
dominated the country and at times under leaders like Tiglath-
Pileser I (twelfth century B. C.) threatened to conquer all known
Asia. An Assyrian Sargon and his son Sennacherib extended
and consolidated this work. Samaria was captured in 722-1
B. C. and Jerusalem under King Hezekiah was seriously
threatened in 701 B. C. Late in the seventh century Assyria,
weakened by Scythian inroads from the north, fell before the
combfhed attacks of Babylon and Media. Nineveh was taken
and destroyed in 608-7 B. c. Under Nebuchadrezzar Babylon
grew great; Judea was conquered in 601 and Jerusalem des
troyed in 586. There were several deportations of the Jews,
multitudes of whom were forced to take up their residence in
Babylonia, some of them rising to places of wealth and power.
The prophecies of Ezekiel, the later portion of Isaiah and many
of the Psalms came from this experience of exile. Meanwhile
the Medes and Persians were overshadowing Babylonia. It
fell before Cyrus in 538 and became a Persian province. Per
mission to return to Judea was given to the Jews by Cyrus. A
considerable number — though not a majority — went back in
the long period between 538 B. c. and 433 B. c. and under
leaders like Ezra, Zerubbabel and Nehemiah, Jerusalem was
rebuilt, the Temple reconsecrated and the Jewish State re
organized as a theocracy.

Ill
JERUSALEM, THE DESIRE OF THE
EXILE
WE have already seen how Jerusalem
is set hard by the meeting place
of the roads which lead from
continent to continent, and how certain the
city was to be drawn into the strife of rival
imperialisms in Western Asia. We have
now to consider how directly Jerusalem was
involved in the fortunes of Assyria and
Babylon and the significant ways in which
all this reacted upon the life of Israel.
" In any general survey of the history of
Babylon," says Jastrow, " two facts are
fundamentally important and must be taken
into consideration : first, that civilization in
the Mesopotamian Valley moves from the
South to the North ; second, that this culture
is the outcome of the mixture of two diverse
elements, Semitic and non-Semitic." The
49

50 JERUSALEM PAST AND PRESENT
Sumerians, the non-Semitic element in that
ancient civilization, were mountain-bred peo
ple, possibly Mongolian, hunters rather than
tillers of the soil, and formidable warriors.
About 3500 years before Christ, they had es
tablished themselves in cities all along the
Euphrates. Each city had its god, each god
his shrine, and each god lorded it over as
much territory as his followers could take
and keep. The cities, gods and dynasties of
this far-off time are for us to-day only names,
a world hidden in mists, across which the
dawn of history slowly rises. For our pur
pose there is no need even so much as to set
down the strange names of these cities which
played their little part in an ever-shifting
struggle of races and gods, kings and sub
jects, or to dwell upon it at all save to
recognize in passing the industry and erudi
tion of the scholars who from sculptured
slabs, strange monuments and broken clay
tablets have read and retold their story with
an amazing fullness of detail. Now and then
a king emerges who enlarges and solidifies
his domain and secures for himself a little

THE DESIRE OF THE EXILE 51
less forgetfulness than his fellows. In gen
eral the Semitic strain prevailed over the
Sumerian and the seat of empire moved
north. The Amorites and Elamites con
quered the Akkadians, as the Akkadians had
prevailed over the Sumerians, and, with the
Amorite occupation, Babylon, whose far-off
beginnings are wholly lost to us, began to
assert its mighty ascendency.
Thereafter the history of Mesopotamia may
be divided into four great periods : — First,
the old Babylonian period from the rise of
Babylon to the time when Assyria was suffi
ciently strong and independent to contend
with Babylon on equal terms ; second, the
first Assyrian period to the ascension of Tig-
lath-Pileser II in 745 B. C. ; third, the second
Assyrian period from 745 B. C. to the fall of
Nineveh ; fourth, the new Babylonian em
pire. Babylon comes into the clear light of his
tory under Hammurabi the Great. He
reigned for fifty-five years, beautified his city,
built canals to drain his country, subdued his
enemies and left a code of laws which we

52 JERUSALEM PAST AND PRESENT
have recovered almost in their entirety, and
which reflect an astonishing culture and a
statesman's genius. He glorified himself
and his reign in an inscription which still en
dures, — " I am Hammurabi, the mighty king,
king of Babylon, the king whom the regions
obey, the winner of victory for his lord,
Merodach, the shepherd who rejoices his
heart. I dug the canal called ' The Blessing
of His People ' ; I allotted both its shores for
food ; measures of corn poured I forth ; a
lasting water supply I made for the people.
. . . Food and drink I made for them
with blessing and abundance ; I gifted them.
In convenient abodes I caused them to dwell.
Thenceforward I am Hammurabi the mighty
king, the favourite of the great gods." And
all this was more than 2,000 years before
Christ. The Babylonians were " not first and fore
most a military people ; their energies were
mostly spent in trade and manufacturing, in
science and art." In time they fell under
foreign masters, and though their culture
conquered their conquerors, Babylon lost her

THE DESIRE OF THE EXILE 53
hold upon the Semites of the North. These
made Nineveh their capital, pushed their em
pire in turn southward, and asserted their
dominion over Babylon. The Assyrians
were born warriors, cruel, restless and in
satiate in their ambition. Under mighty
kings their fierce campaigns carried them
from the frontiers of India to the AZgean Sea.
They swept across Syria and Palestine and
made the king of Tyre drink salt water to
quench his thirst. They limited or broke up
the petty sovereignties and the local religions
of Western Asia and the fear of them lay as a
shadow upon all neighbouring lands. Then
as " night falls on noon," Assyria ceased to
be, nor has she left us any record of her fall.
Very likely there was no real solidity of so
ciety or administration, save in the fluctuat
ing greatness of her kings, to bear the weight
of her empire. She destroyed but never
assimilated, devastated and did not rebuild.
There was no cement in her structure save
the blood of the conquered ; she was hated
and feared but never loved, and what re
mains of her is only sculptured slabs record-

54 JERUSALEM PAST AND PRESENT
ing the cruel victories of her conscienceless
kings, and her testimony, never more needed
than now, that any empire established in
force and maintained by fear has the hand of
God against it, and cannot endure.
Now Jerusalem also lay in the path of
these marauding kings, and it was under Tig-
lath-Pileser II that the first contact of Israel
with Mesopotamia, so momentous in its out
come, began. Assyria could not reach
towards Egypt save through Palestine, and
Egypt naturally enough sought Palestine for
a buffer state. We cannot understand the
history of the Jewish people except in the
light of their relation to these great neigh
bours, for this relationship, perilous as it was,
drew them into currents of a wider move
ment and made them a part of the history of
the world. They were far too weak to stand
alone and therefore allied themselves now
with Egypt and now with Assyria, always
getting nothing out of their allies but the
enmity of the other side. Their prophets
protested endlessly against this policy and
sought to teach the kings that their true de-

THE DESIRE OF THE EXILE 55
pendence was in the Lord their God, for the
prophet spoke out of an inspired conscious
ness that the Jew had for his inheritance
something greater than any empire. This
inheritance was a religious faith belonging
in its purity and austerity to another world
than the religious faith of his neighbours.
It was the consciousness of an unseen and
eternal reality in which all the future was
through him to be instructed. King and
people alike were strangely slow to learn,
and so, partly through mistaken policies and
partly through the march of events which
were too strong for them, the whole of Pales
tine was overrun by conquering armies from
the east.
The Northern Kingdom was the first to
fall, 721 years before Christ, conquered by
Assyria. Its people were largely carried into
captivity and only a mixed population was
left, never thereafter able to rebuild their na
tional life. Jerusalem and Judea resisted for
almost 150 years longer, a little harassed
state and a battie-scarred city on a bare gray
rock, but a city which none the less carried

56 JERUSALEM PAST AND PRESENT
the religious future of humanity. Two great
prophets, Isaiah and Jeremiah, foresaw the
doom of their state and sought in vain to
avert it. The first and greatest of these,
Isaiah, gave up hope for the present, but
claimed the future for his faith. "There
should be," he said, " a remnant who would
be true to their God and out of this rem
nant their God would rebuild their city and
their faith ; " and at last in a wonderful way
Isaiah's vision came true. In 586 B. C. Jeru
salem was sacked and destroyed by Nebu
chadrezzar the Great, but it was by the
Chaldean and not the Assyrian that Jeru
salem was finally captured, and to Babylon
and not to Nineveh that the captives were
taken. About 625 B. C. an Assyrian general
sent to subdue a revolt in Babylon was made
governor of the city. He in turn plotted
against his master, made a league with
Egypt, secured help from the Medes and
marched against Nineveh ; the city was taken
and utterly destroyed ; Nebuchadrezzar, a
son of this general, succeeded his father and
set his many captives at work to make Baby-

THE DESIRE OF THE EXILE 57
Ion the greatest city in the world. Herodotus
tells us of its glory.
" The city stands on a broad plain, and is
an exact square, a hundred and twenty fur
longs in length each way, so that the entire
circuit is four hundred and eighty furlongs.
While such is its size, in magnificence there
is no other city that approaches it. It is
surrounded, in the first place, by a broad and
deep moat, full of water, behind which rises
a wall fifty royal cubits in width and two
hundred in height. ... On the top
along the edges of the wall, they constructed
buildings of a single chamber facing one an
other, leaving between them room for a four-
horse chariot to turn. In the circuit of the
wall are a hundred gates, all of brass, with
brazen lintels and side posts. . . . The
city is divided into two portions by the river
which runs through the midst of it. This
river is the Euphrates. . . . The city
wall is brought down on both sides to the
edge of the stream ; thence, from the corners
of the wall, there is carried along each bank
of the river a fence of burnt bricks. The

58 JERUSALEM PAST AND PRESENT
houses are mostly three and four stories
high; the streets all run in straight lines;
not only those parallel to the river, but also
the cross streets which lead down to the
water side. At the river end of these cross
streets are low gates in the fence that skirts
the stream, which are, like the great gates
in the outer wall, of brass, and open on the
water." Something must be allowed for Herodotus'
generous way of dealing with facts, but none
the less the splendour of Babylon was unique
in that ancient world. We have a strange
testimony to the way in which Babylon mas
tered the imagination of the Jew in that, " it
is the one city known to history which could
have served as a model for the description of
the new Jerusalem, the city lying four square,
the walls great and high and the river flow
ing through the streets thereof." So in the
end Babylon the mighty and Jerusalem the
holy have combined to supply for Christian
expectation its vision of celestial splendour.
It is hardly possible that there should have
been no intercourse between Jerusalem and

THE DESIRE OF THE EXILE 59
Babylon before the captivity. Through em
bassies, commerce and travel the Jew had
learned something of the city to which he
was being carried, and may have been in
some measure influenced by its culture and
its customs. We know clearly enough that
the religion of the Jew was influenced by the
philosophy, if not the faith of Chaldea, but
whether all this is preexilic or post-exilic, it
is impossible now to say. At any rate the
Jews who were taken to Babylon came into
an environment and were subject to an ex
perience destined profoundly to affect their
after history. They went, to begin with,
from a provincial town to an imperial city.
They came under the tutelage of a people
with a genius for the codification of law and
the administration of affairs, a people pos
sessing a science and culture far richer than
their own. Chaldea had much to teach Israel
in many ways. In almost everything which
affects life save religion, Babylon was rich
and Jerusalem was poor, but Jerusalem had
a spiritual wealth beside which the temples
,pf Babylon were bare indeed. Now what

60 JERUSALEM PAST AND PRESENT
will happen to men rich in faith who are
carried over into a civilization richer than
theirs in everything but faith, depends wholly
upon their spiritual steadfastness. If they
surrender to the seductions of their new
environment, accept its easy standards of
living, substitute its science for their faith,
and its culture for their integrity, then their
fall is great indeed and they will end by
possessing neither their own virtue nor the
better qualities of those whom they imitate ;
but on the other hand, if they hold fast to
their faith and the integrity of their life, they
will be able to add to what is high and cen
tral in themselves, rich contributions from
an alien society, and thereby make a dis
tinct contribution to the spiritual wealth of
humanity. Now this is exactly what the Jew did in
Babylon. He refused to be assimilated,
although he was beyond debate greatly
affected by the experiences of the Exile.
What he took back home with him out of
Babylon, he related to his own religion and
rewrote, if I may use the figure, in terms of

THE DESIRE OF THE EXILE 61
his own passion for his God and his past.
Beyond debate, Chaldea at some time and
somehow supplied to Israel aspects of its
cosmogony. There is much in common be
tween the first chapters of Genesis and the
recitals of the clay tablets of Mesopotamia,
but always with this difference : Israel lifted
what science he had, no matter where he
gained it, to the high level of his own faith
in God. So science itself became richer
through the interpretation of it in terms of
the creative power of God, and faith became
richer in that it magnified the ways through
which God manifests Himself to men. It is
not easy to put all this in a sentence ; suffice
it to say that Israel kept this faith through all
the trying experiences of the Exile, and some
how made all that the Exile taught him a
part of his own vision of God.
But this is only a part, and a lesser part, of
what those seventy lonely years did for the
Jew. He was always an exile who never
consented to the discipline which kept him
so long in a strange land. There is that in
the very fact of exile which gives rich

