joy of the whole earth; upon the north side lieth the city of the great King; God is well known in her palaces as a sure refuge." 1

Such was Jerusalem when Herod died, when Jesus was born; the Jerusalem risen out of the ruin of half a thousand years before, with something more than its ancient splendor growing through all these changeful years. Till its second destruction, it now fell more completely under the power of Rome. For ten years the son of Herod, Archelaus, was Ethnarch of Judea. But with him "the sceptre departed from Judah." It became a Roman

province, with its procurator at Cesarea rather than at Jerusalem, ruled not only in the interest but by the officials of Rome. There was a great ecclesiastical court in Jerusalem with seventy-one members, called the Sanhedrin, composed of High Priests, the heads of the twenty-four classes into which the priests were divided, — the elders, and the scribes. The termination of the vassal kingship restored it and the Sadducees to political importance. There were two principal religious parties in the population of Jerusalem, whose origin is rather obscure, but which date into the time of the Maccabees. It is difficult to say which represented most truly the ancient Judaism. The Pharisees were in the majority. They sprang from the ancient pietists who came back from the exile cured of all idolatry, and strenuous for the ancestral religion. But they degenerated into scrupulous, haughty, censorious separatists, over-pious in forms, and usages, and words, and under - pious in spirit and life. Jesus justly charged them with the hypocrisy of long prayers and short performance, of exactness in the letter and carefulness for tradition, without charity or a true and spiritual faith. Says Ewald: "In these, various impulses to false religion which were involved in the preceding centuries at length developed themselves with the utmost

1 Psa. xlviii. 2, 3, Book of Common Prayer.

force, and assumed the clearest prominence; and they who wished to be the most pious, and to appear as teachers of righteousness of every kind, not excepting the highest, were compelled to surround the true religion with the greatest darkness and the closest restrictions, like the Jesuits of modern times."1 The Sadducees were the more liberal Jews, who in the time of the Maccabees felt the Grecian influence and took from it a greater freedom of thought. They tried to blend with the Jewish strictness. the Greek wisdom and freedom, but with no more spiritual vitality than there was in the Pharisaism which they opposed. The Pharisees held to Determinism, the Sadducees to Free Will. The Pharisees were Stoic, the Sadducees Epicurean. The Pharisees were orthodox, the Sadducees liberal. The Pharisees believed in the immortality of the soul and the existence of angels; the Sadducees denied both. The Pharisees held to the traditional and oral as well as the Mosaic or written law. The Sadducees held to the original law, but hardly accepted even the Prophets, much less the commentaries of the rabbis. The Pharisees carried the people with them. The Sadducees were chiefly among the higher orders. The one party was democratic in its way, the other aristocratic. Under Herod the Sadducees lost all political importance, and were left to their old theological and ecclesiastical disputes with the Pharisees, who were honored and encouraged by the Idumean king for political reasons, as he also had absolved his own special partisans, the Herodians, who exerted no very perceptible, certainly no permanent, influence in public affairs. The Essenes were the monks of Judaism, living an ascetic and retired life far from the capital, and having no part in its ecclesiastical or political life. The Temple and the priesthood remained as in the old time, and the people still came to the capital for the great feasts. But everywhere, in the villages. 1 History of Israel, v. 369.

as in the city, since the days of Ezra, there had arisen a new system of worship, unknown before the exile. The religion of the people was in the synagogue more than in the Temple. Religious instruction and devotion went on in these meeting-houses, to be found the country through, of which there were said to be four hundred and eighty in Jerusalem itself. Into them the dispersed Jews, not only throughout Palestine, but in Egypt and Greece and Italy, gathered for worship and to hear the Scriptures read. We hear more of them than of the Temple in the New Testament. Our Lord and his Apostles worshipped in them. In them and following their organization the Christian churches had their beginning. And so Christianity became the religion, not of the Temple, of priests and sacrifices, but of the synagogue rather, with its ministers, its simple prayers and teachings, its local and independent congregations.

