Bella, sublimis, inclyta divitiis, Olim fuisti celsa Ædificiis, Moenibus clara, sed magis innumerum Civium turmis. The events at Rome which elevated Vespasian to the throne were the principal reasons that the siege of Jerusalem was not actually commenced till the early summer of the year 70, when, in April Titus began his march from CÆsarea. His army consisted of four legions: the 5th, under Sextus Cerealis; the 10th, under Lartius Lepidus; the 12th, that which had suffered defeat under Cestius, and was still in disgrace, and the 15th. Besides this formidable force of regulars, he had a very large number of auxiliaries. The exact number of his troops is not easy to estimate. We may at once put aside, as clearly below the mark, the estimate which puts Titus’s army at thirty thousand; for if we agree in accepting Josephus’s statement 3. Let us take the opportunity of stating our opinion that Josephus’s testimony may generally be relied upon. It was for a long time the fashion to hold up his exaggerations to ridicule. Thus, when he spoke of the height of the wall as being such as to make the head reel, travellers remembered the fifty feet of wall or so at the present day and laughed. But Captain Warren has found that the wall was in parts as much as 200 feet high. Surely a man may be excused for feeling giddy at looking down a depth of 200 feet. Whenever Josephus speaks from personal knowledge, he appears to us to be accurate and trustworthy. There is nothing on which he could speak with greater authority, which would sooner have been discovered, than a misstatement as regards the Roman army. 4. Milman gives a list of the losses of the Jews in this war compiled from the numbers given by Josephus. It amounts to more than three millions. Deductions must, of course, be made. 5. No argument ought to be founded on the supposed numbers of the legions. The number generally composing a legion in the time of the Empire was 6000, and before the Empire, was 4000. But at Pharsalia CÆsar’s legions were only 2000 each, while Pompey’s were 7000. 6. It is very curious that these “servants” are not mentioned either by Mr. Lewin or Mr. Fergusson. Mr. Williams puts down the number of the legions at 10,000 each, perhaps including the servants. It is not easy to make any kind of estimate of the number of these servants. Perhaps, however, we shall be within the mark if we put down the whole number of forces under Titus’s command at something like eighty thousand—an army which was greatly superior in numbers to that of the besieged. It was also fully provided and equipped with military engines, provisions and material of all kinds. It marched, without meeting any enemy, from CÆsarea to Jerusalem, where it arrived on the 11th of April. The city, meanwhile, had been continuing those civil dissensions which hastened its ruin. John, Simon Bar Gioras, and Eleazar, each at the head of his own faction, made the streets run with blood. John, whose followers numbered six thousand, held the Lower, New, and Middle City; Simon, at the head of ten thousand Jews and five thousand Idumeans, had the strong post of the Upper City, with a portion of the third wall; Eleazar, with two thousand zealots, more fanatic than the rest, had barricaded himself within the Temple itself. There they admitted, it is true, unarmed worshippers, but kept out the rest. The stores of the Temple provided them with abundance of provisions, and while the rest of the soldiers were starving, those who were within the Temple walls 7. The dates of the siege are all taken from Professor Willis’s ‘Journal,’ given in Williams’s ‘Holy City,’ vol. i. p. 478. 8. After Eleazar had succumbed to John. “And now,” to quote the words of the historian, “the people of the city were like a great body torn in pieces. The aged men and the women were in such distress by their internal calamities that they wished for the Romans, and earnestly hoped for an external war, in order to deliver them from their domestic miseries. The citizens themselves were under a terrible consternation and fear; nor had they any opportunity of taking counsel and of changing their conduct; nor were there any hopes of coming to an agreement with their enemies; nor could such as wished to do so flee away, for guards were set at all places, and the chiefs of the robbers agreed in killing those who were for peace with the Romans.” Day and night, he goes on to tell us, the wretched inhabitants were harassed with the shouts of those who fought, and the lamentation of those who mourned, until through the overwhelming fear, every one for himself, relations ceased to care for each other, the living ceased to mourn for the dead, and those who were not among the defenders of the walls ceased to care for anything or to look for anything except for speedy destruction; and this even before the siege began. And yet, with the city in this miserable and wretched condition, with the certain knowledge that the Romans were coming, the usual crowds of Jews and Idumeans flocked to the city to keep the feast of the Passover. 9. Fergusson’s Art. ‘Jerusalem,’ Biblical Dictionary. 