students of abstruse theology, mingled, a motley crowd, in the narrow streets of the city

of palaces. But over all the Temple, rising above the city, seemed to fling its shadow and

its glory. Each morning the threefold blast of the priests' trumpets wakened the city with

a call to prayer; each evening the same blasts closed the working day, as with sounds

from heaven. Turn where you might, everywhere the holy buildings were in view, now

with the smoke of sacrifices curling over the courts, or again with solemn stillness

resting upon the sacred hills. It was the Temple which gave its character to Jerusalem,

and which decided its fate. There is a remarkable passage in the Talmud, which,

remembering that the time to which it refers was in all probability the very year in which

our Lord died on the cross, reads like an unwilling confirmation of the Gospel narrative:

"Forty years before the destruction of the Temple, its doors opened of their own accord.

thine own accord? Ah! I perceive that thine end is at hand; for it is written (Zech 11:1):

'Open thy doors, O Lebanon, that the fire may devour thy cedars'" (Yoma 39 b). "And,

behold, the veil of the Temple was rent in twain from the top to the bottom" (Matt

27:51)--blessed be God, not merely in announcement of coming judgment, but

henceforth to lay open unto all the way into the Holiest of All.