CHAPTER III

_Salathiel’s Resolution in the Temple_

[Sidenote: Before the Temple]

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

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

[Sidenote: An Interruption]

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

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

[Sidenote: The High Priest in Terror]

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

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

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

[Sidenote: An Attack by the Romans]

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

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

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

[Sidenote: In the Midst of Confusion]

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

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

[Sidenote: Salathiel and Miriam]

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

[Sidenote: A Scene of Disaster]

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

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

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