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572 DAKKNESS AND DAWN
famines and earthquakes in divers places. There was, as
Christ had warned His disciples, great tribulation, such as
had not been since the beginning of the earth, no nor shall
be. These things were the beginning of troubles. The
epoch is so described on the sacred page, and the best comment
on those Christian prophesies is furnished by the
dreary summary of the greatest of pagan historians.
And amid all these calamities and this unbelief, as the
lightning cometh from the east and shineth even to the west,
the sign was seen in heaven of the Son of Man coming in
power and great glory. Against the old dispensation and
the old world the doom visibly went forth. The abomination
of desolation the desolating wing of Rome's abominable
eagle was seen in the Holy Place. The marble floors of
the Temple of Jerusalem swam in blood. Zealots laid their
gory and brutal hands on the holiest things. Priests, gaunt
with famine, were seen leaping madly into the flames kindled
upon the altars. The gold which overlaid the cedarwork ran
molten through the hissing stream of the carnage of its
defenders, and the Holiest Place sank into heaps of ghastly
ruin to have its site defiled with swinish offerings and pagan
shrines. The Temple was doomed to annihilation, because it
was the centre and type of an inferior and abrogated worship.
And the same year which saw this visible abrogation of
Judaism and all its
pompous ineffectually of ceremonies
and sacrifices, saw also the great temple of the Capitoline
Jupiter reduced to ashes in the fierce faction-fight between
Sabinus, the elder brother of Vespasian, and the partisans of
Vitellius. Thus, within a few months, the chief shrines of
the Jew and the Pagan were polluted with massacre, and
flung high into the air their flaming signals of the new faith
which was to dominate the world. Their destruction was a
beacon-light of the coming fulfilment of the old and awful
prophecy, '
I will overturn, overturn, overturn, saith the Lord,
till He come whose right it is.'
The three shadowy Emperors who followed Nero passed
away within a few months, like phantoms, in defeat and shame.
GALBA old, prosaic, unattractive, niggardly, with his feet so
gouty that he could not wear a shoe, and his hands so gouty
that he could not hold up a book had disgusted Rome before
six months were over, and was butchered in the streets. His