It was late in the evening: the slaves extinguished the seven-branched lamp and laid the cushions for beds in the porticoes which surrounded the inner court. All retired speedily to rest, that they might set out the earlier on the following morning. But the mother still lingered on the spot; her grief increased as the time of departure drew nigh; weeping she embraced her child, and said, “Call me Mara, for I am a sorrowful mother in Israel.” Helon in silence leant upon her bosom, till Elisama came, and said to her: “Bethink thee of what our prophet saith,^[18] 'Rachel weepeth for her children and refuseth to be comforted. But thus saith the Lord, refrain thy voice from weeping and thine eye from tears: for thy work shall be rewarded and thy children shall come again to their own border.'” He forced her away into the inner apartments, and himself lay down on one of the cushions in the portico.

Helon did not attempt to sleep. Wishing his uncle calm repose, he ascended the roof of the house where stood the alija, a small apartment like a turret, dedicated to secret meditation and prayer. From the roof there was an extensive view over the city of Alexandria; on the north to the Mediterranean, on the south to the lake Mareotis, and on the east to the Nile and the Delta. Here he had often stood when a boy, and with restless longing had looked towards the Holy Land. It was a clear, calm night of spring. Refreshing odours arose from the surrounding gardens. The countless stars shed down their twinkling radiance upon him, and the moon’s new light was mirrored in the lake and the canals of the Nile.

Before him lay the city of Alexander, justly styled in the days of her highest prosperity, the Queen of the East and the Chief of Cities. In what stillness she now reposed, with her towering obelisks! How deep the silence and the rest which wrapt her 600,000 inhabitants, and her five harbours, by day so full of activity and noise! The house was near the Panium, from which the whole city could be seen at one view. There stood the Bruchium which, besides the royal palace, contained the Museum, rendered the chief seat of the learning of the times, by its library of 400,000 volumes, and by being the residence of the learned men, whom the munificence of the Ptolemies had collected around their court. Here Helon had sat for several years, at the feet of the philosophers. He thought on those years, and, as he compared them with his present hopes, he exclaimed:

“Truly the tents of sin,” said he to himself, as he paced the roof, “even when I think on my own people, who live here in high favour. Let them be called Macedonians if they will, let the sons of the high priest be the commanders of the army, let them hope for still greater distinctions from Cleopatra’s favour, it is still an exile and Israel is in affliction. Their schisms in doctrine and laxity of morals are too plain a proof of it.”

He went into the alija and brought out his harp; the plaintive tones resounded through the still air of night as he sung

“Here we ought to hang them upon the pyramids,” continued he. “The controversy which destroyed the harmony of our social meal this evening still jars upon my soul. Praised be God, that Jeremiah sojourned with my forefathers, that they like myself have continued AramÆan Jews, and have not gone over to the Hellenists.”

The Diaspora, or body of the Jews dispersed in foreign countries, was divided at this time into Hellenists and AramÆan Jews. The Hellenists had adopted the Greek, at that time the universal language of the civilized and literary world; the AramÆan Jews used, even in foreign lands, the Hebrew, or rather a dialect of that language, called the AramÆan. The latter attached themselves to the temple at Jerusalem, the former worshipped at Leontopolis in Egypt. A division once begun is easily extended to other points. With the Greek language the Hellenists had adopted Grecian culture, yet wished still to continue Jews, and hence arose the necessity for uniting philosophy with the law. The only way in which this could be accomplished, was that which they adopted, of attributing the doctrines of Grecian wisdom to the law, as its inward and spiritual meaning. In this undertaking the Egyptians had led the way for them. Egypt is the native country of allegories. For a long time past the popular religion had been very different from that of the sacerdotal caste, and they stood to each other in the relation of the letter to the spirit; of the image to the reality. The Hellenistic Jews had adopted this Egyptian mode, and three classes had been formed amongst them. One party openly renounced both law and allegory, living without the law, which indeed it was impossible to observe exactly any where but in Judea. Another outwardly conformed to the law, but did so for the sake of its hidden and spiritual meaning. A third set were contented with this spiritual meaning, which they arbitrarily annexed to it, and concerned themselves no further with the literal observance. No little confusion had arisen from this variety of opinions, and the incessant controversies to which they gave rise.

