Thirty-eighth Sunday.
THE RETURN FROM BABYLON.
FIRST READING.
"The Lord is in His holy Temple: let all the earth keep silence before Him."—Hab. 2:20.
THE Jews had gone back to their old city of Jerusalem, but they found it looking very sad and ruinous. The walls were broken down, and the pleasant houses were heaps of ruins, and grass and brambles had come up in the courts, and there were heaps of stone blackened with the fire and smoke that had burnt down the city.
The first thing they did was to clear the place where God's holy Temple used to stand, and to build it up again. But they were not rich and powerful like King Solomon, who built the first Temple; they had no gold and silver, and the new Temple they built was very small and poor compared with the old one.
There were old men among them who remembered the first Temple as it used to be, and they wept aloud as they saw how different the new one was; but there were young men who were very glad to have a Temple at all, and they shouted for joy; so there was a mixed sound of weeping for sorrow and of crying out with joy.