“… One in spirit, and in instinct bears alongAround the earth’s electric circle the swift flash of right and wrong.”
“… One in spirit, and in instinct bears alongAround the earth’s electric circle the swift flash of right and wrong.”
“… One in spirit, and in instinct bears along
Around the earth’s electric circle the swift flash of right and wrong.”
The marvelous sowing about the Sea of Galilee is reaching its ripening. The leaven is leavening the whole lump. The mustard-seed reappears in hundreds and hundreds of millions of seed. Cuba is helped to freedom for its own sake; the Russian Czar—he at least—in sincerity says: “War should end.” In business it is ceasing to be a maxim that the benefitof the one is ever opposed to the benefit of the many. We are learning that the Golden Rule and the law of self-preservation run parallel. Applied to commercialism, the Golden Rule is so to make money as to give a benefit also to him from whom you make it; and that, too, is common sense. The children of the inner kingdom never crowd: the more, the more room.
In all these things we see just the beginnings of the results of His coming: all men of one family, God the Father, and Christ the eldest Brother; the sacredness of truth, of the soul, of all life; the reality of the inner world.
Man has climbed up in countless ages by the slow processes of evolution to where he can use the powers of nature through his brain—becoming a coworker with God in guiding the processes of evolution. Now, being reborn into the inner kingdom, he starts on a new and infinitely higher destiny. Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, the things that are laid up for those thus born.
With a boundless universe within and without, and an infinite God, and with an eternity to live and work in, many, many things can take place, and it is God’s good pleasure that they shall never take place to our hurt. The creature of the kingdom of the spiritual man is injury-proof.
And the command is: “Be ye perfect as your Father is perfect”; ever approaching Him in countless ages and reaching Him at the end of eternity, had eternity an end; but since it has no end, in whatever distant period and however great the distance between us, God is still the Infinite One and we the finite ones.
Ah, how men err! The Roman Emperor, after his awful massacre of Christians, set up a column in memory of the extinction of the last Christian. But the Roman empire is in dust, and now the world is rapidly becoming wholly Christian; and were that Emperor alive, he, quite likely, would applaud the result. God’s steppings are from star to star. Who knoweth His counsel?
We look back over the conflict of the ages of evolution; we now see, in the changing of the dunghill into shrubs and rosesand into food, the prophecy of all, and we marvel at our blindness in not knowing that the most manifest thing in all the world, and at all times, was God the Father working for good, whom again and again we have compelled to cry out in pain (for God can suffer pain): The reproaches of men have broken my heart. Looking backward, we begin to see the good in everything, that there has not been a fall of a sparrow without accompanying provision for the sparrow, and we grow enthusiastic and shout with the martyr of old: “Glory be to God for everything that happens!” Hand-in-hand we walk with the great Father over the ages of history, riding victorious over mountain-tops.
We see, modifying the words of John Fiske, that in the roaring loom of time, out of the endless web of events, strand by strand, was woven more and more clearly the living garment of God.
When Christ had passed beyond the grave, He said “Mary,” and Mary said “Master”; they spake, they understood, tho death and the grave intervened. The world of the physical senses has no barrier that hinders knowing in the kingdom of the spiritual man.
“The Wandering Jew” is near the end of his wanderings.
As reasoned the Apostle:[K]If the Gentiles were cut out of the olive-tree which is wild by nature, and were grafted contrary to nature into a good olive-tree, how much more shall the Jews, which be the natural branches, be grafted into their own olive-tree? For God is able to graft them in again. For I would not, brethren, that you should be ignorant of this mystery, lest ye should be wise in your own conceits: that blindness in part has happened to Israel,until the fulness of the Gentiles be come in. AND SO ALL ISRAEL SHALL BE SAVED.
I. K. F.
New York, April 15, 1901.
