Nigrae feraci frondis in Algido
Per damna, per caedes, ab ipso
Ducit opes animumque ferro.’
“How every word of this would suit the Jews! I mean in their past history. According to my news (from a friend of Rufus the new Governor) it may suit their future, too; and we may have to take Jerusalem again. Then—to quote Isaiah and Horace in one—there will be another ‘lopping of the boughs’ in the future. But I mean their past. I wonder whether you understand what I am dreaming of. Probably not, and it is not worth explaining. Nor indeed am I well enough to explain clearly and briefly. I have been going in too much for books of late, and feel at this moment (to quote an old friend) ‘dead from the waist down.’ However—as I am not going to write about these Jews again—I will scribble my last thoughts to the end.
“How strange it would have been, then, my dearest Quintus, if these Jews—I mean the Jewish Jews not the Christian Jews—how strange, I say, it would have been, looked at as a poem, if these fellows had fulfilled Hannibal’s prophecy. They went some way towards it. Though their Ilium has been twice burned they are still alive, numerous, and active. Their ‘ilex’ has had ‘pruning’ enough, heaven knows, from the Roman axe of late, and from the Assyrian and Babylonian axes in days gone by. But they want pruning still. Witness a score of eastern cities, where they have lately been massacring myriads of Greeks—not, I own, without having seen myriads of their countrymen massacred first.
“Their disadvantage has been that they have never made a new start as Æneas did, so as to turn old Troy into new Rome. Æneas could take his gods with him. The Jews could not. The only place where they have done anything of the kind is Alexandria. There they have an imitation temple—not a rival temple of course, but an imitation—and there they are at their best. But elsewhere the stubborn creatures—from Gaul to Euphrates—recognise no home or sacred ground except in a little corner of Syria. Providence has done its best to detach them from this servitude by using Titus to destroy their temple a second time, and by leaving their sacred utensils no existence except upon Titus’s arch. But still they are servants of the genius loci, so to speak. As they cannot serve the temple, they serve the ground on which it stands and the traditions that have collected round it.
“The Christian Jews have immense advantages. They are like the Trojan Romans. The Christians have left their Troy (that is to say, carnal Jerusalem) in order to dwell in Rome (that is to say, heavenly Jerusalem) the city of truth, the city of justice, the city of freedom and universal brotherhood. Their sacred fire is the Holy Spirit. Their sacred vessels are human beings. Every great city in Asia contains their ‘holy things.’ To celebrate their feast on the body and blood of their Saviour, a table of pine wood, a platter, and a mug, supply them with all they need! A little bread, and wine mingled with water, have taken the place of Solomon’s hecatombs! Surely this is the very perfection of religious simplicity—an ambassador in a plain Roman toga amid the courtiers of a Ptolemy!
“Again, when we Romans call on Jupiter, offering our costliest white oxen, who supposes that Jupiter descends? But when these Christians meet, without a denarius in their pockets, three in a room, they tell you that Christ is with them. What is more, many of them believe it! What is most, some of them act as though they believed it! I have called their city a city of dreams, and I repeat it. But, mark you, a city of dreams has one great advantage over a city of bricks or stone. You can smash the latter. But neither Nero, nor Trajan, has been able to smash the former; and I begin to doubt whether it could be smashed by Hadrian, if he tried. At the present rate, I should not be surprised if, in the next hundred years, the empire from the Euphrates to Britain were dotted with colonies of Christ.
“‘Let arms of war give place to the gown of peace!’ So sang the lawyer of Arpinum when he tried his hand at poetry. He was better advised, in his lawyer’s gown, when he confessed ‘Laws are silent among arms.’ But there is a third power more powerful than either laws or arms. You won’t believe me when I tell you its name. It is ‘dreams.’ Yes, ‘Among dreams,’ says Scaurus—and he knows, having been himself a dreamer, in his day, besides being a bit of a soldier and a good deal of a looker on—‘Among dreams, arms are vain.’ I don’t say they are ‘silent.’ That is their contemptible feature—they are not ‘silent.’ But they are impotent. Mars against dreams may make what fuss and bustle he pleases, clash, clang, thunder, like the brazen wheels of Salmoneus. But his thundering will effect nothing. Nor will his steel. ‘Frustra diverberet umbras.’
“When I say ‘dreams,’ do not take me to mean that the personality of a great prophet is a ‘dream.’ But the notion that an empire can be spun out of it, or built on it, seems to me a dream. Yet there is something attractive in it—I mean in the conception of a soul like a vast magnet, attracting and magnetizing a group of souls, of which each in turn becomes a new magnet, magnetizing a group of its own, and so on, and so on, till the whole empire (or family) of souls is bound together by this magnetic law. Yes, ‘law’ one may call it, not a magical incantation, but a natural law, the law of the spiritual magnet. It is all very strange. Yet, given the personality, it is possible.