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To cleave a creed in sects and cries,

To change the bearing of a word.

* * * * * * *

“Why then my scorn might well descend

On you and yours. I see in part

That all, as in some piece of art,

Is toil co-operant to an end.”

In Memoriam.

Its Temple destroyed, its people killed, led captive, or dispersed, Jerusalem must have presented, for the next fifty years, at least, a dreary and desolate appearance. At first its only inhabitants were the Roman garrison, but gradually the Jews came dropping in, at first, we may suppose, on sufferance and good behaviour. When the Christians returned is not certain. Eusebius says that directly after the destruction of Jerusalem, they assembled together and chose Simeon as their bishop; but he does not say that they gathered together in Jerusalem. All the traditions represent them as returning very soon after the siege. As for the Jews, the destruction of the Temple—that symbol of the law—only made them more scrupulous in their obedience to the Law. The great school of Gamaliel was set up at Jabneh, where lectures were delivered on all the minutiæ of Rabbinical teaching, and the Jews were instructed how to win the favour of Jehovah by carrying out to its last letter the smallest details of the Law. And because this, minute as it was, did not comprehend all the details of life, there arose a caste, recruited from all tribes and families alike, which became more holy than that of the priests and Levites—the caste of the Rabbis, the students and interpreters of the Law. The Rabbi had, besides the written law, the Tradition, Masora, or Cabala, which was pretended to have been also given to Moses on Mount Sinai, and to have been handed down in an unbroken line through the heads of the Sanhedrim. The growth of the Rabbinical power does not date from the destruction of the Temple; it had been slowly developing itself for many centuries before that event. In the synagogues which were scattered all over Palestine, and wherever the Jews could be got together, the learned Rabbi, with his profound knowledge of the Law, written and oral, had already, before the destruction of Jerusalem, taken the place of the priests and their sacrifices; so that, in spite of the fall of the Temple, the spiritual life of the Jews was by no means crushed out of them. Rather was it deepened and intensified, and their religious observances more and more invaded the material life. The Rabbinical tribunals usurped entire rule over the Jews. Like the Scotch elders, they had power to summon before them persons accused of immorality, persons who neglected their children, persons who violated details of the Law. They could also impose on offenders punishment by scourging, by censure, by interdict, by the cherem, or excommunication, which inflicted civil death, but for which pardon might be obtained on repentance and submission, and, lastly, by the fatal shammata, the final curse, after which there was no pardon possible: “Let nothing good come out of him; let his end be sudden; let all creatures become his enemies; let the whirlwind crush him; let fever and every other malady, and the edge of the sword, smite him; let his death be unforeseen, and drive him into outer darkness.”^[19] With this machinery of internal government, the Jews were not only united together and separated from the rest of the world, in each particular town, not only did they maintain their nationality and their religion, but, which was of much more importance to their conquerors, they were able to act in concert with each other, to demand redress together, to give help to each other, to rise in revolt together.