FOOTNOTES[A]It has been believed by many from the early ages of the Christian era that among the signs of Christ’s coming would be the recognition of Him by the Jews, as “one sent of the Father,” and that they would then be restored to the Father’s favor; that this recognition would be accompanied by a recolonization of the Jews in Palestine; that from this vantage-ground, they, as a nation among nations—the “inherent genius of the Jews for things religious” again reasserting itself—would lead the nations of earth in final triumph into the kingdom of the spiritual man.Prof. R. Gottheil, of Columbia University, and president of the Federation of American Zionists, said, before the Zionist Congress, in the summer of 1900, in London: “It is time the nations understood our motives. Our purpose is gradually to colonize Palestine. We political Zionists desire a charter from the Sultan authorizing us to settle in our Holy Land, and we ask the powers to approve and protect this charter.”[B]This is simply a name: both kingdoms, that of the natural man and that of the spiritual man, are in harmony with the laws of sequence.[C]“There is not a shadow of trustworthy direct evidence that abiogenesis [spontaneous generation] does take place or has taken place within the period during which the existence of life on the globe is recorded.”—Huxley, under “Biology,” Encyclopedia Britannica, vol. iii., page 689. “These are the generations of every plant of the fieldbeforeit was in the earth.”—Gen. ii. 4, 5.“That it [human consciousness] can not possibly be the product of any cunning arrangement of material particles is demonstrated beyond peradventure by what we now know of the correlation of physical forces.”—Fiske, “The Destiny of Man,” page 42. “By no possibility can thought and feeling be in any sense the products of matter.”—Idem., page 109.[D]Alfred Russel Wallace, who was joint discoverer with Darwin of evolution, and is its greatest living exponent, in his book “Darwinism,” page 474, shows the fallacy as to new causes involving any breach of continuity—these new causes embracing vegetable life, animal life, and the higher powers of man. He says, page 476: “Still more surely can we refer to it [the spiritual world] those progressive manifestations of life in the vegetable, the animal, and man.” Also, in “Natural Selection,” page 185: “The higher powers in man are surest proof that there are other and higher existences than ourselves, from whom these qualities may have been derived, and toward whom we may be ever tending.”[E]After watching the process hour by hour (in the semi-fluid globule of protoplasm of the embryo), one is almost involuntarily possessed by the notion that some more subtle aid to vision than an achromatic would show the hidden artist, with his plan before him, striving with skilful manipulation to perfect his work.—Huxley, “Lay Sermons,” page 261.[F]Romanes, in “Darwin and After Darwin,” chapter iv., says that the embryo is a résumé or recapitulation of the successive phases through which the being has been developed, with explainable omissions. On page 102 he tells of the young salamander that is so complete in its gills shortly before birth that if it is removed from the womb and placed in water it will be able to live, breathing like a fish through its gills.[G]“The Destiny of Man,” page 110.[H]“It is an inevitable deduction from the hypothesis of evolution that races of sentient creatures could have come into existence under no other conditions [than those of pains and pleasures].”—“Data of Ethics,” Herbert Spencer, section 33.[I]“We adhere firmly to the pure, unequivocal monism of Spinoza: Matter, or infinitely extended substance, and spirit (or energy), or sensitive and thinking substance, are the two fundamental attributes or principal properties of the all-embracing divine essence of the world, the universal substance.”—“The Riddle of the Universe,” Ernst Haeckel, p. 21.[J]From advance sheets of “Appleton’s Annual Cyclopædia” for 1901.[K]Rom. xi.
[A]It has been believed by many from the early ages of the Christian era that among the signs of Christ’s coming would be the recognition of Him by the Jews, as “one sent of the Father,” and that they would then be restored to the Father’s favor; that this recognition would be accompanied by a recolonization of the Jews in Palestine; that from this vantage-ground, they, as a nation among nations—the “inherent genius of the Jews for things religious” again reasserting itself—would lead the nations of earth in final triumph into the kingdom of the spiritual man.Prof. R. Gottheil, of Columbia University, and president of the Federation of American Zionists, said, before the Zionist Congress, in the summer of 1900, in London: “It is time the nations understood our motives. Our purpose is gradually to colonize Palestine. We political Zionists desire a charter from the Sultan authorizing us to settle in our Holy Land, and we ask the powers to approve and protect this charter.”
[A]It has been believed by many from the early ages of the Christian era that among the signs of Christ’s coming would be the recognition of Him by the Jews, as “one sent of the Father,” and that they would then be restored to the Father’s favor; that this recognition would be accompanied by a recolonization of the Jews in Palestine; that from this vantage-ground, they, as a nation among nations—the “inherent genius of the Jews for things religious” again reasserting itself—would lead the nations of earth in final triumph into the kingdom of the spiritual man.
Prof. R. Gottheil, of Columbia University, and president of the Federation of American Zionists, said, before the Zionist Congress, in the summer of 1900, in London: “It is time the nations understood our motives. Our purpose is gradually to colonize Palestine. We political Zionists desire a charter from the Sultan authorizing us to settle in our Holy Land, and we ask the powers to approve and protect this charter.”
