The Impenitent City

And when he drew nigh, he saw the city and wept over it, saying, If thou hadst known in this day, even thou, the things which belong unto peace! but now they are hid from thine eyes.—Luke 19:41-42.

1. The Saviour’s tears were a startling contrast to the scene of rejoicing to which this incident is appended. It was in the midst of the Triumphal Entry that this occurred, when all were exulting and shouts of hallelujah thrilled the air. The simple pious hearts of the disciples were glad at this evident acceptance of their Master, and they anticipated a speedy capture of Jerusalem itself for Christ, when His cause would lay hold of the whole nation and great and glorious events would ensue. They hardly knew what they expected; but, in any case, it was to be a mighty triumph for Christ, and salvation for Israel. But as the joyful procession swept round the shoulder of the hill, and the fair city gleamed into sight, a hush came over the exulting throng; for the Lord was weeping. He had no bright and futile illusions. A wave of excitement like that which had transported the disciples could not blind Him to the actual facts of the case. He knew that He had lived, and would die, in vain, so far as that hard and proud capital was concerned. He knew that He was rejected of rulers and people; and that ears and hearts were deaf to His message. As He looked at the beautiful city, it was not with pride but with anguish. He knew that city and nation were doomed. They had had their day of visitation, and were still having it—but the sands were fast running out. In compassionate grief He yearned over them still, weeping for their blindness and hardness of heart. What a pathetic scene is here recalled to our imagination! The gay and careless city smiling in the sunlight, with eager crowds of busy men full of their interests and pleasures, full of their great religious celebration about to be kept—and the Saviour looking down on it all, weeping. They were throwing away their last chance, following false lights, and dreaming false hopes, seeking false sources of peace, stopping their ears against the voice of wisdom and of love. “If thou hadst known in this day, even thou, the things which belong unto peace! but now they are hid from thine eyes.”

2. Those who heard Him did not understand. Nevertheless He was right. He saw things as they were, not as they seemed. His was that prophet-power which is not so truly the vision of things future as of things present, a power which is less intellectual than moral, which in the sphere of the spiritual is the equivalent of the scientific faculty in the physical order—the power of discerning in human history the reign of law, that necessity by which effect follows upon cause, by which evil conduct must bring to pass evil fortune. He saw, and only He, how things really were with Jerusalem and its people, and therefore He saw what must happen to Jerusalem. So to Him the glowing landscape and the city shining on it like a gem were the illusion, and His doom-picture was the reality; the beauty and peace and glory were the mask; the features behind it were pain, horror, desolation. Jesus was right, and all He wept over came to pass in fullest and most bitter measure.

They climbed the Eastern slope

Which leads from Jordan up to Olivet;

And they who earlier dreams could not forget

Were flushed with eager hope.

They gained the crest, and lo!

The marble temple in the sunset gleamed,

And golden light upon its turrets streamed,

As on the stainless snow.

They shout for joy of heart,

But He, the King, looks on as one in grief;

To heart o’erburdened weeping brings relief,

The unbidden tear-drops start:

“Ah, had’st thou known, e’en thou

In this thy day the things that make for peace;”

Alas! no strivings now can work release.

The night is closing now.

“On all thy high estate,

Thy temple-courts and palaces of pride,

Thy pleasant pictures and thy markets wide,

Is written now ‘Too late.’

Time was there might have been

The waking up to life of higher mood,

The knowledge of the only Wise and Good,

Within thy portals seen;

But now the past is past,

The last faint light by blackening clouds is hid;

Thy heaped-up sins each hope of grace forbid,

The sky is all o’ercast;

And soon from out the cloud

Will burst the storm that lays thee low in dust,

Till shrine and palace, homes of hate and lust

Are wrapt in fiery shroud.”1 [Note: E. H. Plumptre.]

