"I saw Him come to Jerusalem. Multitudes followed Him and accompanied
Him, casting their mantles and palm-branches in the way that His mule
might tread upon them."
The old man pointed south toward the single summit from which Christ
approaching could overlook Jerusalem.
"On that hill," he said, "while the multitudes hailed Him and the
sound of Alleluia shook the air, He reined in His meek beast and
looked upon this city, and wept over it. When He spoke, He said, If
thou hadst known, even thou, at least in this thy day, the things
which belong unto thy peace! but now they are hid from thine eyes. For
the days shall come upon thee, that thine enemies shall cast a trench
about thee, and compass thee round, and keep thee in on every side,
and shall lay thee even with the ground, and thy children within thee;
and they shall not leave in thee one stone upon another; because thou
knewest not the time of thy visitation.
[Illustration: "And there His enemies crucified Him."] "And three days later, I saw the Rock of David and all that multitude
follow Him unto the Hill of the Skull and there His enemies crucified
Him!"
After a paralyzed silence, Laodice whispered with frozen lips, "In God's name, why?"
But he wisely did not pause with the calamity. He had the whole of the
beginnings of Christianity to tell, a long narrative that contained as
yet no dogma. Paul had seen the great light on the road to Damascus,
and accepting apostleship to all the world had fought a good fight and
had come unto his crown of righteousness; Peter had established the
Church and had fed the sheep and had been offered up by the Beast who
was Nero; John the Divine was seeing visions of the Apocalypse in the
Island of Patmos; Herod Antipas, "that fox," had passed to his own
place, prisoner and exile, sacrifice to a mad Cæsar's imaginings;
Judas had hanged himself; Pilate had drowned himself; thousands of the
saints had died for the faith by fire and sword and wild beasts; kings
had been converted and of the believers in Rome it was said, Your
faith is spoken of throughout the whole world.
Laodice sat with clasped hands, intent on each word as it fell from
the lips of the aged teacher, seeing at one and the same time the
Kingdom of Heaven constructed and her dream of an earthly empire
falling.
"He said," the Christian continued, "They that are whole need not a
physician; but they that are sick. I came not to call the righteous,
but sinners to repentance."
Repentance was a rite for Laodice, a payment of offering, a process to
the righteously inclined, a thing that could in no wise purify the
sinner as to make him worthy of association with the upright. The old
Christian's use of the word was different; he had said that the
Messiah came to the sinner, and not to the righteous. Had the young
Jewess been less in need of comfort in her own consciousness of
spiritual delinquency she would have set down the old teacher as one
of the idlest dealers in contradiction. But now she listened with
keener zest; perchance in this doctrine there was balm for her hurt.
She made some answer which showed the awakening of this new interest
and then with infinite poetry and earnestness he began to unfold the
teachings of Christ.