“Ah, those crafty foxes of the Herod brood! ’Twas what Christ called them when they slew John for Salome’s dance. She was of the same brood of vipers long ago; and the blood of a Herod runs true to color.”
The Prophet’s hands were over his eyes and he seemed to be thinking back long, long years. The hearth fire guttered lower. The lamp wick had burned almost to the edge of the oil, and still the Prophet’s face shone with luminous radiance as of an inner white flame; and his hands looked like ethereal hands through which flamed an inner fire of the spirit in kindly deeds.
“Dear Master, let me be your slave—”
“Child, there are nor bond nor free in the Great Kingdom which I serve; for neither life nor death, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor heights, nor depths, nor any other creature shall be able to separate us from the love of God.”
“Nor bond nor free?” cried the little mountaineer. “Is there a kingdom in all the world where there are neither bond nor free?”
“The Kingdom is here and now,” said the Prophet; and his brow shone with the radiance of moonlight on the snowy peaks of Lebanon.
“But, sir,” cried the boy, “they held me slave, and they hold you in bonds; for the King Agrippa told the Lord Julius—”
“Two bodies there are,” answered the Prophet gently, “one terrestrial and one celestial—one that waxes old as a garment which we cast aside, and one that grows younger with fuller life as the years nearer draw to God; and neither life nor death, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor any other creature than ourselves can place bonds upon that body. Like the air, which we do not see, but in which we live and move and have our being, that celestial body lives and moves and has its being in the love of God. Child, rejoice, rejoice, again I say rejoice, that the Glad News has come and the Kingdom is here—and now.”
When the Idumean returned, his mood seemed again gentler. He bade the boy fasten the wrist gyves of the chain on the prisoner’s left arm to his own right wrist, and to sleep on the floor, so that he as older man would not be troubled in his sleep by the clank of the chain when he tossed restlessly at night, as age is wont to do.