62 JERUSALEM PAST AND PRESENT
significance to its experiences, for the exile
is never really a citizen of the land in which
he dwells; he is therein a pilgrim and a
stranger. The true homeland of his soul
is where his heart and his dreams are. I
wonder if there is any feeling of this, any
broken sense of it at all, anywhere in litera
ture before the Exile, and if all that thought
of life as a pilgrimage wherein we have no
continuing stay, in that we seek for some city
of desire beyond the hills of time, did not
really begin to come into life with the long
sojourn of the Jew in Chaldea. If we follow
back the great haunting phrases which
breathe for us our sense of the sad discrep
ancy between our station and our desires,
I wonder if they will not bring us to the Jew
who would not sing his songs in a strange
land and who saw in imagination through
the shimmering heat of the low country the
lift of his Judean hills against the sky. How
ever that may be, the very fact that the Jew
refused to accept Babylon as permanent or
to give up hope of returning home again
kept him true to the faith of his fathers, and

THE DESIRE OF THE EXILE 63
that fidelity was a centre around which every
thing else was organized.
He came to have a new respect for his
own religion. We need strange backgrounds
sometimes against which to see the near and
familiar in order to understand how great it
really is. Babylon had nothing to offer Jeru
salem in the way of religion save a pantheon
of divinities who shared between them the
power which the Lord God of Israel exercised
alone — bizarre and capricious gods, personi
fications of nature forces, and above all, gods
who represented the sun, the moon and the
stars ; since the better part of Babylonish
faith was the worship of the starry heavens,
and the sun which rules them. But for the
Jew, his God was the maker of the sun and
the moon and the stars. Why should he
worship the creatures when he might wor
ship the creator? All this gives a new
significance to the first chapters of Genesis,
as it gives a new significance to the fortieth
chapter of Isaiah. It is God who made the
sun for the day and the moon for the night,
who bringeth out the hosts of heaven by

64 JERUSALEM PAST AND PRESENT
number and calleth them by name. The
faith of Israel was as high above the cults of
Babylon as the stars themselves above the
earth. The prophets had long sought to
persuade the Jew of this ; now he saw it for
himself, and thereafter never forgot it ; for,
with the Exile, the Jew was burned clean of
idolatry. There is no trace of that worship
in his post-exilic life.
In Babylon, as I have said, the Jew came
in contact with a greater science than his
own. The stars shine majestically above the
plains of Mesopotamia and from of old the
Chaldeans had studied their courses. They
had been the first astronomers of their east
ern world, and Israel brought back with
him from his exile a new feeling for the
stars. Of course this is to beg vexed ques
tions of criticism, but I assume that the
Psalms which are so full of the sense of the
glory of God in the firmament, which breathe
so real a feeling for nature, and above all,
the Book of Job with its discernment of the
power of God in rising and setting constella
tions, reflect the influences of the Exile. We

THE DESIRE OF THE EXILE 65
find little about the stars in the earlier proph
ets, but the prophet of the Exile takes from
them a text, as we have been doing ever
since. We have no means of knowing how di
rectly the Jews were influenced by the great
Babylonian codes through their enforced
residence in Chaldea, but there are parallels
between the legislation of the Jew and the
legislation of the Chaldean which are cer
tainly more than coincidences. Some inter
play of influences there must have been and
if it did not begin with the Exile, it was cer
tainly deepened and strengthened thereby.
There are those who believe that the Jew was
in debt to the Chaldean for his demonology,
the story of the temptation and fall and, in
general, for those elements in the old Hebrew
religion which reflect a conflict between good
and evil, between God and Satan. Certainly
these lie so much upon the surface of the
Hebrew faith that it is possible to take them
away and leave the depths untouched. This
would seem to indicate that they did not
grow out fof that religion itself but were

66 JERUSALEM PAST AND PRESENT
drawn from alien sources. I would not press
this, but we are sure that with and through
the Exile a new consciousness of the problem
of evil came into Hebrew faith. The Book
of Job is the classic expression of all this,
and whether Job be post-exilic or born of the
Exile itself, it does represent a mature faith,
grappling for the first time with the mighty
challenge of a sorrow-burdened humanity.
Whatever the Jew took out of Babylon he
deepened and transformed. He really never
accepted the Chaldean solution of the prob
lem of evil ; that evil is born of a divided
empire between light and darkness, between
God and Satan. He thought of God as too
great to suffer a divided empire and he began
therefore as one feeling through the shadow
to find a place in the justice of God for the
sorrows of humanity. The problem of the
Book of Job is not, in the heart of it, " given
evil, to find God," but rather, " given a just
and all-powerful God, to understand evil,"
and there is all the difference in the world
between these two points of approach. We
do not see clearly through those shadows

THE DESIRE OF THE EXILE 67
which have always darkened our vision, but
what light we have is from the Jew, and not
the Chaldean, though it may well be that
his own experience in the Exile compelled
him to think more deeply of these things.
But the greatest thing which the Jew
learned through his exile still remains to be
considered. He gained through loneliness
and homesickness a new passion for his own
country, and a new affection for its ruined
city. If the Jew had been loyal to Jerusalem
before he went into exile, thereafter he loved
it with a love beyond words. " If I forget
thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget
her cunning ; if I do not remember thee let
my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth."
Because the Jew thus remembered Jerusalem
and idealized it, he made it as he saw it from
afar, the symbol of all his hopes and his de
sires. It is now that Jerusalem begins to be
the hope of the soul and to stand for some
thing far greater than the war-scarred capital
of a little state. It is now that it begins to
symbolize the City of God, perfect in power
and beauty, to be sought across the years.

68 JERUSALEM PAST AND PRESENT
Something more than this happened. The
Jew took with him into exile the hope of a
redemption and return for the fulfillment of
which he was wholly dependent upon his
God. The first prophet of the Exile, Ezekiel,
gave a definite character and direction to
this hope. It began to take on a Messianic
form. It was identified with the coming of
a Deliverer and with the day of His triumph.
How much all this has meant we shall know
only as we follow the Messianic hope down
through our story. It is enough to say now,
that it began to prepare the way for the
Christ. The second great prophet of the Ex
ile is for us nameless, though his prophecies
are a part of the book of Isaiah — the latter
part, beginning with the fortieth chapter.
They begin with words which breathe the
comforting strength of the Eternal upon all
troubled and restless lives, " Comfort ye, com
fort ye my people, saith your God. Speak ye
comfortably to Jerusalem, and cry unto her,
that her warfare is accomplished, that her
iniquity is pardoned." What does this mean ?
It means that the time has come for the Jew

THE DESIRE OF THE EXILE 69
to go home again, and that a new chapter
was beginning to be written in the long
history of the East. A new power, the Mede
and Persian under Cyrus the Great, was rising
in the hill country beyond the Euphrates.
Babylon, softened by her luxury, was to fall
to a new master, and the Jew was at last to
be set free. But if he were to go back to
Jerusalem and rebuild its fallen walls and
ruined temple — a difficult and heart-breaking
task — he needed great assurances in which
to be established and great music by which
to march. So God sent him a prophet who
sang so gloriously that his anthem has ever
since been the marching music of all those
who have gone out to achieve greater things.
There is nothing anywhere in religious lit
erature like the last twenty-five chapters of
the Book of Isaiah. They sing the strength,
the justice, the love, the unchanging power,
the redemptive might of the Lord. Rich in
passion, mighty in hope, firm in assurance,
they voice as no other human utterance has
ever voiced the everlasting reality of religion.
" Hast thou not known, hast thou not heard,

70 JERUSALEM PAST AND PRESENT
that the everlasting God, the Lord, the
Creator of the ends of the earth, fainteth not,
neither is weary ? There is no searching of
His understanding. He giveth power to the
faint; and to them that have no might He
increaseth strength. Even the youths shall
faint and be weary, and the young men shall
utterly fall : but they that wait upon the Lord
shall renew their strength ; they shall mount
up with wings as eagles ; they shall run,
and not be weary ; and they shall walk, and
not faint." There is a new note in this
which was to mean much in all the after his
tory of religion, the assurance that God shares
the suffering of His children. " Who is this
that cometh from Edom with dyed garments
from Bozrah ? " "I that speak in righteous
ness, mighty to save." "Wherefore art thou
red in thine apparel ? " "I have trodden
the wine-press alone." Here is promise of
the suffering Messiah — the Cross beginning
to lift itself against the sky-line of humanity.
In the end Cyrus captured Babylon, com
ing in through its water-gates, and set the
captive people free. He gave them Nehe-

THE DESIRE OF THE EXILE 71
miah to lead them back to their ruined city
and in due season Ezra the priest recast the
religious life of the people. What follows
belongs to another chapter, but this is
enough to help us to see that the Jew took
back to Jerusalem, when his exile was ended,
far more than he took away as the Exile be
gan and that what he gained in his loneliness
and meditation has become our common
possession. It is the soil in which the ex
pectation of the Messiah rooted itself and
from which our own Christian faith draws its
richest Old Testament assurances. It is one
more testimony to the power of the things of
the spirit. Babylon is but a mound of clay,
its river has choked the old irrigation canals
and made a pestilent swamp where once the
kings of Babylon built their hanging gardens.
The voices of Babylon to-day are the marsh
birds and the cries of wild beasts ; but the
great voices of the exile, the voices of hope
and faith live on and we still keep step in
our passion for better things to that divine
music in the comfort of which the exile went
back to Jerusalem.

IV
Jerusalem, the Despair of Our Lord

In 334 b. c. Alexander the Macedonian appeared in Asia
Minor and in the next ten years had not only carried his vic
torious arms into India but had taken steps towards reorgan
izing the vast empire thus won. He died in 323 B. c. and
within thirty years his empire was divided between five of his
chiefs, each of whom had assumed the title of king. Ptolemy
of Egypt and Seleucus of Syria were the two of these whose
influence touched Jerusalem. Ptolemy occupied Palestine in
301 B. c. and for about a century, although the Egyptian was
generally in the ascendant, the country remained a. bone of
contention between these kingdoms. In 198 B. c, however,
Antiochus, of the Seleucid dynasty, gained a signal victory over
the Egyptians in northern Palestine and soon after entered
Jerusalem. At first he was probably welcomed as a deliverer
but his zeal to introduce Greek customs soon aroused bitter
antagonism. His son, Antiochus Epiphanes, violated the temple
and attempted to compel the Jews to observe heathen rites.
Rebellion ensued and in the decade 170-160 B. C. Judas Mac
cabeus and his brothers took the leadership in a warfare that
finally made Jerusalem practically independent and established
the Hasmonean (Maccabean) family as its priest-kings in 143-
142 B. c. This troubled and precarious independence lasted
until the conflict with Rome in 65-63 B. c. gave Jerusalem into
the power of Pompey. Representatives of the Hasmonean
family still continued in a modified authority, however, under
Roman protection until in 37 B. C. the Idumean Herod who
had married a daughter of that house procured the throne. He
was a man of great abilities and vices ; his son Archelaus in
herited the latter rather than the former and incurred so much
ill will from his subjects that in 4 B. c. the Romans banished
him to Gaul and his realm of Judea and Samaria became a
Roman province under the rule of a Procurator. Pontius
Pilate, before whom Jesus was tried, was the fifth of these Proc
urators. In 66 A. D. the Jews rose against Rome and waged
a war which ended with the capture of Jerusalem by Titus in
70 A. D. and the destruction of city, temple and a vast multitude
of the nation.

IV

JERUSALEM, THE DESPAIR OF OUR
LORD

T1

HE Babylon of Nebuchadrezzar and
. Belshazzar with its massive walls
and gates of brass was captured
without a battle by Cyrus the Great in 538
B. C. and thereafter a new chapter in the
long history of the East began to be written.
Under Cyrus and his successors the Jews,
who had been held captive in Babylon and
who had so bitterly mourned their exile, were
given leave to return and rebuild the walls
of Jerusalem. It is difficult to follow in de
tail the story of the restoration, but we know
that they had for marching music as they
returned the glorious prophecies from the
last twenty-five chapters of Isaiah, and that
they found in Nehemiah a leader of great cour
age and practical force under whom Jeru
salem regained something of its ancient
75

76 JERUSALEM PAST AND PRESENT
power, and for the Jew, because he had
sought it so passionately, a new sanctity.
Thereafter for two hundred years the story
of Jerusalem is the story of a little city-state
under Persian over-lordship, but left much
to itself by the far-away kings of Babylon.
These two centuries are marked by a rich
religious development. This is the golden
period of the priestly order. The high priest
was really the ruler of the city and the state,
and since he ruled in the name of the Lord
his God, Jerusalem was really a theocracy, a
God-governed city in which the interests of
religion were supreme and a strongly devel
oped priestly class had its way with the
people. History furnishes few examples of
a similar situation. There were prophets
also, the record of whose prophecies are
kept for us in the later books of the Old
Testament, but now the prophet is always
subordinate to the priest. This gives a new
character to Jewish religious development
and explains much which follows, for the
priest is likely to be strongly conscious of
his own authority, impatient of change,

THE DESPAIR OF OUR LORD 77
deeply conservative, and more concerned
about the form and order of worship than
the free development of the spirit. The
prophet is almost always a lonely soul, speak
ing for the future rather than the past, sum
moning men and institutions to the high
judgment bar of the divine Justice and, upon
occasion, sadly disturbing the order of things
as they are. None the less the Jerusalem of
the priest has given us a great tradition, most
of the later historical books of the Bible, and
a substantial part of the Psalter. The Psalms
were employed in the temple worship as we
use our own hymns, but like the great hymns
they belong to no time or order. They are
rooted in experience but they rise to God
and voice across the centuries the great as
surances of the soul. They lift their cry unto
Him out of the depths, they praise Him from
the heights, nor is there any questing of the
soul which they do not make articulate. No
body of human utterance has been so con
stantly rehearsed. It is hardly too much to
say that from the day of their first repetition
until now no sun has risen which did not