10. Taking the shape of the city to be circular and 33 stadia in circumference (it was more nearly circular than square), we find its area to have been rather more than 3,500,000 square yards. This, at 30 square yards to one person, gives about 120,000 for the ordinary population. And there were extensive gardens and numerous villas to the north and east which contained another population altogether quite impossible to estimate. And it must not be forgotten that Cestius (Joseph. ‘Bell. Jud.’ vi. ix. 3) caused an estimate to be made, a very few years before the siege, of the numbers actually present at the Passover, and that the official return was 2,560,500 persons. The whole question is clearly stated by Mr. Williams (‘Holy City,’ vol. i. p. 481). And, as he points out very justly, it is not a question how many would be comfortably accommodated in Jerusalem, but how many were actually crammed into it. The people knew full well, of course, that the Romans were coming. Fear was upon all, and expectation of things great and terrible. As in all times of general excitement, signs were reported to have been seen in the heavens, and portents, which, however, might be read both ways, were observed. A star shaped like a sword, and a comet, stood over the city for a whole year. A great light had shone on the altar at the ninth hour of the night. A heifer, led up to be sacrificed, brought forth a lamb in the midst of the Temple. The eastern gate of the inner court, so heavy that it required twenty men to move it, flew open of its own accord in the night. Chariots and troops of soldiers in armour were seen running about in the clouds, and surrounding cities. When the priests were one night busy in their sacred offices, they felt the earth quaking beneath them, and heard a cry, as of a great multitude, “Let us remove hence!” And always up and down the city wandered Jesus, the son of Ananus, crying, “Woe, woe to Jerusalem!” until the siege began in earnest, when he ceased; for being on the wall, he cried, “Woe, woe to the city again! and to the people, and to the holy House!” and then, as he added, “Woe, woe to myself also!” a stone from one of the engines smote him and he died. Titus posted the 10th Legion on the Mount of Olives, and the 12th and 15th on Mount Scopus, the 5th remaining some little distance behind. As the 10th were engaged in pitching their camp, the Jews, whose leaders had hastily patched up a kind of peace, suddenly sallied forth from the eastern gate, and marching across the valley of the Kedron, charged the Romans before they had time to form in battle. " April 11." Titus himself brought a The next four days were spent in clearing the ground to the north of the city, the only part where an attack could be made. “They 11. Joseph. ‘Bell. Jud.’ v. iii. 2. The Jews, furious at sight of this destruction, made a sally, pretending at first to be outcasts from the city, and hiding their weapons until they were close upon the enemy. On this occasion the Romans were utterly routed, and fled, pursued by the Jews “as far as Helen’s monument.” It was a gleam of sunshine, and nearly the only gleam that fell to the lot of the besieged. Titus removed his camp to the north side of the city, and, leaving the 10th still on the Mount of Olives, placed the 5th on the west of the city, over against the towers of Hippicus and Pharsaelus, and the 12th and 15th on the north. A cordon of men, seven deep, was drawn round the north and west of the city. This must have taken some twenty-five thousand men to effect. April 23. On the morning of the Passover, John contrived—taking advantage of the permission freely granted to all who chose to enter the Temple unarmed—to send in his own men, choosing those whose features were not known to Eleazar’s followers, with concealed weapons. Directly they got into the Inner Temple, they made an attack on the men of the opposite faction. A good many were slaughtered, and the rest, finding it best to yield, made terms with their conquerors, Eleazar’s life being spared. There now remained only two factions in the city, Simon holding the strongest place—the Palace of Herod, which commanded the Upper Town—and John the Temple It was determined to begin the assault with the north-western part of the wall, that part of it where the valley turns in a north-westerly direction and leaves a level space between the wall and its own course. The engines used by the Romans were those always employed in the conduct of a siege—the ballistÆ, the towers, and the battering rams. Then banks were constructed, on each of which was a tower and a ram. In the construction of these last all the trees round Jerusalem were cut down. Nor have they ever been replanted, and a thousand years later on the siege of the city by the Crusaders, only inferior in horror to that of Titus, nearly miscarried for want of timber to construct the towers of assault. As soon as the banks were sufficiently advanced the battering rams were mounted and the assault commenced. The Jews, terrified by the thunder of the rams against the city, annoyed, too, by the stones which came into the city from the ballistÆ, joined their forces and tried a sortie from a secret gate near Hippicus. Their object was to destroy the machines by fire; and in this they well-nigh succeeded, fighting