Let us consider:—

I.  Jerusalem’s Day of Privilege.

  II.  Her Rejection of the Light.

  III.  The Tears of the Redeemer.

I

The Day of Privilege

1. There are seasons of special privilege. Jesus here speaks of “a time of visitation.” Properly speaking, that means an overseeing. That is the strict meaning of the original word. It is thus used to describe the office of an Apostle, in the Acts of the Apostles, and the office of a bishop, in St. Paul’s First Epistle to Timothy; and, from this employment of the word in Scripture, it has come to be applied to the court—for such it is—which from time to time, a bishop is bound by the old law of the Church to hold, in order to review the state of his diocese. But this word is more commonly applied in the Bible to God’s activity than to man’s; and a visitation of God is sometimes penal or judicial, and sometimes it is a season of grace and mercy. The day of visitation of which St. Peter speaks, in which the heathen shall glorify God for the good works of Christians, is, we cannot doubt, the day of judgment. And Job uses the Hebrew equivalent to describe the heavy trials which had been sent to test his patience. On the other hand, in the language of Scripture, God visits man in grace and mercy—as He did the Israelites in Egypt after Joseph’s death; as He visited Sarah in one generation, and Hannah in another; as He visited His flock, to use Zechariah’s expression, in Babylon. It was such a visitation as this that our Lord had in view. He Himself had held it; and when He spoke it was not yet concluded.

(1) This visitation was unobtrusive.—In the Advent of the Redeemer there was nothing outwardly remarkable to the men of that day. It was almost nothing. Of all the historians of that period few indeed are found to mention it. This is a thing which we at this day can scarcely understand; for to us the blessed Advent of our Lord is the brightest page in the world’s history; but to them it was far otherwise. Remember for one moment what the Advent of our Lord was to all outward appearance. He seemed, let it be said reverently, to the rulers of those days, a fanatical freethinker. They heard of His miracles, but they appeared nothing remarkable to them; there was nothing there on which to fasten their attention. They heard that some of the populace had been led away, and now and then, it may be, some of His words reached their ears, but to them they were hard to be understood, full of mystery; or else they roused every evil passion in their hearts, so stern and uncompromising was the morality they taught. They put aside these words in that brief period, and the day of grace passed.

There was nothing of the outward pageant of royalty to greet the son of David. There were no guards, no palace, no throne, no royal livery, no currency bearing the king’s image and superscription. All these things had passed into the hands of the foreign conqueror, or, in parts of the country, into the hands of princes who had the semblance of independence without its reality. There was not even the amount of circumstance and state which attends the reception of a visitor to some modern institution—a visitor who only represents the majesty of some old prerogative or of some earthly throne. As He, Israel’s true King, visits Jerusalem, He almost reminds us of the descendant of an ancient and fallen family returning in secret to the old home of his race. Everything is for him instinct with precious memories. Every stone is dear to him, while he himself is forgotten. He wanders about unnoticed, unobserved, or with only such notice as courtesy may accord to a presumed stranger. He is living amid thoughts which are altogether unshared by men whom he meets, as he moves silently and sadly among the records of the past, and he passes away from sight as he came, with his real station and character generally unrecognized, if indeed he is not dismissed as an upstart with contempt and insult. So it was with Jerusalem and its Divine Visitor. “He came unto his own, and his own received him not.”1 [Note: H. P. Liddon.]

(2) The day of visitation is limited.—Jerusalem’s day was narrowed up into the short space of three years and a half. After that, God still pleaded with individuals; but the national cause, as a cause, was gone. Jerusalem’s doom was sealed when Christ pronounced those words.

Here was His last word to the chosen people, the last probation, the last opportunity. We may reverently say that there was no more after that to be done. Each prophet contributed something which others could not; each had filled a place in the long series of visitations which no other could fill. Already, long ago, Jerusalem had been once destroyed, after a great neglect of opportunity. The Book of Jeremiah is one long and pathetic commentary on the blindness and obstinacy of kings, priests, prophets, and people which preceded the Chaldæan invasion, and which rendered it inevitable. And still that ruin, vast and, for the time, utter as it was, had been followed by a reconstruction—that long and bitter exile by a return. But history will not go on for ever repeating events which contradict the possibility of change and renewal. One greater visitation awaited Jerusalem; one more utter ruin—and each was to be the last.

