_Jerusalem by Moonlight_
THE broad moon lingers on the summit of Mount Olivet, but its beam has
long left the garden of Gethsemane and the tomb of Absalom, the waters
of Kedron and the dark abyss of Jehoshaphat. Full falls its splendour,
however, on the opposite city, vivid and defined in its silver blaze. A
lofty wall, with turrets and towers and frequent gates, undulates with
the unequal ground which it covers, as it encircles the lost capital of
Jehovah. It is a city of hills, far more famous than those of Rome:
for all Europe has heard of Sion and of Calvary, while the Arab and
the Assyrian, and the tribes and nations beyond, are as ignorant of
the Capitolian and Aventine Mounts as they are of the Malvern or the
Chiltern Hills.
The broad steep of Sion crowned with the tower of David; nearer still,
Mount Moriah, with the gorgeous temple of the God of Abraham, but built,
alas! by the child of Hagar, and not by Sarah’s chosen one; close to
its cedars and its cypresses, its lofty spires and airy arches, the
moonlight falls upon Bethesda’s pool; further on, entered by the gate
of St. Stephen, the eye, though ‘tis the noon of night, traces with ease
the Street of Grief, a long winding ascent to a vast cupolaed pile that
now covers Calvary, called the Street of Grief because there the most
illustrious of the human, as well as of the Hebrew, race, the descendant
of King David, and the divine Son of the most favoured of women, twice
sank under that burden of suffering and shame which is now throughout
all Christendom the emblem of triumph and of honour; passing over groups
and masses of houses built of stone, with terraced roofs, or surmounted
with small domes, we reach the hill of Salem, where Melchisedek built
his mystic citadel; and still remains the hill of Scopas, where Titus
gazed upon Jerusalem on the eve of his final assault. Titus destroyed
the temple. The religion of Judaea has in turn subverted the fanes which
were raised to his father and to himself in their imperial capital;
and the God of Abraham, of Isaac, and of Jacob is now worshipped before
every altar in Rome.
Jerusalem by moonlight! ‘Tis a fine spectacle, apart from all its
indissoluble associations of awe and beauty. The mitigating hour softens
the austerity of a mountain landscape magnificent in outline, however
harsh and severe in detail; and, while it retains all its sublimity,
removes much of the savage sternness of the strange and unrivalled
scene. A fortified city, almost surrounded by ravines, and rising in the
centre of chains of far-spreading hills, occasionally offering, through
their rocky glens, the gleams of a distant and richer land!
The moon has sunk behind the Mount of Olives, and the stars in the
darker sky shine doubly bright over the sacred city. The all-pervading
stillness is broken by a breeze that seems to have travelled over the
plain of Sharon from the sea. It wails among the tombs, and sighs among
the cypress groves. The palm-tree trembles as it passes, as if it were
a spirit of woe. Is it the breeze that has travelled over the plain of
Sharon from the sea?
Or is it the haunting voice of prophets mourning over the city that
they could not save? Their spirits surely would linger on the land
where their Creator had deigned to dwell, and over whose impending fate
Omnipotence had shed human tears. From this Mount! Who can but believe
that, at the midnight hour, from the summit of the Ascension, the great
departed of Israel assemble to gaze upon the battlements of their mystic
city? There might be counted heroes and sages, who need shrink from
no rivalry with the brightest and the wisest of other lands; but the
lawgiver of the time of the Pharaohs, whose laws are still obeyed; the
monarch, whose reign has ceased for three thousand years, but whose
wisdom is a proverb in all nations of the earth; the teacher, whose
doctrines have modelled civilised Europe; the greatest of legislators,
the greatest of administrators, and the greatest of reformers; what
race, extinct or living, can produce three such men as these?
The last light is extinguished in the village of Bethany. The wailing
breeze has become a moaning wind; a white film spreads over the purple
sky; the stars are veiled, the stars are hid; all becomes as dark as
the waters of Kedron and the valley of Jehosha-phat. The tower of David
merges into obscurity; no longer glitter the minarets of the mosque
of Omar; Bethesda’s angelic waters, the gate of Stephen, the street
of sacred sorrow, the hill of Salem, and the heights of Scopas can no
longer be discerned. Alone in the increasing darkness, while the very
line of the walls gradually eludes the eye, the Church of the Holy
Sepulchre is a beacon light.
And why is the Church of the Holy Sepulchre a beacon light? Why, when
is it already past the noon of darkness, when every soul slumbers in
Jerusalem, and not a sound disturbs the deep repose, except the howl
of the wild dog crying to the wilder wind; why is the cupola of the
sanctuary illumined, though the hour has long since been numbered when
pilgrims there kneel and monks pray?
