The Song of Solomon : and the Lamentations of Jeremiah

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THE LAMENTATIONS OF JEREMIAH
a summary of the morals and manners of the men and
women who Hve in it, but also unique when compared
with other cities. Every city that can boast of real
civic life has its distinctive individuality ; and often this
is as striking as the individuality of any private person.
Birmingham is very unlike Manchester ; nobody could
mistake Glasgow for Edinburgh. London, Paris,
Berlin, Rome, Melbourne, New York— each of these
cities is unique. The particular city may be said to be
the only specimen of its kind. If one is blotted out
the type is lost ; there is no duplicate. Athens and
Sparta, Rome and Carthage, Florence and Venice, were
rivals which could never take the place of one another.
Most assuredly Jerusalem stood alone, stamped with
a character which no other place in the world ap-
proached, and charged with a perfectly unique mission.
For such a city to vanish off the face of the earth was
the impoverishment of the world in the loss of what
no nation in all the four continents could ever supply.
In saying this we must be careful to avoid the
anachronism of reading into the present situation the
after history of the sacred city and the character therein
evolved. In the days before the exile Jerusalem was
not the holy place that Ezra and Nehemiah sub-
sequently laboured to make of it. Still looking back
across the centuries we can see what perhaps the
contemporaries could not discover, that the peculiar
destiny of Jerusalem was already shaping itself in his-
tory. At the time, to the patriotic devotion of the
mourning Jews, she was their old home, the happy
dwelling-place of their childhood, the shrine of their
fathers' sepulchres—Nehemiah's thought about the city
even at a later date ; Mn a word, the ancient centre