78 JERUSALEM PAST AND PRESENT
look down upon some one saying their hal
lowed words, nor any darkness fallen except
to the music of their recitative. If Jeru
salem, which has given us so much which
will outlast the city itself, had given us noth
ing more than the Psalms, we should be
forever in debt to those who knew God so
intimately and sang His praises so splendidly.
And now while the high priests came and
went in long succession, the temple service
failed not, and the Jew was secure and con
tented in his city, the East reached out to
meet the West, and the West to meet the
East. Greece and Persia challenged one an
other along the shores of the Mediterranean
and the ALgean, and it was Greece that con
quered, making Salamis and Thermopylae
household words for the unborn. Finally in
the fourth century B. C, Alexander the
Great led his forces to Babylon itself and
imposed the genius of Europe upon Asia.
The fortunes of Jerusalem were involved in
this change as her fortunes have been in
volved directly or indirectly in every great
readjustment of human power for 3,000

THE DESPAIR OF OUR LORD 79
years. There is a legend that the Jews sent
out their high priest and his attendants, clad
in their robes of office, venerable and impos
ing, and that Alexander was so moved
thereby as not only to turn aside from the
city itself but to acknowledge the supremacy
of their God. However this may be, we
know that he left the city to one side as he
went on his conquering way, but counted it
among his possessions. The very genius
and culture of Greece attended him and
though his career soon ended, Asia Minor
was remade by Greek influence. After Alex
ander's death his empire fell to his generals,
and thereafter for 200 years they and their
successors fought over its fragments. Jeru
salem passed from one to the other of these
reigning Grecian families. It belonged, to
begin with, to the Ptolemies of Egypt, but
later to the reigning house of Syria and
Antioch, and it suffered at the hands of all.
Ptolemy Soter carried many of the inhabit
ants to Alexandria where they multiplied as
did their fathers in Egypt before them.
Alexandria gradually became a great centre

80 JERUSALEM PAST AND PRESENT
of Jewish life and Alexandrian Judaism re
acted strongly upon the private and religious
life of Palestine. The Old Testament was
translated into Greek for the benefit of these
expatriated Jews who play a strong part in
the subsequent fortunes not only of Judaism
but even of Christianity. Jerusalem herself
was divided between her allegiance to her
ancient religion and her austere faith, and to
the spirit of Greek culture, and there grew
up among the Jews a Greek party anxious to
break down the old distinction and to adopt
the ideals of the Greek. For the most part
their Greek over-lords respected the religion
of the Jew, and left his temple and his wor
ship unchallenged. But under Antiochus the
Fourth this policy was changed. He under
took to root out the Jewish religion and it
needed deep and bitter digging to do that.
He took Jerusalem by storm about 170 B. C,
tore down its walls, burned its palaces, and
desecrated its temple, sacrificing swine on the
high altar and stirring the Jews to a madness
of revolt.
Now begins one of the little known but

Ancient Tower at End of City Wall.

THE DESPAIR OF OUR LORD 81
greatly heroic chapters in the long war of
faith and devotion against tyranny and intol
erance. One of the Greek officers acting
under Antiochus came to a small Judean
town hid away in the hills and summoned
all the inhabitants to a heathen sacrifice.
Among these was a certain Mattathias, a
priest, strong in the ancient faith and with
five sons greater even than himself. He
struck down with his sword a recreant Jew
who was about to offer sacrifice upon the
heathen altar, and his sons slew the officer
himself. Thereafter they were outlaws, but
they gathered about them in the fastnesses of
the hills those of their fellow countrymen of a
like mind, and in the end the power of Syria
was not great enough to conquer them.
Judas, called Maccabeus or the Hammer,
was the greatest of these soldiers of faith.
After his death his brothers carried on his
work, finally won their independence, and be
came at once the kings and high priests of
an enfranchised Jerusalem. The story, as we
read it, is like a trumpet call across the hills
of time. Under John Hyrcanus, grandson of

82 JERUSALEM PAST AND PRESENT
Mattathias, Jerusalem itself had a season of
peace and marked prosperity, but all the
while Syria was in a state of anarchy, a rich
prey for some predatory power.
Ferraro has told us, in pages which make
the story of ancient Rome as vivid as con
temporaneous history, of the social and
political conditions which led the Romans to
undertake the conquest of the East. Seventy
years before Christ, the austere Roman
Republic was really dead, the empire not
yet born, and Rome herself had come under
the control of political adventurers who
fought between themselves for the mastery
of the city and the world. They were really
the classic equivalents of modern political
bosses, and it needed money then, as it needs
money now, to carry through their plans.
Italy was exhausted and there remained only
the East to exploit. That was a veritable
treasure house open to any who would
plunder it, through the weakness of its
political organization and the endless revolu
tions and counter-revolutions which make
the tangled web of its history. Roman gen-

THE DESPAIR OF OUR LORD 83
eral after Roman general had been sent out
but no one of them had succeeded in bringing
anything like order to Syria and her neigh
bours. About 65 B. C. Pompey went himself.
There was nothing in Syria to stand against
his legions, and he had his way with all the
country. At this time Rome sought over-
lordship rather than organized administra
tion, and Pompey therefore found himself
under the necessity of deciding between rival
kings. He became in consequence the centre
of a diplomacy so confused that there is no
need to follow it through here. Aristobulus
and Hyrcanus II, the last of the Maccabeans,
strove between themselves to win the favour
of the Roman. Pompey bound over both
the brothers to keep the peace, but Aris
tobulus deserted Pompey and retired to
Jerusalem to prepare for war. The ap
proach of the Romans to the city brought
Aristobulus to his senses. He went out to
meet Pompey, promising to pay him a large
sum of money and to surrender the city if
only the Roman would leave the country in
peace. The Roman was quite willing to do

84 JERUSALEM PAST AND PRESENT
this but Aristobulus could not keep his end
of the bargain, for his soldiers rose against
him, shut the city gates and prepared to
stand a siege. There were then, as so many
times before and afterward, two parties in
Jerusalem, one of them quite willing to
admit the Roman, but the other determined
to hold out to the last. Through the
treachery of the first party, Pompey gained
an entrance to the city, but the second party
had already taken possession of the Temple
and defended it desperately for three months.
Pompey built a great bank beside the north
wall of the Temple and there set up his
battering rams. He knew something of the
habits of the people against whom he was
fighting, took advantage of their unwilling
ness to engage in offensive operations on the
Sabbath, and finally broke down the wall on
the Day of Atonement, October, 63 B. C.
The Romans butchered the priests at the
altar, and Pompey with some of his friends
entered the Holy of Holies, so taking to
themselves a privilege which belonged only
to the high priests. There is a legend that

THE DESPAIR OF OUR LORD 85
he was greatly curious to know what god
hid himself in a shrine so guarded and
revered. When he parted the curtains he
found only silence and darkness, a witness
to the spiritual character of a religion which
knew God as too great to be represented by
any symbols and established its worship in
reverent adoration of the unseen and eternal.
Pompey left the treasure of the Temple un
touched, and " the day after the capture the
worship began again at his command with
Hyrcanus II as high priest. Aristobulus
and his family graced Pompey's triumph in
Rome, and large numbers of captives were
carried to the capital where they raised the
Jewish colony to great importance even if
they may not be said to have founded it."
So Judea once more came under the con
trol of a foreign power, almost exactly one
hundred years after the victories of Judas
Maccabeus, and about eighty years after its
independence had been achieved. Pompey
reduced Jerusalem again to the status of a
little city-state and made it subject to his
representative in Syria.

86 JERUSALEM PAST AND PRESENT
The real intent of the history of this troub
led time is in the social and religious devel
opment of the Jew. From the first there
were two distinct reactions against the Greek
influence and culture. There were those
who were hospitable to Hellenism. They
rationalized their religion, or else grew
greatly skeptical of it, prided themselves on
their open-mindedness, went to the gymnasia
and the games, and considered themselves
citizens of the world. These became the
Sadducees. More tolerant than their neigh
bours, they were less patriotic and showed
little sympathy with the Maccabeans in their
fight for liberty.
The other party was more patriotic, narrow
and intense. They held to the traditions of
the fathers and hated Hellenism root and
branch. They were the " come-outers " of
that ancient time. In their love for the
Hebrew law, they made a ritual of it which
grew constantly more burdensome. " In
personal life " this temper " led to isolation
from the common people, to much washing
of the hands, person, dishes and utensils.

THE DESPAIR OF OUR LORD 87
In thought it led to infinite devotion to de
tails. ... In religion it led to . . .
a church within a church, whose members
were exclusively scribes. In politics it led to
a determination to make Judea complete in
itself — an isolated religious commonwealth,
as far as possible removed from the contami
nations of heathen life." These were the
Pharisees. These parties persisted through
the time of Christ and their antagonism
spelled spiritual and political tragedy for
Israel. During this period also the hope of the
Jew for a state of his own which should re
new the ancient glories of the Kingdom of
David became, if anything, more intense.
We have already seen how the hope of a na
tional redemption began to root itself in the
soil of national defeat and misfortune under
the chief prophets, for whom this hope was
as the rising of a great clear morning ; they
dealt with it broadly and left much to the
demonstration of the future. The hope itself
varied in form with varying circumstances.
" Before the Persian period it was the hope

88 JERUSALEM PAST AND PRESENT
of a regenerate Israel brought to greatness
by Jehovah. . . . The Exile deepened
the consciousness of its peculiar relations
with Jehovah, and with the return of the
most devoted of its members there came a
deepening of the hope that Israel would be
come a world power directly ruled by God."
This expectation gained in vividness and
definiteness in the passing years, and cen
tred around the Messiah and the Day of the
Lord. It is impossible here to follow in de
tail the changing forms of this twofold hope.
In the main, the Messiah was expected to
come as a national deliverer, strong enough
to overthrow all the enemies of the Jew, and
to renew the ancient glory of Israel. He was
to be heralded by the return of Elijah and
possibly of other prophets. Before His com
ing, there would be a period of suffering,
especially in Jerusalem. The moon and the
sun would turn to blood ; the stars fall from
their courses, — and then the Messiah. He
would bring war and judgment, overthrow
the enemies of the Jews and all the evil
angels. With His victory a new age would

THE DESPAIR OF OUR LORD 89
be inaugurated, and a new kingdom set up
in Jerusalem, or else a new Jerusalem descend
from heaven. Peace would then spread
over the world ; the Jews would be recalled
to their home country ; the righteous dead
would be raised from their graves, and God
would then take over the kingdom, holy and
glorious. . . . There was no general
agreement about the way in which this
program should be worked out, nor indeed
about the character of the Messiah Himself.
He is most commonly called the King, the
Anointed One, and the Son of David, a
warrior under whose leadership the Jews
would tread upon the neck of the eagle.
There was little expectation that He would
be merely a teacher of personal religion, and
no expectation that He would strive with the
leaders of His people, and be condemned by
them to die upon the cross.1
A strange literature grew out of this
Messianic expectation, rich in symbolism,
1 1 am in debt for the summary of the Messianic hope of this
period to Dr.SShailer Matthew's little book, " A History of New
Testament Times in Palestine."

90 JERUSALEM PAST AND PRESENT
unbounded in imagination and wholly con
cerned with the end of the world and the
overturning of earthly institutions. There
was much loose handling of dates, and a
kind of elastic time-scheme into which al
most anything could be made to fit. We
have come to see of late how greatly popular
thought was influenced by this eschatology
in the times directly before the coming of
Jesus, and how the Apostolic Church and
primitive Christianity were affected by these
inherited beliefs. Indeed, we find reflections
of them in the Gospels. The Book of Reve
lation is shot through with their splendour,
as storm-clouds are shot through with light,
and because they are thus a part of the
prophecies of the Old Testament, and the
predictions and vision of the New Testament,
they have exercised through the centuries,
and still exercise a really commanding influ
ence. In our times of peace and prosperity
they are forgotten, but great misfortune re
calls them to the minds of the troubled so
inevitably that in every world crisis corre
spondences are discovered to the ancient

THE DESPAIR OF OUR LORD 91
prophecies and every great national or inter
national misfortune is looked upon as the
herald of the end of the age. There is no
need to say how many have discovered in
the travail of our world of to-day the be
ginning of the end of the age, and the build
ing of a red highway for the coming of the
King. But there were also those who expected
the revelation of the love and power of God
in another fashion, who seized upon the
spiritual meanings of the Messianic hope
and were not greatly concerned with its
political or even its eschatological aspects.
They expected one who should come more
quietly, as rain upon the mown grass, whose
ministries should be to the souls of men, who
should preach the gospel to the poor, heal
the broken-hearted, preach deliverance to the
captives, restore sight to the blind, and set at
liberty them that were bruised. Those who
held such faith as this constituted an inner
group, strong in faith, devout in life, who,
like Simeon in the temple, were ready to
' sing their Nunc Dimittis if only they might

92 JERUSALEM PAST AND PRESENT
see the salvation of the Lord. Among these
in due time Jesus Christ was born, a child of
holy expectation, the promised one of the
Lord. Yet the way of His coming and the
character of His ministry were so greatly
different from what His countrymen expected
that they found no room for Him in their
lives, or in their temples, and in rejecting
Him, shut the door of the future in their own
faces. Jerusalem is remembered for many things,
but for this above all, — that she crucified her
Lord. He was never at home in that city ;
He lived much among the northern hills and
by the lake of Galilee. There He spake as
never man had spoken before, and taught
His disciples of the Kingdom of God and its
truths, so revealing to them the wonder and
beauty of a spotless life that they knew Him
as one not like themselves but the very living
Word of God among men. So far as we
know Jesus went to Jerusalem but five times ;
once as a babe in His mother's arms, once as
a boy twelve years old, and three times dur
ing the three years of His teaching.