[B]This is simply a name: both kingdoms, that of the natural man and that of the spiritual man, are in harmony with the laws of sequence.
[B]This is simply a name: both kingdoms, that of the natural man and that of the spiritual man, are in harmony with the laws of sequence.
[C]“There is not a shadow of trustworthy direct evidence that abiogenesis [spontaneous generation] does take place or has taken place within the period during which the existence of life on the globe is recorded.”—Huxley, under “Biology,” Encyclopedia Britannica, vol. iii., page 689. “These are the generations of every plant of the fieldbeforeit was in the earth.”—Gen. ii. 4, 5.“That it [human consciousness] can not possibly be the product of any cunning arrangement of material particles is demonstrated beyond peradventure by what we now know of the correlation of physical forces.”—Fiske, “The Destiny of Man,” page 42. “By no possibility can thought and feeling be in any sense the products of matter.”—Idem., page 109.
[C]“There is not a shadow of trustworthy direct evidence that abiogenesis [spontaneous generation] does take place or has taken place within the period during which the existence of life on the globe is recorded.”—Huxley, under “Biology,” Encyclopedia Britannica, vol. iii., page 689. “These are the generations of every plant of the fieldbeforeit was in the earth.”—Gen. ii. 4, 5.
“That it [human consciousness] can not possibly be the product of any cunning arrangement of material particles is demonstrated beyond peradventure by what we now know of the correlation of physical forces.”—Fiske, “The Destiny of Man,” page 42. “By no possibility can thought and feeling be in any sense the products of matter.”—Idem., page 109.
[D]Alfred Russel Wallace, who was joint discoverer with Darwin of evolution, and is its greatest living exponent, in his book “Darwinism,” page 474, shows the fallacy as to new causes involving any breach of continuity—these new causes embracing vegetable life, animal life, and the higher powers of man. He says, page 476: “Still more surely can we refer to it [the spiritual world] those progressive manifestations of life in the vegetable, the animal, and man.” Also, in “Natural Selection,” page 185: “The higher powers in man are surest proof that there are other and higher existences than ourselves, from whom these qualities may have been derived, and toward whom we may be ever tending.”
[D]Alfred Russel Wallace, who was joint discoverer with Darwin of evolution, and is its greatest living exponent, in his book “Darwinism,” page 474, shows the fallacy as to new causes involving any breach of continuity—these new causes embracing vegetable life, animal life, and the higher powers of man. He says, page 476: “Still more surely can we refer to it [the spiritual world] those progressive manifestations of life in the vegetable, the animal, and man.” Also, in “Natural Selection,” page 185: “The higher powers in man are surest proof that there are other and higher existences than ourselves, from whom these qualities may have been derived, and toward whom we may be ever tending.”
[E]After watching the process hour by hour (in the semi-fluid globule of protoplasm of the embryo), one is almost involuntarily possessed by the notion that some more subtle aid to vision than an achromatic would show the hidden artist, with his plan before him, striving with skilful manipulation to perfect his work.—Huxley, “Lay Sermons,” page 261.
[E]After watching the process hour by hour (in the semi-fluid globule of protoplasm of the embryo), one is almost involuntarily possessed by the notion that some more subtle aid to vision than an achromatic would show the hidden artist, with his plan before him, striving with skilful manipulation to perfect his work.—Huxley, “Lay Sermons,” page 261.
[F]Romanes, in “Darwin and After Darwin,” chapter iv., says that the embryo is a résumé or recapitulation of the successive phases through which the being has been developed, with explainable omissions. On page 102 he tells of the young salamander that is so complete in its gills shortly before birth that if it is removed from the womb and placed in water it will be able to live, breathing like a fish through its gills.
[F]Romanes, in “Darwin and After Darwin,” chapter iv., says that the embryo is a résumé or recapitulation of the successive phases through which the being has been developed, with explainable omissions. On page 102 he tells of the young salamander that is so complete in its gills shortly before birth that if it is removed from the womb and placed in water it will be able to live, breathing like a fish through its gills.
[G]“The Destiny of Man,” page 110.
[G]“The Destiny of Man,” page 110.
[H]“It is an inevitable deduction from the hypothesis of evolution that races of sentient creatures could have come into existence under no other conditions [than those of pains and pleasures].”—“Data of Ethics,” Herbert Spencer, section 33.
