19—675. **Immanuel.** One of the titles of the Saviour, meaning "God with us."
—-
CANTO FOUR
1—Title: **Night and the Wilderness.** This part of the poem is an allegory of the Christian or Meridian Dispensation, following the death of Jesus and his forerunner; portraying the mission of the Comforter, and showing the departure from the primitive Faith, after the passing of the apostolic Twelve, one of whom—the Church having gone into the Wilderness—remains to testify of things to come. The "Night" is the spiritual night that followed the setting of the Sun of Righteousness—a night lit by Moon and Stars, with lesser lights twinkling through the Dark Ages and onward into modern times. The "Wilderness" is the world invisible. (D. and C. 88:66.)
2—688. **An Eagle's Wings.** The Roman Empire, emblemized by the Eagle, dominated the then known world.
3—696. **Peace to Flow.** "(I) The immense field covered by the conquests of Alexander gave to the civilized world a unity of language, without which it would have been, humanly speaking, impossible for the earliest preachers to have made known the good tidings in every land which they traversed. (II) The rise of the Roman Empire created a political unity which reflected in every direction the doctrines of the new faith. (III) The dispersion of the Jews prepared vast multitudes of Greeks and Romans for the unity of a pure morality and a monotheistic faith. The Gospel emanated from the capital of Judea; it was preached in the tongue of Athens; it was diffused through the empire of Rome; the feet of its earliest missionaries traversed the solid structure of undeviating roads by which the Roman legionaries—'those massive hammers of the whole earth'—had made straight in the desert a highway for our God. Semite and Aryan had been unconscious instruments in the hands of God for the spread of a religion which, in its first beginnings, both alike detested and despised. The letters of Hebrew and Greek and Latin inscribed above the cross were the prophetic and unconscious testimony of three of the world's noblest languages to the undying claims of Him who suffered to obliterate the animosities of the nations which spoke them, and to unite them all together in the one great Family of God."—Dean Farrar, in "The Life and Work of St. Paul," abridged edition, Book II, pp. 61, 62.
4—706. **She-Wolf's Might.** The She-Wolf, traditionally the nurse of Romulus and Remus, who founded Rome, was also an emblem of that world-conquering power, which, though eventually it persecuted the Christians, at first protected them from their Jewish oppressors. Judah's emblem was the Lion. As for the remaining figure in the allusion, it is written that the Saviour said to his disciples: "I send you forth as lambs among wolves."
5—707. **Iron-Limbed.** The phrases "iron-limbed," "brazen-loin," "silver-breasted," "golden Babylon," characterize respectively the Roman, Graeco-Macedonian, Medo-Persian, and Babylonian empires, which, in reverse order, ruled successively the ancient world. Beginning with Babylon, the "head of gold," these four universal powers figure in the Prophet Daniel's interpretation of Nebuchadnezzar's dream (Daniel 2).
6—713. **Asian Kin.** Alexander the Great extended his conquests as far eastward as India, whose native inhabitants claim kinship with European peoples through a common Aryan ancestry. If this claim be true, then the Hindoos, like the Europeans, are descended from Japheth, the eldest son of Noah, and consequently are "Gentiles"—a word springing from "Gentilis," meaning "of a nation," that is, a nation not of Israel.
7—718. **Kurush.** Cyrus, founder of the Medo-Persian empire.