THE DESPAIR OF OUR LORD 93
Jerusalem as Christ saw it was greatly in
debt for its splendour to the strangest king
who ever sat upon its throne, Herod the
Great. There are few more tangled webs in
history than the story of plot and counterplot
by which the Idumean ancestors of Herod
established themselves in Jerusalem. It is
the story of misplaced favour and treachery,
of revolution and shady diplomacy. One
may say in a sentence that through the weak
ness of the last Maccabeans the family of
Antipater became well established in the
governing office, and through the favour of
the Romans, Herod was made king of Judea.
He finally conquered and entered Jerusalem
by the help of Roman soldiers. Herod was
one of the really great builders of history,
and he lavished his wealth upon the city.
He built an amphitheatre outside the second
wall where chariot races and gladiatorial com
bats were held. Yet by a strange contra
diction he reared for the Jews the last and
greatest of their temples. The Temple of
Herod was larger and far more splendid
than the Temple of Solomon. Its ruins are

94 JERUSALEM PAST AND PRESENT
still a wonder and its massive stones bear
testimony to the genius of its builder. He
surrounded it with courts and colonnades,
and built a marvellous bridge to join the an
cient city of David with the royal courts of
the Temple. Roman villas buried in gar
dens adorned the city. The cloisters of the
Temple were deep and grateful in their
shadows. These were the cloisters in which
as a boy Christ disputed with the doctors,
and as a man met the full hostility of His
foes. The streets of the city were full of crafts
men working at the ancient trades of the
East, and of merchants dealing in rare
wares. Its population was possibly from
200,000 to 250,000, and this was largely in
creased during the great feasts. All the ele
ments in that ancient world passed through
those narrow streets, — the Roman legions,
bronze-armoured, scornful and disciplined, —
Greek travellers, curious or trivial, — traders
from all the markets of the Orient Long-
bearded Pharisees came and went, marked
with pride and caste, keeping their own

THE DESPAIR OF OUR LORD 95
stern way with no word for their neighbours,
saying their prayers upon the street corners,
with trumpets sounding before them as they
bore their gifts to the Temple; Sadducees,
priding themselves upon their cosmopolitan
spirit, friends of Greek and Roman, and
hating the Pharisees more than they hated
the Roman power; humble and forgotten
folk, weary and heavy laden ; peasants from
villages and countrysides, frankly wondering
at the life about them ; priests busy about
their offices ; Roman officials carried in their
litters and claiming for themselves the right
of way over all passers ; Jews from Alex
andria or the far East come up to worship
at the shrine of their fathers ; — and over it
all the blazing Syrian sky. Through such
crowds as these, there moved from time to
time the Son of God and the Son of Man,
careless of the splendour of the city, for He
foresaw its doom, fearless of the Romans,
for He knew the strength in which He
was established, pitying the multitude, for
He looked upon them as sheep without a
shepherd, challenging the ruling classes in

96 JERUSALEM PAST AND PRESENT
thought, word and deed, cleansing the
Temple by the sheer force of His right
eous indignation, and calling all who would
hear to a salvation to which they would
not attend. History records many dramatic
scenes and moving contrasts, but it has noth
ing more dramatic or significant to picture
than Jesus in the streets of Jerusalem.
He came unto His own, and His own re
ceived Him not. The reason for this is not
far to seek. The ruling classes of the Jews
were set in their ways and hard in their
hearts. Their traditions and their vested
interests alike were opposed to everything
He had to offer. His freer faith and holier
vision challenged them along the whole
frontiers of their lives, indicted and angered
them. It was easier, they thought, to silence
that voice than to obey it, so they brought
Him to His death, and the Cross which the
Romans set up for His crucifixion outside
the city wall has become, as it were, a win
dow through which we look deep into their
hearts as we look into our own, to discover
there such pride and unteachableness as have

THE DESPAIR OF OUR LORD 97
always been silencing the prophets, and mak
ing ready the Cross for those whose only
crime is to have loved us greatly and
sought to lead us into better ways. But
Jesus conquered through the Cross and in
His teaching, example, crucifixion and res
urrection, Christianity was born. The Jeru
salem which rejected Him is remembered
chiefly because He walked its streets. The
road down which He passed bowed beneath
His Cross, the Via Dolorosa, has become the
holiest street in the world. The hill upon
which He was crucified crowns humanity's
devotion, and the sepulchre in which He was
laid has been a shrine for pilgrims for two
thousand years.
Once again Jerusalem makes manifest how
the mightiest things in life are the things
of the Spirit and how that which love has
blessed and faith possessed is more lasting
than any building of men's hands, in that it
belongs to the true and to the enduring.
For the things which are seen are temporal,
but the things which are unseen are eternal.

V
Jerusalem, the Goal of the Crusader

Jesus of Nazareth was crucified probably in 29 A. D. Titus
captured Jerusalem in 70 a. d. Despite the desolation which
ensued, another rebellion was organized in 135 A. D. under
Barcochebas which issued in the obliteration of Jewish nation
ality in Palestine. Jerusalem as rebuilt by Trajan became part
of a Roman colony and lay beside the course of history until
326 when the Emperor Constantine ordered the identification
of the sacred sites. Building ensued and the city became a
place of shrines and churches. The Persians sacked it in the
war of 614-615. Meanwhile the power of Islam was rising.
Mohammed, born about 570, made his famous Hegira or flight
from Mecca in 622, and died in 632. Five years later in 637
the Moslem general Omar captured Jerusalem. The Seljuk
Turks became its masters in 1076. The First Crusade for its
recovery by Christendom began in 1096 and resulted in the
Capture of Jerusalem in 1099. The dates of the Crusades may
be roughly outlined as follows : — First, 1096-99 ; Second,
1147-48; Third, 1189-92; Fourth, 1202-04; Fifth, 1218-21 ;
Sixth, 1228-29 j Seventh, 1245 — to the death of St. Louis,
1270. But the movement was really more nearly continuous
than these dates indicate and there were various campaigns and
forays which the above list scarcely covers. Jerusalem was re
captured by the Moslems in 1 187, and though regained for
very brief periods on at least two occasions, it continued gener
ally in their hands. Until 1517 it was controlled by the Sul
tans of Egypt. At that time it passed to the Ottoman Turks
and has remained with them until its capture by General
Allenby in 1917.

V
JERUSALEM, THE GOAL OF THE
CRUSADER
WHEN the leaders of the Jewish
people rejected Jesus Christ, the
spiritual empire of the Jew came
to an end. For a thousand years his race
had been rich in contributions to religious
faith and insight which practically gave di
rection to the dominant religions of the
world. There is very little in our own pas
sion for social justice, in our search for a
better world, or in our strong consciousness
that human history roots itself in unseen and
eternal forces and is always being brought to
divine judgment, which we do not owe to
the prophets of the Old Testament. The
Psalmists sang the love and goodness of
God in an inspired verse which still voices
more completely than any other body of
human utterance the longings, the confi-
101

102 JERUSALEM PAST AND PRESENT
dences and the adorations of the soul. The
book of Proverbs supplies for us in senten
tious forms a wisdom much worn by contin
ual repetition, rich in authority and gathering
into unforgettable phrases a wealth of medi
tation and the fruition of wide experience.
In the Book of Job, we have the first great
endeavour of the soul, face to face with the
old, old problem " given suffering, to find
God," striving to reconcile the difficult facts
of life with the divine love and justice. It is
impossible to overestimate the significance of
this great literature. It is nothing other than
a divine revelation speaking through a pecul
iar people who by virtue of soul and circum
stance answered to the suggestion of the
Divine Spirit as the violin string to the
bow of the musician. It is the deposit
in terms of spiritual insight of the experi
ences of a race to whom the world will be
forever in debt. We have already con
sidered in some part the influences that
so sterilized the spirit of the nation as not
only to lead it to reject what it had so long
hoped for, but through that rejection to make

THE GOAL OF THE CRUSADER 103
it forever afterwards incapable of continuing
its high mission. After the bitter scene of
the crucifixion on the hill outside the walls of
Jerusalem the sceptre of the Spirit passed to
other hands.
Politically, also, the little Jewish state was
upon the verge of ruin. We discern but dimly
through any contemporaneous records the
forces of revolt against the Roman over-lord
ship of Judea and Galilee which were already in
action in the time of Christ. But the Macca-
bean revolution one hundred and fifty years
before and the outbreak thirty years later
help us to understand how tense the situation
really was. The Jewish state was a powder
magazine which needed only a spark to ex
plode it. All this gives profound meaning
to certain passages in the life of Jesus Him
self. The temptation in the wilderness pos
sessed vast implications. No one could
have known His people as Jesus knew them,
and especially the temper of the north ; no
one could have understood as He under
stood, how easily their religious hope could
be given political direction, without seeing

104 JERUSALEM PAST AND PRESENT
that they needed only a strongly proclaimed
leader demanding for his own the throne of
David to release forces which would set the
land aflame and which might secure a real
kingship for one ready to play the part of
Judas Maccabeus and contributing thereto in
his own person the immense religious sanc
tion of the Messiah. That is to say, any one
who could persuade the Jews that he was the
promised Messiah and make himself the
rallying point at once of their fanaticism and
their patriotism could have led a revolt
against Rome, the chance of whose success
was at least as great as the chance of the
Maccabees and on the whole much greater.
The temptation to do this searched the
very soul of Jesus ; the sword of the con
queror was for Him a flaming alternative
to the way of the Cross. He might have
had another crown than the crown of thorns
and have been remembered as one of the
heroes of a forlorn hope, but He chose the
Cross instead. He chose to conquer by
suffering, and so established the basis of His
empire not in the fierce patriotism of His

THE GOAL OF THE CRUSADER 105
people or in the doubtful fortunes of a little
state, but in the enduring and triumphant
way of sacrifical love. He chose to redeem
rather than to go out to battle ; He chose
the future rather than the present; so He
fulfilled in costly but irresistible fashion the
ancient prophecy that He should be Prince
of Peace, and so there are now upon His
head the many crowns of the vision of the
Book of Revelation, and His empire has just
begun. In such ways then as give beauty
to the pages of the Gospel and eternal power
to His Passion and redemptive might to His
Crucifixion, Jesus Christ made the great
choice while His people made the great
refusal. So that chapter in the story of
Jerusalem ends.
The revolt which He might have headed
broke out thirty years later. It filled the
streets of Jerusalem with civil war, involved
the Jews of Caesarea and other Syrian cities
in a massacre which spared neither man,
woman nor child, made the sunny hills of
Galilee the scene of desperate fighting and
finally brought the armies of Vespasian and

106 JERUSALEM PAST AND PRESENT
Titus before the walls of Jerusalem. The
siege which followed is told in detail in
Josephus — a bitter story of a cruel enterprise.
No people ever made a more determined
resistance than the Jews and no beleaguered
garrison ever made an already i desperate
situation more hopeless by the bitterness
of their quarrels among themselves. They
destroyed their own supplies, slew one
another, and still refused to surrender.
When the city was at last taken it was a
vast sepulchre and Titus triumphed only
over the dead. " The city was ordered to
be razed except the three towers which were
left as standing monuments of the victory."
The whole region was depopulated. Those
who were not put to the sword were sold
into slavery or killed in gladiatorial shows.
Jerusalem at last had brought down a mani
fold vengeance upon herself.
Yet such is the tenacity of the Jewish race
and the power of nature to recover, that
within less than a half century there were
Jews enough in the East to rise again
against the Roman government. " Race

THE GOAL OF THE CRUSADER 107
and religion," says John Morley, " are the
two great facts with which imperialism has
always to reckon." And Judaism, splendid
in religious devotion, tenacious in racial
consciousness, smouldered through the mil
lenniums a bed of fire always ready upon
occasion to send out its jets of flame.
Fifteen years after the rising under Trajan,
Hadrian undertook to rebuild Jerusalem " as
a Roman colony with a Roman name and
divested it altogether of the character which
made it sacred in the eyes of the Jews."
He forbade their dwelling in the city of their
fathers and even preferred the Christians to
them. Three years of fighting entirely want
ing in humanity followed. Hundreds of
thousands of the Jews were slain and in the
end the triumphant Roman rebuilt the city
after his will and gave it a Roman name.
He called it ^Elia Capitolina and reared a
temple to his pagan gods on the desecrated
summits of Mount Zion. Historically this
completes the dispersion of the Jews.
Henceforth they are a people without a
fatherland, whose fate is symbolized by the

108 JERUSALEM PAST AND PRESENT
legend of the "Everlasting Jew " condemned
to an immortality of homeless wandering.
Nor is it merely religious prejudice to follow
the parallel of the legend still farther and to
say that all this was the penalty imposed
upon the Jew because he rejected Jesus
Christ, for of a truth the fanaticism, the
division and the want of teachableness
which led Jerusalem to stone the prophets
and reject the Christ, made the after history
of the Jew what it was.
In due time Constantine built Constanti
nople, and the Roman empire divided along
the lines of ancient cleavage, the Greek and
Latin. The Edict of Milan gave the sorely
tried Church rest from persecution and Con-
stantine's tardy and somewhat dubious con
version made Christianity in the end the
state religion of Rome; the Galilean had
triumphed. Now for two hundred years the
story of Jerusalem is part of the political
and ecclesiastical history of the Eastern
empire. The mother Church of Jerusalem
had long since perished but Christianity
came back to possess the city from which