After the Passion and Crucifixion of Jesus no cause of justice, no ministry of truth, no service of one’s fellow-men, need despair. Though the People, Religion and the State together triumph over them, beyond the brief day of such a triumph the days—to use a prophetic promise which had often rung through Jerusalem—the days are coming. The centuries, patient ministers of God, are waiting as surely for them as they waited for Christ beyond His Cross. Thus, then, did the City and the Man confront each other: that great Fortress, with her rival and separately entrenched forces, for the moment confederate against Him; that Single Figure, sure of His sufficiency for all their needs, and, though His flesh might shrink from it, conscious that the death which they conspired for Him was His Father’s will in the redemption of mankind. As for the embattled City herself, lifted above her ravines and apparently impregnable, she sat prepared only for the awful siege and destruction which He foresaw; while all her spiritual promises, thronging from centuries of hope and prophecy, ran out from her shining into the West; a sunset to herself, but the dawn of a new day to the world beyond.1 [Note: G. A. Smith, Jerusalem, ii. 578.]

II

The Rejection of the Light

1. The Jews were blind to their opportunity. They knew not the day of their visitation. There is the ignorance we cannot help, which is part of our circumstances in this life, which is imposed on us by Providence. And such ignorance as this, so far as it extends, effaces responsibility. God will never hold a man accountable for knowledge which He knows to be out of his reach. But there is also ignorance, and a great deal of it in many lives, for which we are ourselves responsible, and which would not have embarrassed us now, if we had made the best of our opportunities in past times. And just as a man who, being drunk, is held to be responsible for the outrage which he commits without knowing what he was doing, because he is undoubtedly responsible for getting into this condition of brutal insensibility at all, so God holds us all to be accountable for an ignorance which He knows not to be due to our nature. Now, this was the case with the men of Jerusalem at that day. Had they studied their prophets earnestly and sincerely, had they refused to surrender themselves to political dreams which flattered their self-love, and which coloured all their thoughts and hopes, they would have seen in Jesus of Nazareth the Divine Visitor whose coming Israel had for long ages been expecting.

There is a way of blindness by hardening the heart. Let us not conceal this truth from ourselves. God blinds the eye, but it is in the appointed course of His providential dealings. If a man will not see, the law is he shall not see; if he will not do what is right when he knows the right, then right shall become to him wrong, and wrong shall seem to be right. We read that God hardened Pharaoh’s heart, that He blinded Israel. It is impossible to look at these cases of blindness without perceiving in them something of Divine action. Even at the moment when the Romans were at their gates, Jerusalem still dreamed of security; and when the battering-ram was at the tower of Antonia, the priests were celebrating, in fancied safety, their daily sacrifices. From the moment when our Master spake, there was deep stillness over her until her destruction; like the strange and unnatural stillness before the thunder-storm, when every breath seems hushed, and every leaf may be almost heard moving in the motionless air; and all this calm and stillness is but the prelude to the moment when the east and west are lighted up with the red flashes, and the whole creation seems to reel. Such was the blindness of that nation which would not know the day of her visitation.1 [Note: F. W. Robertson.]

2. The blindness of the Jews was the blindness of moral indifference. For years they had been sinking into cold spiritual indifference, while they were clinging all the more strongly to the outward formalities of religion. And then came their rejection of Christ, which consummated their ruin. They knew what tithes the poor man must pay into the treasury, but they could not understand a Christ who came to heal the broken-hearted. They knew that Jerusalem was the place where men ought to worship, and that the Samaritans were heretics; they could not understand One who came to give men life and rest in God. It was their cold-hearted indifference that thus blinded their eyes to the mission of Jesus, and it was this that caused them to destroy Him. They had found a Man who said religion was a reality—who spoke in kindling words of a spiritual world, and pointed the weary to an all-present Father; and when they found they could not put to shame a truth that clashed with their cold-heartedness, they hurried Him to the judgment-hall and the cross.

If we go back to the time of the Greeks, and ask what to the Greek mind was the greatest sin, we find that it was insolence. To them insolence meant the failure of a man to realize what was his true attitude to life, to understand that he was bound, if he would be a true man, to face life boldly and fearlessly with all its issues, to think through its problems, to recognize the limits under which his life had to be lived. Still the same thing is needed. We still ask you to look at your life straight, to see what it means, to see what are the things that will destroy it. And we are forced to conclude with the old Greeks that it is insolence which destroys a man’s life. What the Greeks called insolence, we call irreverence; and irreverence is at the bottom of it indifference. It means the want of self-sacrifice, of self-restraint, the want of manliness, the want of a desire to think things out, to face life and its issues broadly and courageously.1 [Note: Life and Letters of Mandell Creighton, ii. 26.]