with a desperation and courage which no Roman troops had ever before experienced. Titus himself was in the conflict; he killed twelve Jews with his own hands; but the Romans would have given way had it not been for the reinforcement of some Alexandrian troops who came up at the right moment and drove back the Jews. On the fifteenth day of the siege the biggest battering ram, “Nikon,” the Conqueror, effected a breach in the outer wall. The Jews, panic-stricken, forgot their wonted courage and took refuge within the second wall. Titus became therefore master of Bezetha, in the New Town; forming about a third of the city. As nothing is said about the population of this, which was probably only a suburb and never actually filled with Between the palace of Herod and the Temple area there stretched the second wall across the Tyropoeon valley, which was filled, before the faction fights of Simon and John, with houses of the lower sort of people. This was the most densely populated part of the city. The wall which defended it was not so strong as the rest of the fortifications, and in five days, including an unsuccessful attempt to storm the palace of Herod, a breach was effected and the Romans poured into the town, Titus at their head. In hopes of detaching the people from the soldiers, Titus ordered that no houses should be destroyed, no property pillaged, and the lives of the people spared. It was an act of mercy which the fierce passions of the Jews interpreted as a sign of weakness, and renewing their contest, fighting hand to hand in the streets, from the houses, from the walls, they beat the Romans back, and recaptured their wall, filling the breach with their own bodies. The battle lasted for four days more when Titus, entering again, threw down the whole northern part of the wall and became master of the whole Lower Town. Partly to give his troops rest, partly to exhibit his power before the Jews, Titus gave orders that the paying of the troops should be made the opportunity for a review of the whole army almost under the walls of the city, and in full view of the besieged. The pageant lasted four days, during which there was a grand march-past of the splendid Roman troops, with burnished armour and weapons, and in full uniform. “So the soldiers, according to custom, opened the cases where their arms before lay covered, and marched with 12. Joseph. ‘Bell. Jud.’ v. ix. 1. The Jews saw and trembled. But they did not submit. There could be no longer any hope. The multitude, pent up in limits too narrow for one-tenth of their number, daily obtained more room by death, for they died by thousands. The bodies were thrown out into the valleys, where they lay rotting, a loathsome mass. Roaming bands of soldiers went up and down the city looking for food. When they came upon a man who looked fat and well-fed they tortured him till he told the secret of his store: to be starving or to appear to be starving was the only safety: and “now,” says Josephus, “all hope of escaping was cut off from the Jews, together with their liberty of going out of the city. Then did the famine widen its progress, and devoured the people by whole houses and families; the upper rooms were full of women and children that were dying by famine; and the lanes of the city were full of the dead bodies of the aged; the children also and the young men wandered about the market-places like shadows, all swelled with the famine, and fell down dead wheresoever their misery seized them. As for burying them, those that were sick themselves were not able to do it; and those that were hearty and well, were deterred from doing it by the great multitude of those dead bodies, and by the uncertainty there was how At night the miserable wretches would steal into the ravines, those valleys where the dead bodies of their children, their wives, and kin, were lying in putrefying masses, to gather roots which might serve for food. The lot of these was pitiable indeed. If they remained outside they were captured by the Romans, and crucified, sometimes five hundred in a morning, in full view of the battlements: if they went back laden with a few poor roots of the earth, they were robbed by the soldiers at the gate, and sent home again to their starving children, starving themselves, and unable to help them. The cruelty of Titus, designed to terrify the Jews, only stimulated them to fresh courage. Why, indeed, should they surrender? Death was certain for all; it was better to die fighting, to kill one of the enemy at least, than to die amid the jeers of the triumphant soldiers. Besides, And the Jews, though emaciated by hunger, reeling and fainting for weakness, were yet full of courage and resource. While Titus was spending seventeen days of arduous labour in getting ready his new banks against the Temple, the Jews were busy burrowing beneath his feet; and when the rams had been mounted and already were beginning to play, a subterranean rumbling was heard, and the works of weeks fell suddenly to the ground. “The Romans had much ado to finish their banks after labouring hard for seventeen days continually. There were now four great banks raised, one of which was at the tower of Antonia; this was raised by