THE GOAL OF THE CRUSADER 109
both the Jew and the Roman had sought to
shut it out. Jerusalem was made a patri
archate, — that is, one of the five centres of
ecclesiastical administration of which Rome,
Alexandria, Antioch, and Constantinople
were the other four, — though the Patriarch
of Jerusalem had no very great territory to
administer. Jerusalem was given this honour
rather through her association with Christian
history than because of her political im
portance. In the beginning of the seventh
century, A. D. 614-15, Jerusalem was be
sieged, captured and sacked by an army of
Persians, reinforced by the Jews of the East
summoned to an holy war against Christian
unbelievers. Long before this the temples
of the Romans had given place to Christian
churches, the Churches of Helena, Con-
stantine, of the Holy Sepulchre, of the
Resurrection, and many others. They were
now burnt or ruined. The ancient treasures
of the city had been the gold and silver
gathered in the temple service. The treas
ures now were the gifts left by Christian
pilgrims and the relics of the Crucifixion, the

110 JERUSALEM PAST AND PRESENT
Saints and the Martyrs. These were des
troyed or taken away and Jerusalem again
left desolate. The cross found by Helena
and believed to be the true cross was taken
to the Persian capital where it was kept and
worshipped by the Christian wife of the
Persian king.
But a new power was rising in the East.
Over against the decadent faith of Eastern
Christianity Mohammed set his austere re
ligion, a strange mingling of greatness and
weakness but possessing a power of appeal
which has made it one of the chief mission
ary faiths of the world. His followers set
out to establish it by the sword. They swept
as by fire the regions in which Christianity
was born and where it won its first triumphs,
— swept them bare of every suggestion of the
Christian faith. Mohammedanism possessed
itself of Western Asia, conquered Egypt and
Northern Africa, crossed by Gibraltar into
Europe, passed through Spain and over the
Pyrenees and was not halted until it had
reached the very heart of France. In 637
A. D. Jerusalem was taken by the Moslems

THE GOAL OF THE CRUSADER 111
and of all its manifold captures, save its
capture by the English, this, to the credit of
the Arab let it be said, was the least bloody
and tragic. The Christians were allowed to
keep their old churches, though not to build
new ones. They were forbidden to shut
their church doors to any, whether Christian
or Mohammedan. They might only toll
their bells, not ring them. There were to
be no crosses in the churches nor was the
cross to be shown publicly in the streets.
They were reminded in petty and irritating
ways that they were a subject people, but the
Caliphs gave them nevertheless "an assur
ance of protection in their lives and fortunes
and the uses of their churches and the
exercise of their religion " ; and more than
that, the Caliphs kept their promise.
The fortunes of Jerusalem after its capture
in 637 are for 400 years a part of the history
of Mohammedanism in Western Asia. The
city was involved in the Moslem civil wars,
but though the seat of Mohammedan ad
ministration passed from Damascus to Bagh
dad and from Baghdad to Egypt, there was

112 JERUSALEM PAST AND PRESENT
little actual change in Jerusalem, save such
changes as time brings with it of growth,
decay and the sequence of the generations.
For the West these 400 years are, for the
most part, centuries of darkness, anarchy and
the travail of a new world displacing the
ancient Roman order. It is not easy to
anticipate what would have become of
Western civilization had not Charlemagne
through his military genius, his adminis
trative ability and his love for learning,
strengthened and sheltered for a little the
light-giving forces which were all the while
so nearly eclipsed. We know now that what
he really did was to clear in central Europe
a space for the France and Germany of the
future, and so to release great national forces.
What he thought himself to be doing was
to restore the glory of ancient Rome. So
blindly sometimes do the best and greatest
of men do their work. We discover in the
partition treaty of Verdun (what associa
tions that name carries !) by which the em
pire of Charlemagne was divided among his
grandsons, the first definite use in litera-

THE GOAL OF THE CRUSADER 113
ture or diplomacy of the French and German
languages. Mighty changes had already
accomplished themselves in the darkness, for
the birth of a new language is one of the
great achievements of the human spirit and
a force which cannot be overestimated in
history and all human affairs. None the less
the forces of nationality were slow in realiz
ing and asserting themselves. There were
none to continue what Charlemagne began,
and the times that followed were the blackest
in the history of Europe. Nowhere was there
order, security, virtue or constructive power.
The Church itself shares the degradation of
the time and the Papacy is shamed with the
rest. In the tenth century Europe was possessed
by a great despair. Men could see no way
at all out of their troubles and believed that
the end of the world was at hand. The year
iooo was to bring the final destruction of an
order which had in it apparently nothing
either good or enduring and those who had
given up all ^hope of a better world daily
searched the skies for the signs of the com-

114 JERUSALEM PAST AND PRESENT
ing of their Lord. Europe was frightfully
poor and a series of unfruitful seasons added
to the general misery. The wolves came
back again to possess the fields from which
they had been driven out and there are hints
of cannibalism itself. But the year 1000
passed and left the world still undestroyed.
The skies grew kind again and the fields
renewed their yield. Christendom shook it
self free of its fears and began to live. It
would be hard to find in the long course of
human history two centuries more signifi
cant, more pregnant with vast issues or more
fascinating than the eleventh and twelfth.
They constituted one of those rare periods
of rebirth in which great energies of body,
mind and soul worked towards great ends,
are moved by mighty ideals and together
make deathless contributions to history. We
see now that the preceding centuries had
really been times of gestation and that their
very darkness was fertile. The eleventh and
twelfth centuries are charged with all the
energy of races just beginning to come
to consciousness, unwearied and un wasted.

THE GOAL OF THE CRUSADER 115
Men possessed an abounding life which made
them tireless fighters, splendid builders, keen
and curious thinkers. Michelet says that the
eleventh century is the age of pilgrims ;
" man is by birth a pilgrim ; it has been
long since he set out and I do not know
when he shall reach his goal. It needs no
great thing to put him in action. Nature
calls him, love calls him, his native land or
his faith." Truth, also, calls him and un
seen and eternal things and we shall not
understand the Middle Ages unless we under
stand the strange mysticism in answer to
which they sought beyond all the cities of
time, the city which hath foundations, whose
builder and maker is God ; nor until we
understand how their theology, which seems
to us to have been so sterile, was really a
great adventure of their souls seeking in the
divine will shelter and authority. Nor must
we underestimate the real creative power of
their thought. We need to remember how
the first great century of the Crusades was
also the century of Bernard and Abelard,
each one of them a crusader and each incar-

116 JERUSALEM PAST AND PRESENT
nating one of the two great contradictory
impulses which struggle together in the
medieval nature. Abelard is the champion
of reason, the voice of human nature con
scious of its worth and dignity, claiming for
itself the right to live and think and act and
finding in its own desires some revelation
also of the will of God for man. In his truer
and more worthy moments, Abelard stands
more nearly face to face with reality than
any other of the figures of that great time,
and even the weakness through which he
fell is but another aspect of his strength. He
was a protagonist of the Spirit of God, as
immanent in life and light, not far from any
one of us, honoured in honest thought and
served in the freedom of the soul. He gath
ered about him first in the cathedral schools
of Notre Dame, afterwards on the slopes of
Mount Ste. Genevieve, and lastly in the her
mitage of the Paraclete, thousands of the
youths of Europe, called together by his
glowing eloquence, his clear insight, and
above all by the magnetism of his kindling
personality, themselves crusaders asking only

THE GOAL OF THE CRUSADER 117
to be shown that they might believe, to be
taught that they might live, and willing to
leave all behind them for the sake of truth.
Martin says in a great sentence that when
Abelard, "driven out of Paris, established
himself upon the hill now rich in so many
associations, which slopes down to the Seine,
under the very walls of the city, that it was
intelligence herself knocking at the gates of
the future capital of civilization " ; and Rem-
usat remarks " that this hill, destined to be
come as it were the Mount Sinai of university
teaching, was then an asylum where the spirit
of independence sheltered itself." The mod
ern university system dates from Abelard
and his unruly followers outside the walls of
Paris. Towards the end of his stormy life,
Abelard, driven far from Paris, built for him
self a lodge in the wilderness, but there, also,
the crusaders of truth and reason followed
him and his hermitage became a city. The
name which he gave it, the Oratory of the
Comforter, the Paraclete, the One within call,
is also highly significant, for it represents, I
repeat, the dim apprehension of God as

118 JERUSALEM PAST AND PRESENT
sharing also the restlessness of the secular
life and consecrating not alone the Cathedral
and the Monastery but all places of human
action and fellowship.
St. Bernard stands for everything which
Abelard slighted, and affirms everything
which Abelard denies. He possessed in per
haps a higher and more compelling way
the supreme attraction of personality. He
sought the fullness of life through the denial
of all the senses. He was a spiritual flame,
a light and heat which shone through a body
too frail to contain the driving impulses of
his soul. Abelard called the youth of Europe
to the crusades of reason and freedom.
Bernard called the youth of Europe to the
crusades of faith and self-denial. Abelard
built the hermitage of the Paraclete, Bernard
the Monastery of the Valley of Bitterness,
and these two men divided between them the
spiritual and intellectual empire of their
time. Mothers hid their sons that they
might not follow Bernard into the monastery,
and, says Martin, "he would, if he could
have had his way, have changed the world

THE GOAL OF THE CRUSADER 119
into a universal convent and forced God,
Himself, to give the signal of its termina
tion." We cannot understand the Crusades,
unless we understand the immense power of
response to the ideal which lay at the heart
of the Middle Ages, and which moved the
life of the time in tidal waves, now in this
direction, now in that. Nor can we under
stand the Crusades unless we understand
chivalry, the organization in terms of spiri
tual enthusiasm, that is, of the passion for
combat which is so greatly distinctive of the
time. The sons of the Middle Ages were
born warriors as they were born religious
enthusiasts. They combined their religion
and their love of fighting in their chivalry.
Chivalry softened, heightened, idealized their
warlike tendencies and above all subor
dinated them to high ends. If ever any
warrior could have truly said that his sword
was bathed in heaven it was the newly-made
medieval knight, who, after his hours of vigil
before the high altar of the church and his
morning time of taking piece by piece his
armour from the hands of his feudal superior,

120 JERUSALEM PAST AND PRESENT
rode out fully caparisoned to wave his sword
in the sunlight and proclaim himself the
champion of all the oppressed. In effect the
restlessness of the time predisposed the
Europe of the early Middle Ages towards
adventure, men's faith and mysticism made
them naturally seek an end connected with
religion, and their very baptism into the
warrior's spirit drove them towards hardship
and danger as the waters seek the sea. By
one of the greatest coincidences in history,
it was the call of an oppressed Jerusalem
which gave unity to these outstanding medi
eval qualities and inaugurated a tidal move
ment which broke in successive waves
against the very walls of the city.
In 1076, Jerusalem was captured by the
Seljukian Turks. We should have to go into
the heart of Asia itself to account for this.
We know that in answer to obscure causes,
it may be the change of climate which has
made a desert of the high plains where now
we find the sand-covered ruins of ancient
cities, it may be through such restlessness as
stirred Europe from centre to circumference,

THE GOAL OF THE CRUSADER 121
the East poured itself out in successive
waves against the West as the West against
the East, and it was along the limestone
ridges of Palestine that these two move
ments, drawn from such far-off sources, met
and mingled. If one may press one's figure,
Jerusalem was as it were a rock set at the
meeting place of the seas against which the
last great waves of elemental storms dashed
their hostile spray. But the part of Jerusalem
in all this was no accident. The East and
the West met about Jerusalem because Jeru
salem, which held holy meanings for the
West, called Europe to its defense. Along
with such pilgrimages after reason and faith
as Abelard and Bernard created and directed,
there had been for long in Europe quite
literal pilgrimages to the holy places. Some
times the pilgrims went for adventure and
sometimes for penance, but more often that
they might, themselves, walk the streets
which Jesus trod, gaze upon the hill of the
Cross, kneel before the empty tomb and
worship at the place of the Nativity. The
Mohammedans did not at first oppress these

122 JERUSALEM PAST AND PRESENT
pilgrims, but rather welcomed them. They
taxed them, it is true, but they defended them
in turn, made the roads safe, and kept their
shrines secure. Very likely trade had some
thing to do with this but not all. The
Mohammedans also were pilgrims ; they too
had their sacred shrines and could under
stand the faith of those who came from afar
to kneel at some holy place. But the new
conquerors of Jerusalem were a people of a
different sort, cruel and fanatical. They
desecrated the Christian shrines and op
pressed the pilgrims who began to carry
back to Europe such reports of their own op
pression and the defilement of the holy
places, as moved all who heard to righteous
anger. Thus the Crusades began.
The Crusades are, perhaps, the most mass
ive single fact in European history, if a move
ment which extended over 200 years and
involved such a variety of forces can be
called a single fact. We may, first of all,
think of them as one great interwoven ex
pression of the spirit of medievalism, and
then go on to consider some of their out-

