Jerusalem--centre of pilgrimage to three great religions--unholiest
city under the sun!
"For from Zion the Law shall go forth and the Word of God from
Jerusalem." Gone forth of a sooth, thought the Scribe, leaving in
Jerusalem itself only the swarming of sects about the corpse of
Religion.
No prophetic centre, this Zion, even for Israel; only the stagnant,
stereotyped activity of excommunicating Rabbis, and the capricious
distribution of the paralyzing _Chalukah_, leaving an appalling
multitudinous poverty agonizing in the steep refuse-laden alleys. The
faint stirrings of new life, the dim desires of young Israel to
regenerate at once itself and the soil of Palestine, the lofty
patriotism of immigrant Dreamers as yet unable to overcome the long
lethargy of holy study and of prayers for rain. A city where men go to
die, but not to live.
An accursèd city, priest-ridden and pauperized, with cripples
dragging about its shrines and lepers burrowing at the Zion gate; but
a city infinitely pathetic, infinitely romantic withal, a centre
through which pass all the great threads of history, ancient and
mediæval, and now at last quivering with the telegraphic thread of the
modern, yet only the more charged with the pathos of the past and the
tears of things; symbol not only of the tragedy of the Christ, but of
the tragedy of his people, nay of the great world-tragedy.