the 5th Legion, over against the middle of that pool which was called Struthius. Another was cast up by the 12th Legion, at the distance of about twenty cubits from the other. But the labours The other banks against the west wall were not more fortunate. For Simon’s soldiers, with torches in their hands, rushed out suddenly when the engines were beginning to shake the walls. They seized the iron of the engines, which was red hot, and despite this held them till the wood was consumed. The Romans retreated: the guards, who would not desert their post, fell in numbers, and Titus found his whole army wavering under the attacks of a half-starved and haggard mob, whose courage The wall, which was probably little more than a breastwork, though strong and solid, was completed, together with thirteen external redoubts, in three days, 13. This alone is sufficient to prove the extent of Titus’s army. An army of thirty thousand would be utterly unable to accomplish such a work in three days. Even the obstinacy of the Jews gave way under these sufferings, and more than one attempt was made to introduce the Romans. Matthias opened a communication with the enemy. He was detected, and, with three sons, was executed. One Judas, the son of Judas, who was in command of a tower in the Upper City, concerted with ten of his men, and invited the Romans to come up and take the tower. Had Titus at once ordered a troop to mount, the Upper City might have been easily taken. But he had been too often deceived by feints, and hesitated. It was then that Josephus, whom of all men the besieged hated, was wounded in the head, but not seriously, by a stone. The Jews made a tremendous acclamation at seeing this, and sallied forth for a sortie, in the excess of their joy. Josephus, senseless, was taken up and conveyed away, but the next day reappeared and once more offered the clemency of Titus to those who would come out. The hatred which his countrymen bore to Josephus, as to an apostate, natural enough, shows remarkably the love of justice which in all times has distinguished the Jew. His father and mother were in the city. They were not, till late in the siege, interfered with in any way: and his father was set in prison at last, more, apparently, to vex his son than with any idea of doing him an injury. The miserable state of the city drove hundreds to desert. They came down from the walls, or they made a pretended sortie and passed over to the Romans; but here a worse fate accompanied them, in spite of Josephus’s promises, for Josephus had not reckoned on the expectation that the Jews, famishing and mad for food, would, as proved the case, cause their own death by over-eating at first. And a more terrible danger awaited them. It was rumoured about that the deserters swallowed their gold before leaving the city, and the auxiliaries in the Roman camp, Arabians and Syrians, seized the suppliants, and fairly cut them open to find the gold. And though Titus was incensed when he heard of it, and prohibited it strictly, he could not wholly stop the practice, and the knowledge of this cruelty getting into the city stopped many who would otherwise have escaped: they remained to die. 14. Josephus narrates how his mother wept at the false report of his death, and quotes with complacency her lamentation that she had brought so distinguished a man into the world for so early a death. Banks, meanwhile, were gradually rising against the fortress of Antonia. The Romans had swept the country clear of trees for ninety furlongs round to find timber for their construction: they took twenty-one days to complete, and were four in number. The besieged no longer made the same resistance. Their courage, says Josephus, was no longer Jewish, “for they failed in what is peculiar to our nation, in boldness, violence of assault, and running upon the enemy all together ... but they now went out in a more languid manner than before ... and they reproached one another for cowardice, and so retired without doing anything.” The attacks of the enemy were, however, courageously defended. For a whole day the Romans endeavoured with rams to shake the wall, and with crows and picks to undermine its foundations. Darkness made them withdraw, and during the night the wall, which had been grievously shaken, fell of its own accord. But even this calamity had been foreseen by the defenders, and, to the astonishment and even dismay of Titus, a new wall was found built up behind the old, and the Jews upon it, ready to defend it with their old spirit. Titus exhorted his soldiers, who were getting dejected at the renewal of the enemy’s obstinacy, and offered the highest rewards to him who would first mount the wall. His exhortation, like the rest of the speeches in Josephus, is written after the grand historic style, and embodies all those sentiments which a general ought to feel under the circumstances, together with a verbosity and length quite sufficient to deprive it of all hortatory effect. One Sabinus, with only eleven others, made the attempt. He alone reached the top of the wall, and after a gallant July 17. But on that very day the daily sacrifice failed for the first time, and with it the spirit of the starving besieged. The end, now, was not far off. In seven days nearly the whole of Antonia, excepting the south-east tower, was pulled down and a broad way opened for the Roman army to march to the attack of the Temple. Cloisters, as we have seen, united the fortress with the Temple, and along these either on the flat roofs or along the galleries. 