THE GOAL OF THE CRUSADER 123
standing characteristics. Directly we begin
to do this, we see that the Crusades are
vastly more than the endeavour of a militant
Christianity to possess again the shrines of
Palestine, and to establish the standard of the
Cross above " those holy fields, . . . over
whose acres walked those blessed feet, . . .
nailed for our advantage on the bitter Cross."
They were one of the four great attempts of
the Western world to impose its will upon
the East, carry Europe beyond the Darda
nelles and maintain it there. Alexander the
Great was the first who sought to accom
plish this and the East, in the end, came
back, though deeply changed by its contact
with Greek civilization, to possess its own.
Rome sought to plant her eagles in Asia
Minor and succeeded for a little, but in the
end the East came back once more to possess
its own. The Crusades were the third at
tempt, and the fourth is being made to-day
by the British, who are working their way
northward from Jerusalem towards Constan
tinople. The whole movement from Alex
ander's time to our own has been really a

124 JERUSALEM PAST AND PRESENT
kind of strategic defense of Western civili
zation. Europe seems always to have felt
instinctively that the West could best be
guarded by possessing the hinterland beyond
the Bosphorus. Martin sees in the Crusades
the best defense which Europe could pos
sibly have offered to the menace of the Turk
and is persuaded that the Seljukian Turks
would have taken Constantinople and over
run eastern Europe 400 years before Constan
tinople was really captured, had it not been
for the Crusades. They broke the force of
the Turkish offensive and although they
failed in what they definitely sought, they
held back for a full two hundred years the
tide of invasion which might have altered
the whole course of European history. By
that time, the Seljukian Turk had spent
himself and the West was free from any
kind of threat from the East for two cen
turies more. When Constantinople was at
last captured, the force of Europe was so
organized, that, although Mohammedanism
reached the very walls of Vienna, it was not
able so to establish itself as seriously to affect

THE GOAL OF THE CRUSADER 125
the course of Western civilization. As one
traces the course of European history and
follows the play of cause and effect down the
centuries, we may well wonder what might
have been, had Latin Europe, in the twelfth
century, really made of Palestine a buffer-
state between the East and the West. That
was always possible. The weakness and
division of the crusaders themselves defeated
their own endeavour and in their defeat they
left open a road between the uplands of Asia
and the eastern gate of Europe.
In the fullness of time the Ottoman Turk
travelled that road and entered that gate.
He brought into Europe elements which
Western civilization could neither assimilate
nor dislodge. Then " the Eastern question "
crossed the Bosphorus and its far-flung con
sequences have brought ruin to Flanders and
northern France, and are involving Europe
and America in a common tragedy. The
Crusades were, first of all, an attempt to
meet "the Eastern question" in the East.
So much the discriminating historian now
sees, but the Europe of the First Crusade was

126 JERUSALEM PAST AND PRESENT
largely unconscious of the vast significance
of what was being done. True, Constan
tinople threatened by the black tents planted
upon the hills about her raised "a cry of
terror and distress which sounded through
the whole of Europe and the man of genius
who was then at the head of the Catholic
Church never underestimated for a moment
the greatness of the peril which Christianity
faced." But these are not the considerations
which really called the sons of the Church to
the banner of the Cross. They vowed them
selves to their task because Jerusalem had
been taken and its shrines profaned.
William of Tyre writes with moving sim
plicity of the conditions for the mending of
which the whole of Western civilization
poured itself out. " After having escaped a
thousand chances of death and crossed many
hostile countries, the Pilgrims who reached
at last the gates of the Holy City were not
able to enter without paying, each one, a
piece of gold for tribute to the infidel, and
having lost all upon the road and having
only by the barest chance come to the city

THE GOAL OF THE CRUSADER 127
alive, the greater part of them had nothing
with which to pay. They had no choice
then but to remain outside the city walls,
asking in vain permission to enter. Stripped
bare of everything, they had no choice save
to die of hunger or misery. Those who were
able to pay the tax and enter Jerusalem were
subject to every kind of danger. They were
spit upon, beaten or even massacred by the
pagans. To crown all, the churches kept in
repair with great difficulty were each day
subject to violent outrages. During the
divine service the infidels entering with furi
ous cries would seat themselves even upon
the altars with no respect for the sanctuary.
They overturned the cups which held the
blood of Christ, trod the holy vessels under
their feet, broke the marbles and heaped
injury and insult upon the priests. The
Patriarch of Jerusalem was himself treated by
them as one vile and abject. They took him
by the beard or the hair, threw him out of his
chair and dragged him on the ground.
Upon occasion they put him in a dungeon
as though he were a slave, for no other

128 JERUSALEM PAST AND PRESENT
reason than to trouble the people through the
suffering of their Shepherd. At a time when
the city, so loved of God, was subject to so
many sorrows, there happened to be among
those who came to visit the holy places a
hermit called Peter, born in France and the
Bishopric of Amiens. He was a little man,
miserable in his bodily state, but a great soul
dwelt in his mean body. His spirit was
ready and his eye piercing, his look penetra
ting and sweet, and he spoke with eloquence.
Peter was introduced by a friend to the
Patriarch Simeon, who, recognizing in him a
certain force and experience, confided in him
without reserve and laid before him all the
calamities which waited upon the servants of
God dwelling in the Holy City."
Few ^interviews have been more momen
tous in their outcome, for Peter charged him
self to arouse Europe and succeeded in his
self-appointed task. "On fire with divine
zeal, he goes everywhere in Italy, crosses the
Alps, visits all the Princes of France,
preaches, thunders upon the need there was
that the places made glorious by the presence

THE GOAL OF THE CRUSADER 129
of the Lord should no longer remain exposed
to the profanation of the infidels. He was
not content with admonishing Princes ; every
where he aroused the poor and men of low
estate no less than the great lords and the
knights." In 1095, Pope Urban the second
summoned the Church to the Council of
Clermont. The Council met on St. Martin's
Day, the 18th of November. Fourteen arch
bishops, two hundred and twenty-five bish
ops, ninety abbbts, thousands of knights and
an innumerable multitude of people crowded
the valley and the hills which surround Cler
mont. For the first time in her history since
the fall of Rome, Europe came to a common
consciousness and that at the bidding of her
outraged faith. When we remember again
the temper of those there gathered together,
the passion of their faith, their mysticism,
their restlessness, their longing for adventure
and their wholly warlike spirit, we see how
what followed was as inevitable as gravita
tion. All that had been in gestation through
the Dark Ages there came to birth. Pope
Urban played upon that multitude as a musi-

130 JERUSALEM PAST AND PRESENT
cian upon his organ. He quoted with a new
and mighty force the old words of Jesus
" whoever shall leave for my sake, his house
or his brothers or his sisters, or his father or
his mother, or his wife or his children, or his
lands, shall receive in this present time one
hundred fold and shall have for his inherit
ance eternal life." "Take the road to the
holy sepulchre, O sons of France, and set out
assured of an imperishable glory which
awaits you in the realm of the skies."
France could not hear such words as
these without response. When Detaille was
painting upon the walls of the choir in the
Pantheon at Paris the mighty company of
the sons of France who have spent them
selves through the centuries for La Gloire,
he should have put somewhere in the heart
of those endless ranks the men who an
swered Pope Urban at Clermont with a shout
which rocked the earth and sky, " God wills
it, God wills it." Again and again some
human shouting has, as it were, shaken the
earth, but was there ever any human cry, I
wonder, which has wakened such mighty

THE GOAL OF THE CRUSADER 131
echoes as the cry of the men who then and
there began the Crusades ? There is no room
or occasion here to follow that movement in
detail. The First Crusade began in 1096 and
the movement did not entirely spend itself
until 1299, almost exactly two centuries later.
Central and Southern Europe launched the
earlier Crusades but the movement finally
gathered into itself the whole of Germany,
Denmark and England. In the main, the
crusaders followed three roads : the valley of
the Danube, the roads which skirt the north
ern Adriatic, and the path of the sea. The
last Crusades drove at Egypt and even
northern Africa in the attempt to reach the
seats of Mohammedan administration. The
whole movement, simple as it is when we
stand far enough back from it to see its
massive outlines, was never simple at all in
detail. The Crusades involved preparations
which altered the economic balance of Eu
rope. The great barons particularly pledged
everything which they possessed in order to
fit out their followers. Many of them never
came back at all. Those who did, came

132 JERUSALEM PAST AND PRESENT
back impoverished and their power was
never thereafter fully restored. Far-reaching
consequences were involved in all this ; the
growth of cities, the growth of municipal
power, some added measure of liberty for
the common people and an increase in the
spirit of democracy, but above all the deep
ening of the sense of nationality with the
king as the head and symbol of the nation.
There was after the Crusades a much greater
centralization of power in the European mon
archies than before. Industry and commerce
profited, and Italy, since her great cities,
Genoa and Venice particularly, furnished the
ships for the crusaders, increased mightily
in sea power. We may date the beginnings
of the rich city states of Italy from this
period. The Crusades involved also endless
questions of adjustment between the Euro
pean states and above all, between Latin
Europe and Constantinople. The Greek Em
peror, though he had asked the help of Latin
Christianity against the Turk, received far
more than he asked, and in the end Con
stantinople suffered as much from the de-

THE GOAL OF THE CRUSADER 133
fenders of the faith as she later suffered from
the Ottoman Turks. The relation between
the crusaders and Constantinople is a tangled
web of violence, trickery and deceit.
In the main, there are seven main move
ments ; the first is the Crusade of the great
Barons, Godfrey the foremost of them all.
Godfrey and his followers after immense
labours, still more immense losses, and
strange alternations of despair and uncon
querable exaltation, halted first in Constan
tinople, then at Nicaea, and then for long
under the walls of Antioch, came at last to
the far-sought city and after a month's siege
forced an entrance by storm. Those who
finally passed through the breaches in its
walls were but a handful of those who had
set out. Hardly one in twenty survived the
chances of the expedition to worship at
the shrines which had cost so great a price.
Jerusalem was thereafter, for the better part
of a century, a little Latin kingdom with
Godfrey for the first and worthiest of its
kings and the full weight of feudal organi
zation imposed upon Palestine. There were

134 JERUSALEM PAST AND PRESENT
seneschals, constables, marshals and cham
berlains, a Baron of Jaffa, a Prince of Galilee
and Lords of Bethlehem and Nazareth. There
were no foundations, economic and social, up
and down the limestone ridges of Palestine
strong enough to bear a weight like this.
The Kingdom of Jerusalem was from the first
a beleaguered state and save for a wisdom
and statesmanship which Europe did not
then even begin to possess, its downfall was
sure and only the divisions among the Mo
hammedans themselves postponed its recap
ture. In 1 187 Saladin won it back and
thereafter the Mohammedans never lost it
save for brief intervals.
The Second Crusade was an expedition of
support led by King Conrad of Germany and
Louis the Seventh of France. St. Bernard
was the moving spirit in launching this sec
ond expedition, doing what Peter the Hermit
had done but with more compelling power.
The Second Crusade ended in utter shame
and ignominy. " So vast had been the drain
of population in this holy war that about
one man was left to seven women and now

THE GOAL OF THE CRUSADER 135
it was known that the fathers, the husbands
and the sons, or the brothers of these women
would never see their homes any more.
Their cry of anguish charged Bernard with
sending them forth on an errand on which
they had done absolutely nothing and had
reaped only wretchedness and disgrace."
The Third Crusade was to deliver the city.
When the West heard that it had been taken,
Christendom forgot the losses of their own
country to weep over Jerusalem and repented
in sackcloth and ashes. The host now
armed was led by men whose names still
sound across the years, the great kings of
medieval Europe, Frederick Barbarossa,
Richard Plantagenet and Philip Augustus of
France ; but alas, in this multitude of kings
there was no wisdom. The siege of Acre
drained their power and Frederick Barba
rossa was drowned in a little river of Asia
Minor, though his countrymen refused to be
lieve that one so great could really have
perished t"so meanly. For centuries after
Germany was persuaded that the red-
bearded emperor slept an enchanted sleep

136 JERUSALEM PAST AND PRESENT
with his knights in the heart of the Kyffauser,
waiting, when the ravens should cease to
hover around the peak, to descend with his
crusaders and bring back his power to
Germany. Philip Augustus went back to
France with but a handful of his knights,
and Richard the Lion Hearted wandered
through Europe as an exile, filling in legend
a far nobler place than he had ever filled in
life. The Fifth Crusade was ruined by the trea
son of the Venetians and ended not in the
conquest of Jerusalem but in the plunder of
Constantinople. Frederick the Second, last
and most brilliant of the Hohenstaufen upon
whom the doom of his house fell with full
power, led the Sixth Crusade. He succeeded
by treaty rather than conquest in regaining
the Holy City but the Papacy hated him. It
would not take Jerusalem from his hands as
a gift and the city was soon lost. The
Seventh Crusade is inseparably associated
with the name and memory of one of the
greatest of French kings, one of the gentlest
and most devout of those who have ever

THE GOAL OF THE CRUSADER 137
worn a crown, St. Louis, who judged his
people as a father, who built the Sainte-
Chapelle, a priceless shrine for the Crown of
Thorns, who suffered long in the deltas of
the Nile and who died at last in a second ex
pedition as he wished to die, seeking the
sepulchre of his Lord, though far, far from
the Holy Land ; for he died at Tunis. In
1299, the Knights Templar acting with cer
tain Mongolian forces, captured many Syrian
cities, Damascus among them, entered Jeru
salem in triumph, visited the Holy Sepulchre
and celebrated Easter on Mount Zion. But
as there was no support behind the movement,
Jerusalem was lost and the Crusades ended.
What shall we say of a movement which
began in Clermont in 1095 and ended on
Easter day 1299 — a movement which whi
tened every road between the Alps and the
Dead Sea with the bones of pilgrims and
warriors and which bled Europe for 200
years? The West probably lost a larger
proportion of its population through the
wars of the Crusades and the pestilence and
famine incident thereto than it ever lost be-