An armed Turkish guard are bivouacked in the court of the Church; within
the Church itself, two brethren of the convent of Terra Santa keep holy
watch and ward; while, at the tomb beneath, there kneels a solitary
youth, who prostrated himself at sunset, and who will there pass unmoved
the whole of the sacred night.
Yet the pilgrim is not in communion with the Latin Church; neither is
he of the Church Armenian, or the Church Greek; Maronite, Coptic, or
Abyssinian; these also are Christian churches which cannot call him
child.
He comes from a distant and a northern isle to bow before the tomb of
a descendant of the kings of Israel, because he, in common with all the
people of that isle, recognises in that sublime Hebrew incarnation the
presence of a Divine Redeemer. Then why does he come alone? It is not
that he has availed himself of the inventions of modern science to
repair first to a spot which all his countrymen may equally desire to
visit, and thus anticipate their hurrying arrival. Before the inventions
of modern science, all his countrymen used to flock hither. Then why do
they not now? Is the Holy Land no longer hallowed? Is it not the land of
sacred and mysterious truths? The land of heavenly messages and earthly
miracles? The land of prophets and apostles? Is it not the land upon
whose mountains the Creator of the Universe parleyed with man, and the
flesh of whose anointed race He mystically assumed, when He struck the
last blow at the powers of evil? Is it to be believed that there are no
peculiar and eternal qualities in a land thus visited, which distinguish
it from all others? That Palestine is like Normandy or Yorkshire, or
even Attica or Rome.
There may be some who maintain this; there have been some, and those,
too, among the wisest and the wittiest of the northern and western
races, who, touched by a presumptuous jealousy of the long predominance
of that oriental intellect to which they owed their civilisation, would
have persuaded themselves and the world that the traditions of Sinai
and Calvary were fables. Half a century ago, Europe made a violent and
apparently successful effort to disembarrass itself of its Asian faith.
The most powerful and the most civilised of its kingdoms, about to
conquer the rest, shut up its churches, desecrated its altars, massacred
and persecuted their sacred servants, and announced that the Hebrew
creeds which Simon Peter brought from Palestine, and which his
successors revealed to Clovis, were a mockery and a fiction. What has
been the result? In every city, town, village, and hamlet of that great
kingdom, the divine image of the most illustrious of Hebrews has been
again raised amid the homage of kneeling millions; while, in the
heart of its bright and witty capital, the nation has erected the most
gorgeous of modern temples, and consecrated its marble and golden
walls to the name, and memory, and celestial efficacy of a Hebrew woman.
The country of which the solitary pilgrim, kneeling at this moment
at the Holy Sepulchre, was a native, had not actively shared in that
insurrection against the first and second Testament which distinguished
the end of the eighteenth century. But, more than six hundred years
before, it had sent its king, and the flower of its peers and people,
to rescue Jerusalem from those whom they considered infidels! and now,
instead of the third crusade, they expend their superfluous energies in
the construction of railroads.
The failure of the European kingdom of Jerusalem, on which such vast
treasure, such prodigies of valour, and such ardent belief had been
wasted, has been one of those circumstances which have tended to disturb
the faith of Europe, although it should have carried convictions of
a very different character. The Crusaders looked upon the Saracens as
infidels, whereas the children of the desert bore a much nearer affinity
to the sacred corpse that had, for a brief space, consecrated the Holy
Sepulchre, than any of the invading host of Europe. The same blood
flowed in their veins, and they recognised the divine missions both
of Moses and of his great successor. In an age so deficient in
physiological learning as the twelfth century, the mysteries of race
were unknown. Jerusalem, it cannot be doubted, will ever remain the
appanage either of Israel or of Ishmael; and if, in the course of those
great vicissitudes which are no doubt impending for the East, there be
any attempt to place upon the throne of David a prince of the House of
Coburg or Deuxponts, the same fate will doubtless await him as, with all
their brilliant qualities and all the sympathy of Europe, was the final
doom of the Godfreys, the Baldwins, and the Lusignans.
Like them, the ancestor of the kneeling pilgrim had come to Jerusalem
with his tall lance and his burnished armour; but his descendant, though
not less daring and not less full of faith, could profit by the splendid
but fruitless achievements of the first Tancred de Montacute. Our hero
came on this new crusade with an humble and contrite spirit, to pour
forth his perplexities and sorrows on the tomb of his Redeemer, and to
ask counsel of the sacred scenes which the presence of that Redeemer and
his great predecessors had consecrated.