[H]“It is an inevitable deduction from the hypothesis of evolution that races of sentient creatures could have come into existence under no other conditions [than those of pains and pleasures].”—“Data of Ethics,” Herbert Spencer, section 33.
[I]“We adhere firmly to the pure, unequivocal monism of Spinoza: Matter, or infinitely extended substance, and spirit (or energy), or sensitive and thinking substance, are the two fundamental attributes or principal properties of the all-embracing divine essence of the world, the universal substance.”—“The Riddle of the Universe,” Ernst Haeckel, p. 21.
[I]“We adhere firmly to the pure, unequivocal monism of Spinoza: Matter, or infinitely extended substance, and spirit (or energy), or sensitive and thinking substance, are the two fundamental attributes or principal properties of the all-embracing divine essence of the world, the universal substance.”—“The Riddle of the Universe,” Ernst Haeckel, p. 21.
[J]From advance sheets of “Appleton’s Annual Cyclopædia” for 1901.
[J]From advance sheets of “Appleton’s Annual Cyclopædia” for 1901.
[K]Rom. xi.
[K]Rom. xi.
There has appeared from time to time in Europe, during the past thousand years, a mysterious individual—a sojourner in all lands, yet a citizen of none; professing the profoundest secrets of opulence, yet generally living in a state of poverty; astonishing every one by the vigor of his recollections, and the evidence of his intercourse with the eminent characters and events of every age, yet connected with none—without lineage, possession, or pursuit on earth—a wanderer and unhappy!
A number of histories have been written about him; some purely fictitious, others founded on ill-understood records. Germany, the land of mysticism, has toiled the most in this idle perversion of truth. Yet those narratives have been in general but a few pages, feebly founded on the fatal sentence of his punishment for an indignity offered to the Author of the Christian faith.
That exile lives! that most afflicted of the people of affliction yet walks this earth, bearing the sorrows of eighteen centuries on his brow—withering in soul for the guilt of an hour of madness. He has long borne the scoff of man in silence; he has heard his princely rank degraded to that of a menial, and heard without a murmur; he has heard his unhappy offense charged to deliberate malice, when it was but the misfortune of a zeal inflamed by the passions of his people; and he has bowed to the calumny as a portion of his punishment. But the time for this forbearance is no more. He feels himself at last wearing away; and feels, with a sensation like that of returning to the common fates of mankind, a desire to stand clear with his fellow men. In their presence he will never move again; to their justice, or their mercy, he willnever again appeal. The wound of his soul rests, never again to be disclosed, until that day when all beings shall be summoned and all secrets be known.
In his final retreat he has collected these memorials. He has concealed nothing; he has dissembled nothing; the picture of his hopes and fears, his weaknesses and his sorrows, is stamped here with sacred sincerity.
Other narratives may be more specious or eloquent, but this narrative has the supreme merit of reality. It may be doubted; it may even be denied. But this he must endure. He has been long trained to the severity of the world!
The Author.
The superior numbers appearing throughout the text refer to “Explanatory Notes” in the first pages of the Appendix.
The superior numbers appearing throughout the text refer to “Explanatory Notes” in the first pages of the Appendix.
Salathiel Feels Remorse
“Tarry thou till I come.”[1]The words shot through me—I felt them like an arrow in my heart—my brain whirled—my eyes grew dim. The troops, the priests, the populace, the world, passed away from before my senses like phantoms.
But my mind had a horrible clearness. As if the veil that separates the visible and invisible worlds had been rent in sunder, I saw shapes and signs for which mortal language has no name. The whole expanse of the future spread under my mental gaze. A preternatural light, a new power of mind, seemed to have been poured into my being; I saw at once the full guilt of my crime—the fierce folly—the mad ingratitude—the desperate profanation. I lived over again in frightful distinctness every act and instant of the night of my unspeakable sacrilege. I saw, as if written with a sunbeam, the countless injuries that in the rage of bigotry I had accumulated upon the victim; the bitter mockeries that I had devised; the cruel tauntings that my lips had taught the rabble; the pitiless malignity that had forbidden them to discover a trace of virtue where all virtue was. The blows of the scourge still sounded in my ears. Every drop of the innocent blood rose up in judgment against me.
Salathiel’s Former Triumph
Accursed be the night in which I fell before the tempter! Blotted out from time and eternity be the hour in which I took part with the torturers! Every fiber of my frame quivers, every drop of my blood curdles, as I still hear the echoof the anathema, that on the night of wo sprang first from my lips, “His blood be upon us, and upon our children!”
