His laugh, as he uttered the words, was bitterness itself, and I felt my flesh instinctively shudder. But a glance toward the Temple told me that the words were true. The legions had forced their way to the foot of the third and weakest rampart, which I now saw flying in pieces under the blows of the battering-rams. They must have marched by the very spot where I had sat since midnight, and I probably escaped only by being taken for one of the dead. I wrung my hands in agony. He burst into a wild roar of derision.
Salathiel Beholds Epiphanes
“What fools you lords of the creation are! What is the loss of life to the naked wretches that you see running about like frightened children on those battlements, or to the clothed wretches that you see ready to massacre them, for the honor and glory of a better-clothed wretch?—a dinner too much will revenge them on the Emperor of the earth. The spear or the arrow comes, and quick as thought their troubles are at an end. Man!—the true misery is to live, to be constrained to live, to feel the wants, wearinesses, and weaknesses of life, yet to drag on existence; to be—what I am.”
He tore the helmet from his forehead, and, with a groan of agony, flung it to a measureless distance in the air. In amaze and terror I beheld Epiphanes! The same Greek countenance, the same kingly presence, the same strength and heroic stature, and the same despair, were before me that, in the early years of my wo, I had seen on the shores of the Dead Sea.
“I told you,” said he, with a sudden return to calmness, “that this day would come; and to tell you so required no spirit of prophecy. There is a time for all things, long-suffering among the rest; and your countrymen had long ago come to that time. But one grand hope was still to be given; they cast it from them! Ages on ages shall pass before they learn the loftiness of that hope or fulfil the punishment of that rejection. Yet, in the fulness of time, shall the light break in upon their darkness. They shall ask, Why are we the despised, the branded, the trampled, the abjured, of all nations? Why are the barbarian and the civilized alike our oppressors? Why do contending faiths join in crushing us alone? Why do realms, distant as the ends of the earth, and diverse as day and night—alike those who have heard our history, and those who have never heard of us but as the sad sojourners of the earth—unite in one cry of scorn? And what is the universal voice of nature but the voice of the King of nature?”
I listened in reverence to language that pierced my heart with an intense power of truth, yet with a pang that made me writhe. I longed, yet dreaded, to hear again the searching and lofty accents of this being of unwilling wisdom.
“Man of terrible knowledge,” said I, “canst thou tell for what crime this judgment shall come?”
Awe was written upon his mighty brow, and his features quivered as he slowly spoke.
“Their crime? There is no name for it. The spirits of heaven weep when they think of it. The spirits of the abyss tremble. Man alone, the man of Judea alone, could commit that horror of horrors.”
He paused and prostrated himself at the words; then rising, rapidly uttered: “Judge of the crime by its punishment. From the beginning, Israel was stubborn, and his stubbornness brought him to sorrow. He rebelled, and he was warned by the captivity of a monarch or the slaughter of a tribe. He sinned more deeply, for he was the slave of impurity; then was his kingdom divided; yet a few years saw him powerful once more. He sinned more deeply still, for he sought the worship of idols. Then came his deeper punishment, in the fall of his throne and the long captivity of his people. But even Babylon sent back the forgiven.