3. Such a process of hardening may be very gradual. Little by little we lose our keen delight in God, our warm loyalty to our Saviour, our exquisite pleasure in noble things, our cordial sympathy with spiritual people and their aims; little by little we decline into godlessness and worldliness. There is a growing deadness of nerve, a creeping paralysis which leaves us more and more untouched and unmoved by the high and glorious things of our faith, which renders us more and more careless about the tragic possibilities of life.

Life must be a movement—a progress of some kind. We cannot stand still—rise or fall we must. Unless, therefore, we have a restraining power within us conquering those hidden evil tendencies, our life must be gradually sinking. But indifference—the mere absence of positive Christian earnestness—has no restraining influence. Not what we are not, but what we are, forms character. We resemble that which we supremely love. That rectitude of life and conduct which is not the result of choice or effort, and which may exist in the absence of temptation, is purely negative, and, unless supported by some earnest positive principle, is in peril when the slumbering evil tendencies are wakened into power by temptation. We may go a step farther, and affirm that spiritual indifference actually prepares the way for open sin. “He that is not with me is against me,” said Christ, and then followed His parable of the unclean spirit returning in sevenfold might to the empty house. The mere expulsion of evil which leaves the heart vacant and indifferent is a false reformation. Take away corrupt love, and leave the soul’s chamber empty, and it will come again in gigantic force. Thus indifference is the commencement of a blindfold descent into spiritual ruin.

You have seen the snow-flakes falling—at first they lay like beautiful winter flowers, but gradually they formed an icy crust that hardened and thickened with every snow shower. So, a man may receive the truth of Christ in the freezing atmosphere of cold indifference, until he is girded round with a mass of dead belief which no spiritual influence can penetrate.1 [Note: E. L. Hull.]

4. These Jews knew not the day of their visitation and yet they were always expecting it. Their prophets had foretold it; in their prayers they cried out for it. Even at this very time they were looking for their Messiah. But they had made up their minds as to the way in which the visitation would be made. When at last it came in God’s way—so simply, so quietly—they could not receive it.

How many there are who are still living in carelessness, never really ranging themselves on the side of Christ, never really giving to Him their hearts and souls; and all the time they have a sort of vague idea that some day the Lord will come and visit their hearts! They do not mean to die in their irreligion. They half imagine that suddenly and unexpectedly God will call them and convert them; then the King will enthrone Himself in their hearts, and all will be well; then they must needs give up sin, and delight in religion. So now they are content to wait; till that day it does not matter much, they think, what lives they lead. All the time Jesus is with them; but they know Him not; they know not the time of their visitation; they are expecting a visitation of some strange, sensational, or terrible kind. If some storm or tempest of passion shook their being, they might yield to that; if God were to afflict them by laying them permanently on a bed of sickness, or by taking from them all that makes life dear, they would count that as a visitation of God, and would expect to be converted. Our ordinary language seems to countenance this notion. It is “a visitation of God,” we say, when a city is smitten with cholera or plague, or when death cannot be accounted for. It would be well for us all if we could realize more fully that, although God’s voice may be heard in the whirlwind and the storm, it is more often heard in the quiet whisper, speaking lovingly to the conscience.

Where are thy moments? Dost thou let them run

Unheeded through time’s glass? Is thy work done?

Hast thou no duties unfulfilled? Not one

That needs completion?

Thou would’st not cast thy money to the ground;

Or, if thou did’st, perchance it might be found

By one who, schooled in poverty’s harsh round,

Knew not repletion.

But thy time lost, is lost to all and thee;

Swiftly ’tis added to eternity,

And for it answerable thou must be;

So have a care.

Gather thy moments, lest they swell to hours;

Stir up thy youthful and still dormant powers;

Now only canst thou plant Heaven’s fadeless flowers,

Therefore, beware.