138 JERUSALEM PAST AND PRESENT
fore or since. Historians do not agree in
any verdict. Some of them believe the Cru
sades, foredoomed to failure, to have been a
colossal folly in which the strongest and best
of the racial stock of central Europe particu
larly was so exhausted that we are all the
descendants of second-rate men and women.
Beyond debate, Europe burnt herself out in
these fires. When the Crusades were done,
the great spiritual, intellectual and artistic
impulses which are the glory of medievalism
and whose broken fragments are still our
richest treasure, were exhausted. From the
end of the Crusades until the Renaissance,
European history is increasingly mean, cruel
and sterile. There must be some connection
between the waste of the Crusades and the
decay which followed. But this is not the
whole story. The contact between the East
and the West was rich in far-reaching conse
quences. The Arabian civilization taught the
Latin civilization many things which have
not been forgotten. Constantinople and
eastern Europe were saved for two centuries
more and the social structure of western

THE GOAL OF THE CRUSADER 139
Europe was so altered as greatly to
strengthen centralized government and at
the same time to take something of the
weight of feudalism from the back of the
average man.
I, myself, find the real secret of the flower
ing out of medievalism not in the Crusades
themselves, but in the deeper, richer spirit
of which the Crusades were but one experi
ence, and I am persuaded that the Crusades
impoverished quite as much as they enriched
the [spirit of the Middle Ages. They do not
bear close examination. They reveal an al
most inconceivable amount of folly and even
crime when you study them near-to, but in
the mass they are nobly imposing. They
represent an ardour, a passion for high ends
and a moving self-commitment to ideal
causes at the bidding of faith and adoration
of which only the men of the Middle Ages
seem to have been capable. They have
given a new meaning to chivalry and a
glory strangely shot through with shadow
to our common humanity. Their traditions
have enriched literature and their memory is

140 JERUSALEM PAST AND PRESENT
an inspiration. Since the days of the Cru
sades, we have never quite ceased to be
crusaders. Every great loyalty, possible or
impossible, to which men have since an
swered has been in some fashion rebaptized
in that first crusading spirit. Every holy
and desperate cause which summons us to
high adventure gains reinforcement from
the memory of the first great adventure of
Christian Europe when the children of the
Cross poured out all that they were and that
they possessed, if only they might win Jeru
salem for their Lord Whom Jerusalem re
jected and see with dim eyes the manger
of His Nativity, the hill of His Crucifixion,
and the rock-hewn Tomb which could not
contain Him. Thus it was Jerusalem which
gave the Crusades their occasion and offered
to the restless, questing, mystic warriors of
the twelfth and thirteenth centuries a definite
object for which they might battle and a
shrine which they might die to possess.
The story of Jerusalem after the Crusades
seems commonplace ; two great lights had
fallen over that gray, old city, and two great

THE GOAL OF THE CRUSADER 141
lights had darkened and left only the shadow
behind. The first was the light of a spiri
tual vision revealed through its prophets and
become divine in Jesus Christ. Jerusalem
rejected Him and that light never rose again.
The second was the fierce light of the de
votion of the warriors of medieval Europe.
They watered its streets with their blood, pos
sessed it for a moment, then lost it ; but such
was the high, dramatic quality of their en
deavour to possess it that all which follows
is drab and ordinary.
When the power of the Seljukian Turks
had spent itself and Mohammed and Egypt
could no longer hold Palestine, the Ottoman
Turk fell heir to the city and he and his
descendants kept it until yesterday when the
English captured it and it came once more
under the dominion of a Christian power.
But what the future holds for Jerusalem, no
man may now say. In the 2,900 years be
tween 1000 B. C. and 1918 A. D. Jerusalem
has been besieged and captured twenty-four
times. Its walls have again and again been
levelled, its very site has been plowed and

142 JERUSALEM PAST AND PRESENT
sown with salt. It has belonged to the an
cient Canaanite, to the Jew, to the Greek, to
the Roman, to the Syrian, to the Chaldean,
to the Arab, to the Turk, to Latin Europe,
and to England. Blood enough has been
shed there to brim all its reservoirs, deeds
enough of shame and glory have been done
there to make a record of mingled light and
darkness never to be forgotten. It is asso
ciated with the faith of the Jew, the fanati
cism of the Mohammedan and the adoration
of the Christian. All the great religions, the
great cultures, the great races have met be
fore its walls and striven to possess it. Is
there any story in human history like the
story of Jerusalem ?

VI
Jerusalem, the Hope of the Soul

VI
JERUSALEM, THE HOPE OF THE SOUL
WE have now followed to our own
time the dramatic story of the
changing fortunes of Jerusalem.
If the city had no great religious associations,
nor any meaning at all for the high enter
prises of the spirit, the story of Jerusalem
would still remain an absorbing chapter of
history, for few cities of the world have been
so long in the full current of great historical
movements. Jerusalem has never been the
seat of any great administration, nor had
any long empire save in the regions of the
spirit, but it has, none the less, stood at the
meeting-place of the empires. Its fortunes
were involved from the morning of history in
any alteration of the balance of power in
Western Asia, and equally in any war be
tween Asia and Europe. Jerusalem would
have been far more secure and its story far
145

146 JERUSALEM PAST AND PRESENT
less fascinating had the city been at the heart
of some stable and easily defended country
and not situated as it is on a frontier which
really involves the meeting of three con
tinents. This is the outstanding fact which controls,
historically speaking, the whole course of
Palestinian history. History always has a
strongly defined geographical control but
geography alone does not make history un
less indeed we add thereto the geography of
the soul. We have seen how the passion of
the Jew for his capital city established it in
the idealism of a race which remembers
more tenaciously and hopes more persistently
than any other race in the world. No small
part of the glory and tragedy of history is
due to the determination of exiled peoples to
return to their motherlands or to the purpose
of a state to win again for itself lost prov
inces. Alsace and Lorraine have involved
France and Germany for 300 years, but
there is, I think, no other instance of the pas
sion of a race for what it has made its own
through long use, profound association,

THE HOPE OF THE SOUL 147
battle, worship and administration compa
rable with the passion of the Jew for Jeru
salem.
Much else is also involved, for the patriot
ism of the Jew was one aspect of his religion ;
his prophets were always interpreting the
fortunes of the state in terms of the love or
justice of their God and always just as in
evitably somehow testing the love and justice
of God by the fortunes of the state. The
history of Jerusalem, therefore, in every
period from the first of the prophets till the
ministry of Jesus Christ has its spiritual reac
tions. That is to say, the development of
the Hebrew faith and every aspect and utter
ance of it were vitally affected by the chang
ing fortunes of Jerusalem. There are regions
in which speculations as to what might have
been have little force because there is no way
of testing the soundness of one's conclusion,
but humanly speaking one must believe that
without the constant menace of Assyria,
Babylon or Egypt, without the threat of in
vading tides which washed always around
the frontiers of the Hebrew state, broke

148 JERUSALEM PAST AND PRESENT
more than once against the walls of their
capital and from time to time ran red through
streets grown old in battle, without captivity
and bitterly endured exile and the never sur
rendered hope of deliverance therefrom, we
should never have had the great messages of
the prophets or the grave music of the
Psalms, or the deathless voices of assurance
in which ever since the sorely tried have
found their comfort and inspiration.
These and like forces made Jerusalem
what it was and have given it a meaning for
us to be measured only by the wealth and
meaning of religion itself, but the story of
Jerusalem does not end with the records ol
time ; it projects itself into the expectations
of eternity. Jerusalem owes half its wonder
to the tenacity of a memory which would
not forget it and to the long action and reac
tion between faith and experience as voiced
by the great Hebrew prophets. It owes the
other half of its wonder to a deeply held and
often adjourned but never surrendered hope
which has made the city the symbol of
Christian idealism and the far-sought refuge

THE HOPE OF THE SOUL 149
in another world of the weary and heavy-
laden. The old Jerusalem is a battle-scarred
city which has so covered the face of the
hills upon which it was originally built with
the waste of manifold destruction and re
building, that the very contour of its site has
been altered and there are fifty feet of waste
between the foundations of the city to-day
and the ancient city of David. But the new
Jerusalem with its walls of twelve manner of
precious stones and its gates of pearl is lifted
four square against the horizons of eternity
unscarred by any battle, not to be darkened
by any sorrow, built by the power of hope
upon the foundations of faith. How has it
come to pass that an oriental city of no great
size or power has become the dearest symbol
of the holiest expectations which men have
ever entertained ? To answer that question
we need to follow in some detail the develop
ment of the idealism which has taken Jeru
salem for its symbol. It is no easy task to
do this, for it involves so much. That time-
worn phrase, " the New Jerusalem," is, as it
were, a kind of window through which we

150 JERUSALEM PAST AND PRESENT
look not only into history itself but deep into
the human heart.
The old Jerusalem looks abroad from its
commanding site to far horizons but the
horizons which lie about the New Jerusalem
are vaster still. For the New Jerusalem is
bounded by the wonder and mystery of life.
Children of time and change as we are, we
have never accepted our temporal state with
out seeking to follow it back to its sources
and on to its consummations. We are
always searching the past for some knowl
edge of that from which we set out, we are
always searching the future for some dis
closure of the end of our journey. So every
race and every faith has its doctrine of first
things and last things. We have never
accepted death as any satisfying end of the
journey of life and have sought beyond that
shadow the fulfillment of our hopes and the
readjustment of trying conditions. Ideas of
reward and punishment have always been
involved in any conception of the hereafter,
for our race has always felt instinctively that
morality is of the nature of things and that

THE HOPE OF THE SOUL 151
we can never strike a satisfactory moral
balance if we have time alone to deal with.
Our race has therefore always ascribed some
judicial powers to whatever gods we have
worshipped and established their tribunals
beyond the bournes of time and space.
These ideas have of course been very often
most simply held and most crudely expressed
but they are not wholly wanting even
among savage peoples. Some idea, too, of
a final catastrophe has been widely held.
" The Andaman islanders believe that spirits
depart from souls, go to a gloomy jungle
below the earth which is flat, but the time
will come which will cause the world to turn
over, the living will perish and change places
with the dead. Spirits will be reunited with
souls and live on a renewed earth in which
sickness and death will be unknown. Many
American tribes expected a catastrophic end
of all things." The Mexican, the Eskimo,
the Peruvian, have all shared some such
hope as this. The Celtic folk, in legends
misty as the winds which blow in from
northern seas, tell of islands rich in happi-

152 JERUSALEM PAST AND PRESENT
ness, where the warrior may lay down his
armour, and the bard find moving music for
his harp. The Scandinavian has his hall of
heroes from which his warriors ride out
every morning to joyous battle and return
at night without a scar, and also his expecta
tion of the twilight of the gods when the
forces of evil and darkness long restrained
will at last break loose to have their way
even with the high gods themselves, and
after that of a new earth with green meadows
and fields which bring forth without labour,
with even the gods reborn. There is no
need to multiply such illustrations. They
belong, I say, to all races and all times.
They are the creations of an instinctive faith
which accepts neither death nor darkness,
nor any kind of defeat as final. But the
Jew was richer in such a faith than any other
people. As we trace the evolution of the New
Jerusalem we are fortunate in being able to
study aspect by aspect the growth of a great
eschatology and to discover its influence
upon Christian idealism. All Jewish proph-

THE HOPE OF THE SOUL 153
ecy, as we have seen, involved reward and
retribution, though to begin with all this was
simply conceived. There is in earlier Hebrew
history no trace of judgment beyond death.
Death itself is judgment, bitter only as death
is premature. The immortality of the
Ninetieth Psalm is at best but a corporate
immortality. Individuals come and go " for
when thou art angry all our days are gone,
we bring our years to an end as a tale that
is told." Only the might of God endures.
The only hope a man may have of living is
in those who follow him. Life itself and the
field of history are for the earlier Hebrew
prophet and psalmist the field in which the
justice and love of God must operate, and
if God's justice is not made manifest in
the felicity of the devout and the mis
fortune of the wicked, then the Hebrew
moralist is sadly perplexed. The Book of
Job tells us that. At the widest the fortunes
of the nations test the goodness of God.
The rewards of obedience are to be found in
national prosperity, the punishment of dis
obedience is national adversity and time is

154 JERUSALEM PAST AND PRESENT
the stage for it all. Defeat and captivity are
always therefore retributive. The restora
tion of the nation and the rebuilding of its
capital city mark the signal mercy of a for
giving God.
With deepening experience and a richer
faith, other elements begin to enter in and
the doctrine of last things involves some
thing more than time, though it is fair to say
that even in the later Hebrew prophets the
doctrine of last things does not involve eter
nity as we conceive it. For we set the eter
nal squarely over against the temporal, while
the Hebrew prophet affirmed rather a series
of ages indefinite induration but not charged
with the full content of the eternal. Jewish
love and faith carried the hope of a restored
Jerusalem along with it as the doctrine of
last things grew vaster and more complex.
Jerusalem is not only to be rebuilt and be
come the capital city of a great Jewish state,
it is to become the glory of the whole earth.
" Arise, shine ; for thy light is come and the
glory of the Lord is risen upon thee, . . .
whereas thou hast been forsaken and hated,

