If the words of the second prophecy are true, as the words of the first prophecy were shown to be true, the Second Coming cannot be far distant. Once again in these years nations have risen against nations, the earth has quaked, destroying many lives, and pestilences, famines and seditions have decimated nations. For more than a century the words of Christ have been translated and preached in all languages. Soldiers who believe in Christ, although they are not all faithful to the heirs of Peter, are in command over that city, which after its downfall was in the power of the Romans, the Persians, the Egyptians and the Turks. And still men do not think of Jesus and His promise. They live as if the world were always going to continue as it has been, and they work and mortify themselves only for their earthly and carnal interests.
“For as in the days that were before the flood, they were eating and drinking, marrying and given in marriage, until the day that Noah entered into the ark, And knew not until the flood came, and took them all away: so shall also the coming of the Son of man be. Likewise also, as it was in the days of Lot; they did eat, they drank, they bought, they sold, they planted, they builded; But the same day that Lot went out of Sodom it rained fire and brimstone from heaven and destroyed them all. Even thus shall it be in the day when the Son of man is revealed.”
The same thing happens in our day in spite of the wars and the pestilences which have cut down millions of lives in a few years. People eat and drink, marry and have children, buy and sell, write and play. And no one thinks of the Divine Thief who will come suddenly in the night, no one waits for the Real Master, who will return unexpectedly, no one looks at the sky to see if lightning is flashing from the east.
The apparent life of the living is like the delirious dream of a fatal fever. They seem awake because they hurry about without rest, occupied by those possessions which are clay and poison. They never look up to Heaven—they fear only their brothers. Perhaps they are waiting to be awakened in the last hour by those dead of old, who will rise up at the approach of the Resurrected Christ.
UNWELCOME
While Jesus was condemning the Temple and Jerusalem, those maintained by the Temple and the lords of Jerusalem were preparing His condemnation.
All those who possessed, taught and commanded were waiting only for the right moment to assassinate Him, without danger to themselves. Every man who had a name, dignity, a school, a shop, a sacred office, a little authority was against Him. He came to oppose them and they opposed Him. With the idiocy natural to those in power they believed that they would save themselves by putting Him to death, and they did not know it was exactly His death which was needed as the beginning of their punishment.
To have an idea of the hatred which the upper classes of Jerusalem felt towards Jesus, priestly hatred, scholastic hatred and commercial hatred, we must remember that the Holy City apparently lived by faith, but in reality on the Faithful. Only in the Jewish metropolis could valid and acceptable offerings be made to the Old God, and therefore every year, especially on great feast days, streams of Israelites poured in there from the Tetrarchates of Palestine and from all the provinces of the Empire. The Temple was not only the one legitimate sanctuary of the Jews, but for those who were attached to it and for all the others who lived at its feet, it was the great nourishing breast which fed the Capital with the products of the victims, the offerings, the tithes and, above all, with the profits accompanying the continual influx of visitors. Josephus says that at Jerusalem on special occasions there were gathered together as many as three million pilgrims.
The stationary population depended all the year round on the Temple: business for the animal-sellers, dealers in victuals, money-changers, inn-keepers, and even artisans depended on the fortunes of the Temple. The priestly caste, which without the Levites (and there were a great crowd of them) numbered in Christ’s lifetime twenty thousand descendants of Aaron—got their living from the tithes in kind, from the taxes of the Temple, from the payments for the first-born—even the first-born of men paid five shekels a head!—and got their food from the flesh of the sacrificial animals, of which only the fat was burned. They were the ones who had the pick of herds and crops; even their bread was given them by the people, for the head of every Jewish family was obliged to hand over to the priests the twenty-fourth part of the bread which was baked in his house. Many of them, as we have seen, made money on the raising of the animals which the Faithful were obliged to buy for their offerings; others were associated with money-changers, and it is not impossible that some of them were really bankers, because people readily deposited their savings in the strong-boxes of the Temple.
A net-work of self-interest thus bound to the Herodian edifice all the inhabitants of Jerusalem, down to the vendors at fairs and the sandal-makers. The priests lived on the Temple and many of them were merchants and rich men: the rich needed the Temple to increase their profits and keep the common people respectful: the merchants did business with the rich people who had money to spend, with the priests who were their associates and with the pilgrims from every part of the world drawn towards the Temple: the working men and the poor lived from the scraps and leavings which fell from the tables of the rich, the priests, the merchants and the pilgrims.