III

The Tears of Jesus

“He saw the city and wept over it.” He wept—wept aloud (there had been only silent tears at Bethany, for the two Greek words imply this distinction)—He wept aloud as the city of Jerusalem burst on His sight. The spot has been identified by modern travellers, where a turn in the path brings into view the whole city. “There stood before Him the City of ten thousand memories, with the morning sunlight blazing on the marble pinnacles and gilded roofs of the Temple buildings”; and as He gazed, all the pity within Him over-mastered His human spirit, and He broke into a passion of lamentation, at the sight of the city, which it was too late for Him—the Deliverer—to save; at the thought of the ruin of the nation, which He—the King—had come to rule. “If thou hadst known—Oh! that thou hadst known—the things that belong unto thy peace!” As if He had said, “Thou art called Jerusalem, which means ‘They shall see peace.’ Oh that thou wert Jerusalem in truth and hadst known the things that make for thy peace! but now they are hid from thine eyes.”

The Son of God in tears

The Angels wondering see:

Hast thou no wonder, O my soul?

He shed those tears for thee!

He wept that we might weep,

Might weep our sin and shame,

He wept to shew His love for us,

And bid us love the same.

Then tender be our hearts,

Our eyes in sorrow dim,

Till every tear from every eye

Is wiped away by Him!1 [Note: H. F. Lyte, Poems, 82.]

There is no more moving sight than a strong man in tears. Only the strong can truly weep. Tears are then the overflow of the heart. They come when words are powerless; they go where deeds cannot follow. They are the speech of souls past speaking.2 [Note: R. W. Barbour, Thoughts, 52.]

1. It was not for Himself that He wept. The Saviour quite forgot Himself. Conscious as He was, perfectly conscious, of the terrible suffering and shame which awaited Him, He thought not of it; His whole soul was taken up with the city which lay before Him, glittering in the brilliant light of early morning. The tide of sorrow and regret which that sight set a-flowing submerged all other feelings for the moment. It is proper to man that only one very strong emotion can find room within his breast at the same moment; and our Lord was man, true man, made like unto us in all points, sin alone excepted. So He forgot for the moment all about Himself; His heart went out to the city which lay before Him, and He wept over it.

He measured the worth, or rather He estimated the worthlessness, of those greetings which greeted Him now. He knew that all this joy, this jubilant burst, as it seemed, of a people’s gladness, was but as fire among straw, which blazes up for an instant, and then as quickly expires, leaving nothing but a handful of black ashes behind it. He knew that of this giddy thoughtless multitude, many who now cried, “Hosanna; blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord,” would, before one short week was ended, join their voices with the voices of them who exclaimed, “Crucify him, crucify him; we have no king but Cæsar”; and He wept, not for Himself, but for them, for the doom which they were preparing for their city, for their children, for themselves.

The contrast was, indeed, terrible between the Jerusalem that rose before Christ in all its beauty, glory, and security, and the Jerusalem which He saw in vision dimly rising on the sky, with the camp of the enemy round about it on every side, hugging it closer and closer in deadly embrace, and the very “stockade” which the Roman Legions raised around it; then, another scene in the shifting panorama, and the city laid with the ground, and the gory bodies of her children among her ruins; and yet another scene: the silence and desolateness of death by the Hand of God—not one stone left upon another! We know only too well how literally this vision has become reality; and yet, though uttered as prophecy by Christ, and its reason so clearly stated, Israel to this day knows not the things which belong unto its peace, and the upturned scattered stones of its dispersion are crying out in testimony against it. But to this day, also, do the tears of Christ plead with the Church on Israel’s behalf, and His words bear within them precious seed of promise.1 [Note: Edersheim, Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah, ii. 369.]

2. He wept over the doom of the impenitent city that He loved. He foresaw the hour when the Roman army would level its walls, destroy its Temple, and scatter its people through all lands; when the spot that had been so long known as the glory of Judæa should be recognized only by its ruins. And to Christ there must have been something profoundly sad in that prospect. For ages Jerusalem had been the home of truth and the temple of the Eternal. For ages its people had been the solitary worshippers and witnesses to the true Lord of men. And the thought that a nation called and chosen of old, a nation whose forefathers had been true to God through perils and captivities, should fall from its high standing through falseness to its Lord, and, shorn of its ancient glory, should wander through the world, crowned with mockery, misery, and scorn, might well fill the heart of the compassionate Christ with sorrow. But yet we cannot suppose that the downfall of Jerusalem and the scattering of its people were the chief objects of His pity. It was the men themselves—the men of Jerusalem, who, by the rejection of God’s messengers, and of Himself, the greatest of all, were bringing down those calamities—that awakened His compassion. He saw other temples than Solomon’s falling into ruin—the temples of the souls that had spurned His voice; and the ruin of those spirits moved Him to tears.

