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Let us, at least, award them the meed of praise for a courage which has never been equalled. Let us acknowledge that, in all the history of the world, if there has been no siege more bloody and tragic, so there has been no city more fiercely contested, more obstinately defended; and though we may believe that the fall of Jerusalem had been distinctly prophesied by our Lord, we must not therefore look on the Jews as the blind and fated victims of prophecy. The city fell, not in order to fulfil prophecy, but because the Jews were, as they ever had been, a turbulent, self-willed race; because they were undisciplined, because they loved freedom above everything else in the world except their religion; and their religion was the ritual and the Temple.

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“Wild Hours, that fly with hope and fear,

If all your office had to do

With old results that look like new,

If this were all your mission here,

“To draw, to sheathe a useless sword,

To fool the crowd with glorious lies,