Helon had been hurried by the prevailing spirit of his age and country for some years into the vortex of allegory. A youth of such an ardent temperament and high intellectual endowments, connected with the most considerable families of the Alexandrian Jews, could scarcely escape this temptation. Had his father been alive, he would have been a constant monitor to him against the danger—but since his death on the journey to the Holy Land, Helon’s danger had increased, with the increase of his liberty. It seems too as if it were necessary that those master spirits, who are destined successfully to oppose the errors of their times, should themselves for a while be involved in them. The scattered intimations which the law itself affords opened to him a new and attractive field, which he was eager to explore completely. He was advised to make himself acquainted with the Grecian philosophy, as the source of the knowledge which he desired, and for this purpose he resorted to the Museum. His first instructor here was a Stoic, who demanded from him a greater rigour than even the law had required, but at the same time taught him, that the knowledge of God was not necessary. Helon forsook him, and applied himself to an acute Peripatetic; but his thoughts seemed more occupied with his pecuniary remuneration, than with the high rewards of wisdom and philosophy. Helon lost no time in seeking another teacher. A Pythagorean required, as a preliminary, a long study of music, astronomy and geometry, and Helon thought that the knowledge of the truth might surely be attained by a less circuitous process. At last a young and lively Greek of the name of Myron, whom he had known as a child, introduced him to a Platonic philosopher. In him he seemed to have found all of which he had been in search. He perused with Myron the dialogues of him whom his disciples called the divine. Those were hours never to be forgotten, in which his doctrine of reminiscences, of virtue that is not to be taught or learnt, of That which is, first irradiated his mind. About this time he became acquainted with a wise Jew, who was also a Platonist, and profoundly skilled in the interpretation of the law. He could answer every question which Helon wished to ask respecting the sense of scripture. He explained to him the seven days of creation, and the ten commandments, in their spiritual import; and taught him much respecting the world of ideas, which he had not found even in Plato. His new teacher represented the divine intelligence, not as an attribute of God, but as a being having a distinct existence, and called it the image of God, his first born son, the highest of the angels and the primeval man.

For a long time his fancy rioted in these speculations, to which he was so entirely devoted, that if he continued to observe the law, it was owing to the pure and simple manners to which he was accustomed in his father’s family. But every thing which only gratifies the understanding loses its charm, especially with men of lively and ardent temperament, when it loses its novelty. When Helon’s first transport, at the enlargement of his views, had subsided, and cool reflection began to resume her sway; when he perceived that Myron could, with equal ease, explain and vindicate the worship of Jupiter, Bacchus, and Apollo—the Orphic and Dionysian mysteries—and all the idolatries of polytheism, by the aid of the same principles which his teacher had applied to the interpretation of scripture; suspicions were awakened in his mind that these principles could not be true. That which converts falsehood into truth, he thought, can never increase the force and evidence of truth. The promises which were given to Israel, the threatenings and warnings of Jehovah against participation in idolatry, recurred to his mind. The image of his deceased father was daily held up to him by his mother, as one who had abhorred the system of the Hellenists. A feeling of pride in his own nation, as the chosen people of Jehovah, was awakened in his bosom, and he could no longer take pleasure in the society of Myron.

He began now to remark the endless varieties and inconsistencies of these allegorical interpretations. Every one, full of the persuasion of his own wisdom, expounded the divine word according to his own fancy. Helon could not but perceive that all this wisdom was an arbitrary, self-invented, human system of doctrine respecting divine things, in opposition to which, not only Plato but the whole tenour of scripture taught him, that God only can be our instructor in things relating to himself, and that human reason must here rely upon revelation. This revelation he found in the law, delivered to his nation upon mount Sinai, under circumstances the most impressive and sublime. While this train of thought tended to alienate him from the Hellenists and their system, his mother one evening remarked to him with sorrow his slowness in fulfilling the divine precepts. At first he was so much offended by it, that he replied to her remonstrance only by a sarcastic look, and retired to his books. But conscience did not allow him to rest. Suddenly the divine denunciation occurred to him, “The eye that mocketh at his father, and despiseth to obey his mother, the ravens of the valley shall pick it out, and the young eagles shall eat it.”^[19] He was deeply moved, and now saw with opened eyes the abyss of immorality, to the edge of which this new wisdom had conducted him. He had long desired to be free from the burthensome duties of the law, and he had now transgressed against the first commandment with promise. He felt to what this heathen philosophy, this partial culture of the mind, was bringing him; and in the lives of its professors he saw, in all their rank maturity, the vices, of which he discovered the seeds in his own heart. They lived without a law, sunk in heathen vice and immorality. He now perceived that nothing but the most faithful obedience to the law could make him truly happy, that in this way only he became a partaker in the promises of God to the upright, and that the passion for allegories had corrupted his mind instead of enlightening it. These reflections determined him to return to the faith of his fathers.

