Such was the change in His own feeling as He approached the capital. Not less striking is the expression of His thought of its meaning and its fate. For the pious Jew, Jeru-salem was L'topia ; and the mediaeval view, expresssed in such enraptured poems as • Pearl' (cf. Gollancz's tr.j and the Crusading dreams of Gerus'dcmm': LibcraM, were the natural continuarion of the ideas of which Ezekiel's visions and the Apocalvpse are the expression. Jesus ac- cepted this estimate of its importance when He deliberately chose it as the one place on earth where the Messianic claim must be publicly made ( Jn .5^* etc. ), but He did this in the full consciousness that when it had ser^-ed this purpose it would pass away. To Him it was a doomed Utopia, doomed Ijeyond aU hope of recovery. Had it known (Lk 19*^), had it understood the day of its visitation, it might have endured ; as things were, it was for Him but a city of might-have-been. Yet, in the very hour when it was rushing to its doom. He seized upon it and forc-ed it to fulfil the purpose towards which it had blindly struggled through all its eventful history. It linked on His work and Person with the past, and in crucifying Him .sent on to the future the completed drama of redemption.
Subsequent history, with ruthless and terrific irony, has confirmed His view. The efforts of the Crusades to revive Jerusalem have only the more hopelessly ntiarked it as the doomed Utopia. Every traveller is impressed with the same sense of its infinite loneliness and stony desolation. It looks like a gigantic fortress that has stood dismantled for ages, but retains for ever a weird air of petrified gallantry. It is a fossil city, fossilized when far gone in decay. The savage liveliness of the bugles w"hich now shriek across its streets and houses, only adds to the sen-se of ancient death. Built for eternity, setting the pattern for men's dreams of the New Jerusalem, it stands for the sarca-sm of promises unfulfilled, a city with a great future behinrj it. 'What,' we cannot but ask, has this relic to do with a blessed future for mankind ? ' History and religion .seem to mourn here together, reiterating the lament of Jesus. One sees in every remembrance of it those two weeping figures, the most significant of all for its .secular and religious life, — Titus, who gazed upon Jerusalem from Scopus the day before its destruction, and wept for the sake of the beautiful city so near its doom ; and Jesus Christ, who, when things were ripening for Titns, foresaw the coming of the legions as He looked upon Jerusalem from Olivet. — ' And when he was come near he beheld the city, and wept over it ' (Lk 19*M.
The appearance of the city, as seen from such a
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lofty vantage ground as that -svhich the approach from Bethany gives from the shoulder of the Mount of Olives, must always have been to a considerable extent the same as it is to-day. It is true that there are now two Jerusalems side by side, the ancient city packed together firmly, and the more loosely scattered masonry of the new Levantine city that has risen to the south and west of the Jaffa Gate. Yet to the north there is still the mound of ashes said to have been carried thither from the Temple sacrifices of old ; and ancient tombs fill the valleys and stretch along the northern plain. It is easy for the imagination to detach the modem buildings, and to regain the ancient impression. It has been pointed out (Hausrath, i. 38, 39) that Athens stands on an unfruitful cliff; Rome between a marsh and a wilderness ; Jeru- salem on a barren tongue of stone, where ' the mountain land gathers itself as to a natural centre.' The ' mountains stand round about Jerusalem,' but they lift her up to their height, and she stands as a mural crown upon the mountain land. The surrounding peaks are but little elevated above her level, and she is the climax as well as the centre of the land, set up to be ' the mountain throne and the mountain sanctuary of God.' And that tongue of land is so stony that even the denudation of sieges and of centuries cannot veiy greatly have changed the general aspect of the scene. There is no river in her landscape to redeem the hardness of the outlines. She is ' a city of stone in a land of iron, with a sky of brass' (Disraeli's Tancred). She has nothing in common with the villages of Judaea, the variety of her buildings differentiating her from the rectangular sameness of theirs. As if to accentuate the contrast, the village of SUoam still lies on the eastern slope of the Kidron valley, a drift of square hovels seen across a field of arti- chokes. Jerusalem ' sitteth solitary,' as she has always sat ; unique in the land as she is lonely in history. The colours of her walls and buildings change in the changing lights from grey Avith a touch of orange to grey with a touch of blue. For there is no one colour of Jerusalem. In the changing lights of sunrise, noon, afternoon, and evening, its colour changes. At one time it hangs, air\^ and dream-like, over the steep bank of the Valley of Jehoshaphat ; at another time it seems to sit solid on its rock, every roof and battlement picked out in photographic clearness ; again, in the twilight of evening all is sombre, with rich purple shadows.