15. Mr. Lewin makes this very clear. It seems to us to be made still clearer by taking his graphic description and applying it to any plan which follows the old traditions. And now many of the priests and higher classes deserted the falling city and threw themselves upon the clemency of Titus. They were received with kindness and sent to Gophna. John’s last resource was to pretend they An attempt was made to take the Temple by a night attack. This, however, failed, and Titus foresaw the necessity of raising new banks. Fighting went on daily in the cloisters, until the Jews set fire to them, and occasional sorties were made by the besieged in hopes to catch the enemy at unguarded moments. The banks were finished on the 1st of August. Titus ordered that they should be brought and set over against the western wall of the inner Temple. For six days the battering rams played against the masonry of the inner Temple, for by this time the beautiful cloisters which surrounded it, and ran from east to west, were all destroyed, and the inner Temple, a fortress in itself, stood naked and alone, the last refuge of John and his men. Had they yielded this at least would have been spared. But it was not to be. With a pertinacity which had no longer any hope in it the obstinate zealots held out. On the north side the Romans undermined the gate, but could not bring it down; they brought ladders and endeavoured to tunnel the wall. The Jews allowed them to mount, and then killed every one and captured their ensigns. And thus it was that Titus, fearing perhaps that the spirit of his own troops would give way, ordered the northern gate to be set on fire. This was done, and the cloisters, not those of the outer court, but of the inner, were soon destroyed. But Titus resolved still to save the Holy of Holies. Aug. 9. It was the day on which Nebuchadnezzar had burned the Temple of Solomon. The Jews made another sortie, their last but one. They could effect nothing, and retired after five hours’ fighting into their stronghold, the desecrated Temple, on whose altar no more sacrifices were now made, or ever would be made again. Titus retired to Antonia, resolving to take the place the next day; but the Jews would not wait so long. They 16. Joseph. vi. iv. 5. Titus, with all his staff, hastened to save what he could. He exhorted the soldiers to spare the building. He stood in the Holy of Holies itself, and beat back the soldiers who were pressing to the work of destruction. But in vain: one of the soldiers threw a torch upon the gateway of the sanctuary, and in a moment the fate of the building was sealed. And while the flames mounted higher the carnage of the poor wretches within went on. None was spared; ten thousand were killed that were found there—children, old men, priests and profane persons, all alike; six thousand fled to the roof of the royal cloister, that glorious building which crowned the Temple wall to the south, stretching from “Robinson’s Arch” to the valley of the Kedron. The Romans fired that too, and the whole of the multitude perished together. “One would have thought that the hill itself, on which the Temple stood, was seething hot, full of fire in every part; that the blood was larger in quantity than the fire; 17. Joseph. vi. v. 1. The really guilty among the Jews, the fighting men, had cut their way through the Romans and fled to the upper city. A few priests either hid themselves in secret chambers or crouched upon the top of the wall. On the fifth day they surrendered, being starving. Titus ordered them to execution. And so the Temple of Herod fell. The Roman army flocked into the ruins of the Temple which it had cost them so many lives to take; sacrifices were offered, and Titus was saluted as Imperator. An immense spoil was found there, not only from the sacred vessels of gold, but from the treasury, in which vast sums had been accumulated. The upper town, Zion, still held out. Titus demanded a parley. Standing on that bridge, the ruined stones of which were found by Captain Warren lying eighty feet below the surface of the ground, he for the last time offered terms to the insurgents. He explained that they could no longer entertain any hope, even the slightest, of safety, and renewed his offers of clemency to those who should yield. But the offers of Titus were supposed to be the effect of weakness. Again the insurgents, now indeed possessed with a divine madness, declined them. They demanded that they might be allowed to march out with all their arms, and what would now be called the honours of war. This proposition from a handful of starved soldiers surrounded by the ruins of all that they held dear, with a triumphant army on all sides, was too monstrous to be accepted even by the most clement of conquerors, and Titus resolved with reluctance on the destruction of the And then they set fire to the houses, and