He now felt himself once more at home under his paternal roof; his former filial reverence for his mother returned; his father’s spirit seemed to smile on his conversion; and the experienced counsels of his uncle proved much more than an equivalent to him for all the wisdom of the Museum. All the joys and the longings of his childhood returned upon him; the feelings of the present moment seemed to be linked immediately to the remembrances of his boyish days, and all that had intervened appeared like a period of delusion. His desire to behold Jerusalem came over him again, in all its original vividness: it had been the strongest of his early feelings, and the very names of Canaan, Zion, and Jerusalem, had held a mysterious sway over his imagination. His mother, as he sat upon her knees, had told him of the place, towards which he was taught to lisp his prayer; of the thousands who went up to the feast; of Moses, David, and Solomon; and had represented Egypt as a land of exile, another Babel, in comparison with the land of his fathers. He often saw her weep when she spoke of Jericho and her native city, and related how she, when a maiden, had gone up in the choir of singers to the festival, but must now remain in a strange land. As the severest punishment for his childish offences, he used to be told, that it would be a long time before he would be fit to accompany his father on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land; and the reward of his proficiency and his obedience was the promise of a sight of Jerusalem. When Jews from the holy city visited Alexandria, and, as their custom was, came to see his father, it was a festival for Helon; he regarded these strangers with scarcely less veneration than his fathers had done Jeremiah, and tried all the insinuating arts of which he was possessed, to induce the most courteous among them to tell him something about the land of his ancestors. It was the land of promise, the theme of sacred song, the theatre of sacred history. When his father was in a cheerful mood, he used to relate anecdotes of his pilgrimages, beginning and ending every narrative with the words of the children of Korah:

The journey from which his father never returned, was to have been the last which he made alone—on the next, Helon was to have accompanied him. His grief at being obliged to remain at home, his mother’s tears, his father’s solemn farewell, as it were prophetic of the fatal event; his mother’s daily remarks, “Now they are in Hebron, to-day they will reach Jerusalem; to-day the passover begins, to-day it will be over;” their joyful expectations of his return, and the overwhelming intelligence of his death, had all combined to leave an impression on his mind, which he had with difficulty mastered for a time, and which now revived with uncontroulable force. Since his return to the law of his fathers, a pilgrimage to Jerusalem had been his dream by night and his thought by day. Leontopolis, the character and proceedings of the Hellenists, and even the conversation at this evening’s entertainment, all conspired to convince him, that Egypt was no place for the fulfilment of the law. It was now the predominant wish of his soul to become a true Israelite, a faithful follower of the law, and a worthy member of the people of the Lord, and he felt that only in the Holy Land could he become so.

All these reflections and retrospects of his past life filled the mind of Helon, as he laid down his harp upon the parapet of the roof, and paced up and down in strong emotion. At times he stopped, and fixing his eyes on the north-east, almost persuaded himself that the clouds which he saw there were the hills of Judah. In the mean time Sallu, who, like his master, had been unable to sleep, had silently placed a lamp in the alija. Helen was attracted by the light and went in. A roll lay unfolded; he looked into it, and opened at the splendid description which an exile at Nineveh, of the tribe of Naphthali, makes of the holy city. (Tob. x.) “O Jerusalem, the holy city! Many nations shall come from far to the name of the Lord God, with gifts in their hands. Blessed are they that love thee, and rejoice in thy peace. Let my soul bless God, the great King: for the Lord our God will deliver Jerusalem from all her afflictions. The gates of Jerusalem shall be built of sapphires and emeralds and precious stones; thy towers and battlements of pure gold: and the streets of Jerusalem shall be paved with white marble, and in all her streets shall they say, Hallelujah! Praised be God who hath exalted her, and may his kingdom endure for ever. Amen.”

“Hallelujah,” he exclaimed, “that before me an Egyptian Jew could put such words into the mouth of a captive at Nineveh.” He hastened to his harp, and placing the footstool under his foot, turned towards the Holy Land as he sung

He knew by heart all the psalms which had any relation to Jerusalem, and no sooner had he finished one, than his fingers and his voice, unbidden, began another.