The last chapter in the history of Jerusalem, for seventy years, has written upon it a new name, and is the first chapter in a new era of human history. Jesus Christ was not born in the city, but in the country. He never made his home in Jerusalem, and knew it only by occasional visits. Six weeks after he was born he was carried into the Temple for his presentation, and was recognized, even in his infancy, by ancient representatives of the spiritual Israel, who waited there for signs of the new kingdom of God, and who "spake of him to all them that were looking for the redemption in Jerusalem." It is stated by St. Luke that "his parents went to Jerusalem every year at the feast of the passover," but how often he went with them we do not know. Once, when he was twelve years old, we hear that he went with them, and, lingering there in the Temple, had a boy's discovery or forecast of his divine calling. How many times in the many silent years before he began his preaching at Nazareth he went up to 1 Luke ii. 38. 2 Luke ii. 41.

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the great city to see its sights, to learn from its teachers, to surprise them as he did in his boyhood, to participate in its festivals, there is no report left. Indeed, if the fourth gospel had not supplemented the other three, we should not know that he was present at more than one of five feasts which he actually kept at Jerusalem after he became a public teacher. From the first three gospels it would seem as if he had chosen to remain in Galilee, among a simpler and less bigoted class of people, to lay the foundation of his kingdom, rather than face the dangers of proclaiming himself in the ecclesiastical Capital, and seeking his first converts and apostles there. But we find him going every year to the great Feast of the Passover, as perhaps he had been doing all his life. We can hardly explain the fanatical hatred of the Pharisees there, which pursued him even into Galilee,' unless he had become known in the city, and known in his real character. He could hardly have exclaimed, "How often would I have gathered thy children together," if he had not frequently been there, trying to rouse the people by his instructions and warnings. His attachment to the family of Lazarus, the affection of Joseph of Arimathea for him, the power he exerted over such men as Nicodemus, imply not infrequent and transient visits, but some degree of famil iarity.2

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He surrounded himself with Galileans by choice. Among them he won disciples. They could understand him. The curious and excitable citizens might run after him, but he "did not trust himself to them." He found his apostles among fishermen rather than scribes and rabbis. For reasons, some of which we can understand, he did not put himself into any active connection with the life of Jerusalem, and waited his time before coming in conflict with its authorities. But the end was to come there. It was the

1 Matt. xv. 1.

8 John ii. 24.

2 Neander, Life of Christ, 156.

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place, the only place, for the awful climax. It would have been an historical, a moral incongruity, for him to be crucified anywhere else. One day when some Pharisees out in the country were advising him to get out of the jurisdiction of Herod Antipas, for he would certainly kill him, he said, "It cannot be that a prophet perish out of Jerusalem." He knew his doom was there. He recognized the moral fitness of it. He saw into the spirit of the place, the political and religious passions, the elements of danger, the spiritual delusion, the prejudice, the bigotry, which made his death by assassination or execution certain. No party was for him, Pharisees, Sadducees, Herodians, priests, lawyers, all against him. He had no party of his own, even if we count Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus among his friends. Not an apostle belonged in Jerusalem. He made no impression on the life of the city, unless in such evanescent feeling as that of Palm Sunday, when the streets and Temple were full of strangers.

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But if he was not identified with it in his life, he was in his death. His crucifixion was the crime of Jerusalem. Its authorities compassed it with cunning, and forced it upon the Roman governor against his will. The city of David, of the prophets, of Jehovah the Almighty, of the Temple of God, the capital of Israel, was henceforth and forever to carry this brand. It had killed the Saviour of the world. But it could not kill the faith he had begotten in his little church. The Master had been destroyed; the disciples lived, and made his memory, his death, the life of a new world. His cross turned from infamy into glory. It became the hope of the humble, and the conqueror of the great. The Church put it on its basilicas, the emperor on his labarum. The High Priest in the Holy of Holies was not so near to God or to the heart of man as his victim crucified in the place of a skull. He fell only to rise

1 Luke xiii. 33.