THE HOPE OF THE SOUL 155
so that no man went through thee; I will
make thee an eternal excellency, a joy of
many generations. For brass I will bring
gold, and for iron I will bring silver, and for
wood, brass, and for stones, iron ; I will also
make thy officers peace and thine exactors
righteousness. Thou shalt call thy walls Sal
vation, and thy gates Praise. The sun shall
be no more thy light by day ; neither for
brightness shall the moon give light unto
thee ; but the Lord shall be unto thee an
everlasting light, and thy God thy glory."
So the New Jerusalem rises like the dawn.
How much of all this is symbolism and how
much literal expectation in the mind of the
great prophet of the Exile we shall never
know, but those who followed him, and espe
cially those who wrote much upon last things
in the bitter times before and after Judas
Maccabeus, took it all literally and added
much. "Nature will be changed, the land
will become marvellously fertile and well-
watered. There will be no more evil beasts
or else the lion and the lamb will lie down
together. All human ills will be done away

156 JERUSALEM PAST AND PRESENT
and there will be no more weeping, nor sor
row, nor sighing." This expanding expecta
tion involves two conceptions : first, the Day
of the Lord, a day, that is, when by the
interposition of His great might God will
directly overthrow the enemies of His people
and establish their empire by His own weap
ons ; moreover, since there were many right
eous dead who had sought and sought in
vain their deliverance, the Divine Justice
must also include them ; the Day of the Lord,
therefore, involves the Day of Resurrection.
Here we have the full emergence of the
conception of the last judgment with great
cosmic aspects. Heaven and earth are to
be overturned, that the Jew may come to his
own again and his God be vindicated. In
the measure that the hope itself was ad
journed, it was the more passionately clung
to. As men dwelt upon the ways in which
God must come to deliver them, they filled
the hope of His deliverance with signs and
wonders and the mighty discomfiture of His
foes. The day of deliverance involved also
the expectation of a Deliverer and so their

THE HOPE OF THE SOUL 157
faith in a Messiah which had long lain at
the very heart of all Jewish prophecy comes
clearly into light, and the Messiah Himself is
invested with all the qualities of majesty and
power which the hard-beset would dream of
in one coming, conquering and to conquer.
The one thing they never expected was that
He should come as a carpenter out of Naza
reth, and be crucified upon a cross which
they themselves had planted. In general
this literature of last things shows three well
defined notions of the future, though these
notions do not always agree. First, "con
tinuing the prophetic conception, there is
judgment followed by the establishment of a
blissful earth or a renewed earth. Second,
the kingdom is temporary and at its close
judgment begins followed by the dawn of an
eternal world. Third, no kingdom on earth
but an imminent future kingdom in the Other-
World." The Jewish mind loved strange symbols,
wheels within wheels, and beasts and horns ;
a symbolism which puzzles the Occidental
mind and has always left room for capri-

158 JERUSALEM PAST AND PRESENT
cious interpretations. The Jewish mind
also loved to deal loosely with time, to con
ceive future ages in weeks of years, in
seventy and multiples of seventy, in millen
niums and multiples of millenniums. Here
also we see a chronology so vague as to fit
into almost any time or scheme and at the
same time provide a way of escape when our
calculations do not come true. In the end
after much brooding and by the addition of
elements drawn from Persia and in answer
to the strange power of the human mind to
build mighty systems at the bidding of its
hopes and fears, especially when unchecked
by the courses of experience, Jewish eschatol-
ogy became one of the most complicated
achievements of religious faith. It is com
parable in the scope and boldness of its spec
ulations only with that strange philosophy
which the Jew and the Greek together pro
duced in Alexandria. The practical import
of it all for our purposes is that it was carried
over into Christianity. It goes without say
ing that this would happen, for Christianity
itself was born of the Jewish Messianic ex-

THE HOPE OF THE SOUL 159
pectation. The life of Palestine was saturated
with this expectation when Christ was born
in Bethlehem, though beyond debate it was
held by Mary and Elizabeth and Simeon far
more simply and spiritually than by the mass
of the Jewish people. Jesus spiritualized
and transformed it ; at least the outcome of
His ministry was the spiritualization and
transformation of it, though how far He Him
self accepted the more widely-held belief is a
question about which scholars are debating
to-day as they have never done before.
There is no question at all that His people
rejected Him because He did not fulfill their
expectations of what the Messiah must be
and do. The Cross bears incontestible testi
mony to that ; while the Gospels and the
temper of the Apostles as recorded in the
Acts and the Epistles bear incontestible testi
mony to an expectation of His speedy return.
The Apostolic Church in the agony of its
persecution turned for comfort and assurance
to the old hope, charged with new meaning,
of a supernatural deliverance and the glory
of the New Jerusalem. There are many

160 JERUSALEM PAST AND PRESENT
things in the Book of Revelation which puz
zle us sadly but we know that the Christians
of that far-off time faced death in every fear
ful form with indomitable courage because
they saw through the fires which consumed
them, the walls of the Celestial City gleaming
in the skies and the gates of pearl swung
open for their reception. So Jerusalem be
came for the whole Christian Church a glori
ous symbol of the felicity of the redeemed
and the stronghold of the divine love high
uplifted above the bitterness of their earthly
state. The visions and prophecies of the Book of
Revelation established the expectation of the
New Jerusalem enduringly in the life of the
Church, though little use was made of this
symbolism during the first thousand years of
church history. St. Augustine did, indeed,
offer to the sorely tried world the hope of a
spiritual empire which should succeed the
temporal dominion of Rome, but his " City
of God" is rather a philosophy of history
than a vision of future reward. St. Augus
tine, moreover, anticipates the permanency

THE HOPE OF THE SOUL 161
of Rome rather than the restoration of Jeru
salem. His book was called out by the dis
may and helplessness of Western Europe in
the face of the fall of the Roman Empire,
and he assures the Christian of his western
world that Rome can never fall — though her
temporal adminstration come to an end, God
will build a spiritual city and a spiritual em
pire upon her time-worn foundations.
One may well wonder whether Augustine
could have so written of the New Rome
without the suggestion of the New Jerusalem,
but none the less it is Rome and not Jeru
salem which is the city of his hope and
faith. Yet Augustine, with all his authority,
was not great enough to supplant the ex
pectation of a New Jerusalem with the ex
pectation of a New Rome, for the " City of
God " lay almost wholly upon the surface of
Western thought. Augustine influenced his
world in great and manifold ways, but he in
fluenced it less through what is perhaps the
most philosophical and deeply reasoned of
his books, than by anything else he did.
We have already seen how thick a dark-

162 JERUSALEM PAST AND PRESENT
ness fell upon Europe between St. Augus
tine and the Crusades, and how finally
Europe came to despair of any happy issue
from its afflictions, and could see no hope at
all except in the end of the world and the
triumphant coming of the Lord. Under the
expectation of the imminent end of the world,
the Church turned anew to the vision of the
New Jerusalem.
It is strange how history repeats itself, and
with what uniformity the same situations
produce the same results through the centu
ries. We have seen how in the far-off be
ginning of Hebrew prophecy, the prophets
turned from the unhappy political condition
of their people, from war and captivity, to
the hope of their restoration, and how in
their vision Jerusalem was to be rebuilt, and
once more become the capital of a free and
happy state. We have seen how the later
prophets began to transfer their hope of
deliverance from the earth to the skies, and
to the dream of a heavenly City established
through the saving power of God. We have
seen how in the bitter times of the Neronian

THE HOPE OF THE SOUL 163
persecutions, the Christians looked up from
a world which tortured and slew them to the
strength and security of the " City of God."
Now a thousand years after, the Benedictine
monks and their comrades of many other
orders in medieval monasteries, much op
pressed by the desolation and hopelessness
of their world, sought the fulfillment of their
hopes in this old old vision of the City of
God. A few of the more thoughtful and
highly gifted among them gave a majestic
voice at once to their despair and to their
faith. The noble Latin hymns " Dies Iree "
and " De Contemptu Mundi " catch up and
continue after a silence of almost a thousand
years the great music of the prophets, though
with all the difference in the world, for the
prophets were of the East and the monks of
the West. The prophets belong to the pre-
Christian world, the monks are the express
creation of their faith and their time. Yet
monk and prophet have this in common,
that both seek a " city which hath founda
tions, whose builder and maker is God."
The prophets have left us only broken

164 JERUSALEM PAST AND PRESENT
Hebrew records of what they said, but the
monks have left us their glorious Latin verse,
such a voicing of the longings of the pilgrims
of time for a celestial peace and the securities
of eternity as have made their songs the
treasure of the Christian Church. The very
versification of these old Latin hymns is
richly suggestive. They break all the canons
of classic Latin poetry. They pay no regard
at all to ancient meters. They employ rhyme
as Virgil and Horace never for a moment
thought of using it. "It was not," says
Trench, " until the classical framework of
Latin verse was wholly shattered, quantity
absolutely ignored and accent substituted in
its stead, that the latent powers of rhyme
being at the same time evoked with Chris
tian Latin poetry, attained the perfection
which fills with astonishment all who are
capable of judging as they contemplate this
second birth of Latin song." There are
barren stretches enough in this hymnology,
but at its best it possesses a high nobility.
" As a whole," says Milman, " the hymnology
of the Latin Church has a singularly solemn

THE HOPE OF THE SOUL 165
and majestic tone. It suggests, as it were,
a grave full tone of the chant, a sustained
grandeur, the glowing burst, the tender fall,
the mysterious dying away of the organ."
But the real appeal of these hymns is not
after all so much in their great music, as in
their voicing of lonelinesses and longings
which are the very texture of the soul. We
are highly fortunate in our English transla
tions of them. We find them in every well
chosen hymn book at the end of all the
hymns, the very culmination of the wistful
vision and praise of the Church. We sing
them in our seasons of more solemn thought
or lyric longing and their very repetition
brings healing to our souls.
" O Mother dear, Jerusalem,
When shall I come to thee ?
When shall my sorrows have an end,
Thy joys when shall I see ? "
and even as we sing, the horizons of time
fall back, the clear light of a cloudless day
conquers our shadows, and it is Jerusalem
the battle-scarrred which has supplied for us

166 JERUSALEM PAST AND PRESENT
the symbol of our hope. With Bernard of
Cluny we sing,
"Jerusalem, the golden, with milk and honey
blest,"
or else, " For Thee O dear, dear Country,
Mine eyes their vigils keep,"
and once more, it is Jerusalem set up on
high which supplies to us our truest symbol
of beauty, splendour and praise.
It is true that there is a note of other worldli-
ness in all this which may unduly detach us
from the duties of this present world, and too
greatly root our faith and hope in that which
is not to be possessed hereafter unless we
secure something of the glory and wonder of
it in the life which now is. This was the
fault of the monk and he paid for it dearly,
but none the less, we shall never build the
City of God upon the foundations of time
unless we possess the vision of the City, for
we are citizens of two worlds, and we make
this world what it ought to be only in the
light of a vaster, truer order for which we

THE HOPE OF THE SOUL 167
are always longing and of which we feel
ourselves to be truly the citizens. Jerusalem
as the hope of the soul may become a trans
forming force in every aspect of our common
life here and now, if we are persuaded that
there are eternal excellencies which lend
meaning to all present endeavour, and offer
to us a fullness of hope which only eternity
is great enough to satisfy.
This vision of the heavenly Jerusalem as
we discover it in the Book of Revelation and
the hymnology of the Church affects our
whole religious life. No greater sermons
have ever been preached than such sermons
as those of Phillips Brooks on the " City that
lieth four square," — sermons which find their
texts in the hope of the Church, their inspira
tion in the vision of its prophets, their wealth
in an apocalyptic splendour of imagery, and
their application in duty and character ; and
when we consider how greatly these sermons
and hymns voice our questions, what moving
assurances they breathe across our troubled
souls, and how poor our worship would be'
without them, we see how much we owe to

168 JERUSALEM PAST AND PRESENT
the ancient expectations of a redeemed Jeru
salem, and how the voices of the great
prophets echo down the years. Literature
and architecture alike have been affected by
this hope and its symbolism. We have built
the glowing walls of the New Jerusalem into
the pictured windows of our churches. The
light which falls upon the high altars of the
old cathedrals shines through glass in which
the faith of those who made their churches
so glorious have set forth their vision of the
triumph of the redeemed — and the New Jeru
salem is the symbol of it all.
The real power of this hope is not, of
course, in the literal form in which it is
expressed, but in what lies beneath and be
yond it; for beneath it, I repeat, is our
longing for some blessed end to the pilgrim
ages and battles of life, a longing which is
itself a testimony that we are made not for
time but for eternity, and above it all is the
power which in creating these very hopes
testifies to the possibility of their fulfillment.
Surely God would never have left us to hope
so greatly if He had meant that all our hopes

THE HOPE OF THE SOUL 169
would be disappointed. The New Jerusalem
with its walls of precious stones and its gates
of pearl is only a symbol, but the strength,
beauty, peace and security which it sym
bolizes are part of the quenchless demand of
life and the last great gift of God to His
children. Life would be poor indeed if there
were no hope to call to us from beyond the
hills of time, and it is the enduring glory of
the old city of Jerusalem to have become so
associated with the passion of Christianity
for peace and immortality that we cannot
think of one without the other. So Jeru
salem has become deathless as the hope of
deathlessness, and because it belongs to the
realm of the Spirit, it endures as the Spirit
endures.

Printed in the United States of America

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