I had headed the multitude; where others shrank, I urged; where others pitied, I reviled; I scoffed at the feeble malice of the priesthood; I scoffed at the tardy cruelty of the Roman; I swept away by menace and by scorn the human reluctance of the few who dreaded to dip their hands in blood. Thinking to do God service, and substituting my passions for my God, I threw firebrands on the hearts of a rash, jealous, and bigoted people—I triumphed!
In a deed which ought to have covered earth with lamentation, which was to make angels weep, which might have shaken the universe into dust, I triumphed! The decree was passed; but my frenzy was not so to be satiated. I loathed the light while the victim lived. Under the charge of “treason to Cæsar,” I demanded instant execution of the sentence.—“Not a day of life must be given,” I exclaimed, “not an hour;—death, on the instant; death!” My clamor was echoed by the roar of millions.
But in the moment of my exultation I was stricken. He who had refused an hour of life to the victim was, in terrible retribution, condemned to know the misery of life interminable. I heard through all the voices of Jerusalem—I should have heard through all the thunders of heaven—the calm, low voice, “Tarry thou till I come!”
I felt my fate at once! I sprang away through the shouting hosts as if the avenging angel waved his sword above my head. Wild songs, furious execrations, the uproar of myriads stirred to the heights of passion, filled the air; still, through all, I heard the pursuing sentence, “Tarry thou till I come,” and felt it to be the sentence of incurable agony! I was never to know the shelter of the grave!
A Ceaseless Wanderer
Immortality on Earth!—The compulsion of perpetual existence in a world made for change; to feel thousands of years bowing down my wretched head; alienated from all the hopes, enjoyments, and pursuits of man, to bear the heaviness of that existence which palls even with all the stimulants of the most vivid career of man; life passionless, exhausted, melancholy,old. I was to be a wild beast; and a wild beast condemned to pace the same eternal cage! A criminal bound to the floor of his dungeon forever! I would rather have been blown about on the storms of every region of the universe.
Immortality on Earth!—I was still in the vigor of life; but must it be always so? Must not pain, feebleness, the loss of mind, the sad decay of all the resources of the human being, be the natural result of time? Might I not sink into the perpetual sick-bed, hopeless decrepitude, pain without cure or relaxation, the extremities of famine, of disease, of madness?—yet this was to be borne for ages of ages!
Immortality on Earth!—Separation from all that cheers and ennobles life. I was to survive my country; to see the soil dear to my heart violated by the feet of barbarians yet unborn, her sacred monuments, her trophies, her tombs, a scoff and a spoil. Without a resting-spot for the soles of my feet, I was to witness the slave, the man of blood, the savage of the desert, the furious infidel, rioting in my inheritance, digging up the bones of my fathers, trampling on the holy ruins of Jerusalem!
Immortality on Earth!—I was to feel the still keener misery of surviving all whom I loved; wife, child, friend, even to the last being with whom my heart could imagine a human bond; all that bore a drop of my blood in their veins were to perish in my sight, and I was to stand on the verge of the perpetual grave, without the power to sink into its refuge. If new affections could ever wind their way into my frozen bosom, it must be only to fill it with new sorrows; for those I loved must still be torn from me.—In the world I must remain, and remain alone!
Immortality on Earth!—The grave that closes on the sinner, closes on his sin. His weight of offense is fixed. No new guilt can gather on him there. But I was to know no limit to the weight that was already crushing me. The guilt of life upon life, the surges of an unfathomable ocean of crime, were to roll in eternal progress over my head. If the judgment of the great day was terrible to him who had passed but through the common measure of existence, what must be itsterrors to the wretch who was to appear loaded with the accumulated guilt of a thousand lives!
He Passes through Jerusalem
Overwhelmed with despair, I rushed through Jerusalem, with scarcely a consciousness of whither I was going. It was the time of the Passover, when the city was crowded with the multitude come to the great festival of the year. I felt an instinctive horror of the human countenance, and shunned every avenue by which the tribes came in. I at last found myself at the Gate of Zion, that leads southward into the open country. I had then no eyes for that wondrous portal which had exhausted the skill of the most famous Ionian sculptors, the master-work of Herod the Great. But I vainly tried to force my way through the crowds that lingered on their march to gaze upon its matchless beauty; portal alone worthy of the wonders to which it led, like the glory of an evening cloud opening to lead the eye upward to the stars.
