From this Mount! Who can but believe
that, at the midnight hour, from the summit of the Ascension, the great
departed of Israel assemble to gaze upon the battlements of their mystic
city? There might be counted heroes and sages, who need shrink from
no rivalry with the brightest and the wisest of other lands; but the
lawgiver of the time of the Pharaohs, whose laws are still obeyed; the
monarch, whose reign has ceased for three thousand years, but whose
wisdom is a proverb in all nations of the earth; the teacher, whose
doctrines have modelled civilised Europe; the greatest of legislators,
the greatest of administrators, and the greatest of reformers; what
race, extinct or living, can produce three such men as these?
The last light is extinguished in the village of Bethany. The wailing
breeze has become a moaning wind; a white film spreads over the purple
sky; the stars are veiled, the stars are hid; all becomes as dark as
the waters of Kedron and the valley of Jehosha-phat. The tower of David
merges into obscurity; no longer glitter the minarets of the mosque
of Omar; Bethesda's angelic waters, the gate of Stephen, the street
of sacred sorrow, the hill of Salem, and the heights of Scopas can no
longer be discerned. Alone in the increasing darkness, while the very
line of the walls gradually eludes the eye, the Church of the Holy
Sepulchre is a beacon light.
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