His own pilgrimage to Jerusalem seemed to him like the departure of Israel from Egypt fourteen hundred years before, and he was transported at once to those remote ages with so lively a feeling, that the psalm seemed to him to spring fresh from his own soul, and to have been dictated by his own emotions. The forty-third Psalm occurred to his mind, and with the raised look, but subdued voice of humble devotion, he sung—

The tones of the harp gradually died away, and Helon remained absorbed in gratitude and devotion towards Jehovah.

At length he arose to perform his evening prayer. Since his return to the law of his fathers, he had been rigid in the performance of this duty, and without discriminating accurately, in the fervour of his new zeal, between the commands of God, and the usages established by tradition, he would gladly even have added to their length and frequency. There was at this time a distinction commonly made among the AramÆan Jews between the righteous man, who only aimed to fulfil the law as it was left by Moses; and the pious man, who, not content with this, endeavoured by the performance of other ordinances to attain a still higher degree of the divine favour. At an earlier period of Helon’s life, it would have seemed to him a superfluous trouble, to endeavour to deserve the character of the righteous man; now, nothing could satisfy him, but to aspire to the rank of a pious man.

The washing of the hands preceded prayer, because nothing impure was to appear before the purest of Beings. Helon next covered his head with his mantle, a sort of tallith. This mantle had at the four corners fringes, which were called zizis, consisting of eight double twisted threads of wool, whose azure colour had a reference to the heavens, with five tassels for the five books of the law. The use of these fringes had been commanded by God himself to the children of Israel, “That they might look upon them and remember all the commandments of the Lord and do them, and seek not after their own heart and their own eyes.”^[20] He next bound the phylacteries, called tephillim, on his forehead and his left arm, in such a way, that the strings of the first hung upon his breast, and the latter were wound seven times round the fore-arm, then across the fore-finger and the thumb, and finally three times round the middle finger. These phylacteries were little cases, containing strips of parchment, on which the following sentences of the law were written. Deut. v. 11, 13-21. Exod. xiii. 11-16. Deut. vi. 4-9. and Exod. xiii. 1-10. of which the Lord had commanded “They shall be for a token upon thine hand and for frontlets between thine eyes.”^[21] In the phylactery for the forehead there were four strips, in that for the left arm only one.

He now placed himself with his face towards Jerusalem and prayed the Kri-schma, a prayer which consisted of these three passages from the books of Moses; Deut. vi. 4-9. in which it is commanded to love and honour God alone; Deut. xi. 13-21. where the promises are given for the fulfilling of the law; and Numb. xv. 37-41. where it is required that the commandments be diligently kept. He concluded all with a prayer to God, as being, in every act of religious worship, the beginning and the end, the centre to which every thing tends.

Having performed his devotions, he descended with a cheerful heart from the roof, and laid himself beside Elisama in the portico. At the first cock-crowing he arose; for strengthened and animated by hope he had little need of sleep.

He went first to the alija, and having repeated the ceremonies of the preceding evening, and again concluded with an act of praise to God, he roused the slaves and bade them lead the laden camels to the gate. His mother came, with eyes red with weeping, from the apartment of the women. The sun was rising at that moment, and Elisama approaching her, tried to console her with the words of the eighty-fourth Psalm,

“Yes,” she exclaimed,

The travellers were invited to take some food, but Elisama declared that only the servant in Israel took food early in the morning, and to others it was a disgrace. The mother, however, was not to be dissuaded, and compelled them to take dates, figs, and honey. “Greet thy father’s grave,” said she to Helon. “Let thy first visit be to the valley of Jehoshaphat.” Sallu led out the camels. He was full of joy, and every moment touched his ear-ring as a badge of honour. The mother embraced her son, and weeping said to him,

“Go then,” she exclaimed, “God be with thee on the way, and his angel lead thee!”

Helon tore himself from her, and, accompanied by his uncle, descended the inner court. He had scarcely reached the outer, before the delightful expectation of visiting Jerusalem had already gained the ascendency in his thoughts over the sorrow of departure. And when from the end of the street he had cast back a look on the parental house, and blessed once more his mother and the alija, he proceeded with alacrity on his way, repeating to himself,

No farewell to home is ever less painful than the first.