On those days the Roman guard was withdrawn from the battlements, which I ascended to seek another escape; but the concourse, gathered there to look upon the entrance of the tribes, fixed me to the spot. Of all the strange and magnificent sights of earth, this entrance was the most fitted to swell the national pride of country and religion. The dispersion, ordained by Heaven for judgment on the crimes of our idolatrous kings, had, through that wonder-working power by which good is brought out of evil, planted our law in the remotest extremities of the world. Among its proselytes were the mighty of all regions, the military leaders, the sages, the kings; all, at least once in their lives, coming to pay homage to the great central city of the faith; and all coming with the pomp and attendance of their rank. The procession amounted to a number which threw after-times into the shade. Three millions of people have been counted at the Passover.
The diversities of the multitude were not less striking. Every race of mankind, in its most marked peculiarities, there passed beneath the eye. There came the long train of swarthy slaves and menials round the chariot of the Indian prince, clothed in the silks and jewels of regions beyond the Ganges. Upon them pressed the troop of African lion-hunters, halfnaked, but with their black limbs wreathed with pearl and fragments of unwrought gold. Behind them, on camels, moved patriarchal groups, the Arab sheik, a venerable figure with his white locks flowing from beneath his turban, leading his sons, like our father Abraham, from the wilderness to the Mount of Vision. Then rolled on the glittering chariot of the Assyrian chieftain, a regal show of purple and gems, convoyed by horsemen covered with steel. The Scythian Jews, wrapped in the furs of wolf and bear, iron men of the North; the noble Greek, the perfection of the human form, with his countenance beaming the genius and beauty of his country; the broad and yellow features of the Chinese rabbins; the fair skins and gigantic forms of the German tribes; strange clusters of men unknown to the limits of Europe or Asia, with their black locks, complexions of the color of gold, and slight yet sinewy limbs, marked with figures of suns and stars struck into the flesh; all marched crowd on crowd; and in strong contrast with them, the Italian on the charger or in the chariot, urging the living stream to the right and left, with the haughtiness of the acknowledged master of mankind. The representative world was before me. But all those distinctive marks of country and condition, though palpably ineradicable by human means, were overpowered and mingled by the one grand impression of the place and the time. In their presence was the City of Holiness; the Hill of Zion lifted up its palaces; above them ascended, like another city in a higher region of the air, thatTempleto whose majesty the world could show no equal, to which the eyes of the believer were turned from the uttermost parts of the earth, in whose courts Solomon, the king of earthly kings for wisdom, had called down the blessing of the Most High, and it had descended on the altar in fire; in whose sanctuary the King whom heaven and the heaven of heavens can not contain was to make His future throne, and give glory to His people.
And Comes upon a Scene Magnificent
O Jerusalem, Jerusalem! when I think of what I saw thee then, and of what I have since seen thee—the spoiled, the desolate, the utterly put to shame; when I have seen the Roman plow driven through the soil on which stood the Holyof Holies; the Saracen destroying even its ruins; the last, worst devastator, the barbarian of the Tatar desert, sitting in grim scorn upon the ramparts of the city of David; violating the tombs of the prophet and the king; turning up for plunder the soil, every blade of whose grass, every atom of whose dust, was sacred to the broken heart of Israel; trampling with savage cruelty my countrymen that lingered among its walls only that they might seek a grave in the ashes of the mighty,—I have felt my spirit maddened within me. I have made impious wishes; I have longed for the lightning to blast the tyrant. I still start from my bed when I hear the whirlwind, and send forth fierce prayers that its rage may be poured on the tents of the oppressor. I unconsciously tear away my white locks, and scatter them in bitterness of soul toward the East. In the wildness of the moment I have imagined every cloud that sailed along the night a minister of the descending vengeance. I have seen it a throne of terrible shapes flying on the wings of the wind, majestic spirits and kings of wrath hurrying through the heavens to pour down sulfurous hail and fire, as upon the cities of the Dead Sea. I have cried out with our prophet, as the vision swept along, “Who is he that cometh from Edom? with dyed garments from Bozra? he that is glorious in his apparel, traveling in the greatness of his strength! Wherefore art thou red in thine apparel, and thy garments like him that treadeth the winepress?” and I have thought that I heard the answer: “I, that speak in righteousness, mighty to save! I will tread them in mine anger, and trample them in my fury, and their blood shall be sprinkled upon my garments, and I will stain all my raiment; for the day of vengeance is in mine heart, and the year of my redeemed is come!”