all was over. As for the prisoners who remained alive, they were destined to the usual fate of slaves. To fight as gladiators; to afford sport among the wild beasts in the theatres; and to work for life in the mines, was their miserable lot. Woe, indeed, to the conquered in those old wars, where defeat meant death, whose least cruel form was the stroke of the headsman, or, worse than death, life, whose least miserable portion was perpetual slavery in the mines. It would have been well had Josephus, after narrating the scenes which he tells so well, gone to visit these his miserable fellow-countrymen in slavery, and described for us, if he could, the wretchedness of their after-life, the unspeakable The Romans, knowing that Jerusalem had a sort of subterranean city of excavated chambers beneath it, proceeded to search for hiding insurgents and for hidden wealth. The chambers were, like the houses, often full of dead bodies. They found fugitives in some of them; these they put to death. In others they found treasure; in others they found corpses. Simon and John were not among the prisoners, nor were they among the killed. John, several days after the capture of the city, came out voluntarily from his hiding-place, and gave himself up to Titus. He was reserved for the triumph. And then came the grand day of rejoicing for the conquerors. Titus made a long and laudatory oration to the army, adjudged promotions, coronets, necklaces, and other prizes of valour, and with lavish hand distributed the spoils among his soldiers. For three days the troops banqueted and rejoiced. Then Titus broke up his camp, and departed for CÆsarea with the 5th and 15th Legions, leaving the 10th, under Terentius Rufus, to guard the city, and sending the 12th to the banks of the Euphrates. 18. Joseph. vii. v. 3. It was not till October that Simon gave himself up. To prevent being killed at once, he emerged by night from his hiding-place dressed in a long white robe, so that the astonished soldiers took him for a ghost. “I am Simon, son of Gioras,” he cried. “Call hither your general.” Terentius received him as a prisoner, and sent him to Titus. One of the most important things in the conduct of a No historian, except perhaps Milman, whose sympathies are ever with the fallen cause, seems to us to have done justice, not only to the bravery and heroism of the Jews, but also to the heroism of their leaders. Their leaders have been described by an enemy and a rival—that Josephus, son of Matthias, who, after making an heroic resistance at Jotapata, obtained his life by pretending to be a prophet, and continued in favour with the conquerors by exhorting his fellow-countrymen to submission. That Simon and John were men stained with blood, violent, headstrong, we know well; but it does not seem to us that they were so bad and worthless as Josephus would have us to believe. After the siege fairly began they united their forces: we hear no more of the faction-fights. If their soldiers committed excesses and cruelties, they were chiefly for food; and everything was to give way to the preservation of the defenders. Moreover, discipline was not thought of among the Jews, whose notion of fighting was chiefly a blind and headlong rush. But we must again recall the religious side of the defence. To the Jew his Temple was more, far more, than Mecca can ever be to a Mohammedan. It had traditions far higher and more divine. The awful presence of Jehovah had filled the sanctuary as with a cloud. His angels had been seen on the sacred hill. There, for generation after generation, the sacrifice had been offered, the feast kept, the unsullied faith maintained. The Temple was a standing monument to remind them by whose aid they had escaped captivity; A handful of men, they offered war to the mistress of the world. True, the insurgents were rude and unlettered, who knew nothing of Rome and her power. Even if they had known all that Rome could do, it would have mattered nothing, for they were fighting for the defence of all that made life sweet to them; and they were sustained by false prophets, poor brainstruck visionaries, who saw the things they wished to see, and foretold what they wished to happen. God might interfere; the mighty arm which had protected them of old might protect them again. The camp of the Romans might be destroyed like the camp of the Assyrians; and because these things might happen, it was a natural step, to an excited and imaginative people, to prophesy that they would happen. But when the time passed by, when none of these things came to pass, and the deluded multitude hoped that submission would bring safety at least, the tenacity of their leaders held them chained to a hopeless defence. Whether Simon and John fought on with a stronger faith, and still in hope that the arm of the Lord would be stretched out, or whether they fought on with the desperate courage of soldiers who preferred death by battle to death by execution, it is impossible now to say. It has been suggested by Josephus, as well as by modern writers, that the courage of the Jews was shaken by predictions, omens, and rumours; but if there were predictions 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. |