3. He knew that this dreadful doom might have been averted. There were things which belonged to Jerusalem’s peace, and which would have secured it, if only she would have known them. They were things which He had brought with Him. The guilty city, the murderess of the prophets, she that had been a provocation almost from her first day until now, might have washed her and made her clean from all that blood and from all that filthiness; she might have become, not in name only, but in deed, “the city of peace,” if only she would have consented first to be “the city of righteousness,” to receive aright Him who had come, “meek and having salvation,” and bringing near to her the things of her everlasting peace. There was no dignity, there was no glory, that might not have been hers. She might have been a name and a praise in all the earth. From that mountain of the Lord’s house the streams of healing, the waters of the river of life, might have gone forth for the healing of all the bitter waters of the world. But no; she chose rather to be herself the bitterest fountain of all. As she had refused in the times past to hear God’s servants, so now she refused to hear His Son, stopped her ears like the deaf adder, made her heart hard as adamant that she might not hear Him.

4. But He knew that His bitter tears were unavailing now. The desolation of the beloved city was a catastrophe that even the prevailing work of His redemption was powerless to avert. “Now they are hid from thine eyes.” This is a deliverance which lies beyond the limit even of the salvation which Christ is to accomplish. “Thou knewest not the time of thy visitation.” All the opportunities afforded by the Divine forbearance to those who slew the prophets, who stoned the messengers, and who were about to kill the heir, and culminating in this day of Messiah’s unmistakable claim upon the allegiance of God’s people, had passed unheeded and unused. Now, once and for all, the things that belong to peace are hidden. Jerusalem Christ cannot save. Its destruction He cannot turn away. Therefore, He breaks forth into a passionate lament, like Rachel weeping for her children—“And when he drew nigh, he beheld the city, and wept over it.”

Jerusalem is the head and heart of the nation, the seat of the religious power in which Israel is personified. Why then must this power be blind and obstinate, angry and offended? Why should these high priests, elders, masters of the Law and guardians of the traditions, these leaders of the chosen people, fail to understand what the simple, the poor, the humble, the despised have comprehended? Why do their minds blaspheme while the minds of the people welcome with acclamations the Chosen One of God? Such thoughts overwhelmed and distracted the soul of Jesus. There is still time for them to acknowledge Him; they can still proclaim Him Messiah, and save Israel, to bestow upon it the peace of God. The unutterable anguish of Jesus is not for His own fate, to that He is resigned; it is the fate of His people and of the city which is on the point of demanding His execution; and this blindness will let loose upon Israel nameless calamities. The hierarchy, which despises the true Messiah, will be carried away by its false patriotism into every excess and every frenzy. It will endeavour in vain to control the people in their feverish impatience for deliverance. The Zealots will provoke implacable warfare, and, in grasping after empty glory and empty liberty, their fanaticism will be the unconscious instrument of the vengeance of God. Jesus knew it; the future was before His eyes; He saw Jerusalem besieged, invested, laid waste with fire and sword, her children slaughtered, and her houses, her monuments, her palaces, her Temple itself levelled with the ground.1 [Note: Father Didon, Jesus Christ, ii. 175.]

5. And yet, in spite of all, He persisted in His endeavours to reclaim the lost. He threw Himself into the work of rousing and alarming Jerusalem, as though its future might instantly be transformed. From the Mount of Olives He descended straightway to the Temple, and the last week of His life was spent in daily intercourse with its chief priests. How vain, as it then appeared, were all His words! How little availed His sternest tones to stir the slumberous pulses of His time! How unmoved (save by a bitter and personal animosity) were the leaders and teachers to whom He spoke! And when that scornful indifference on their part was exchanged at last for a distinctive enmity, with what needless prodigality, as doubtless it seemed even to some of His own disciples, He flung away His life! Flung it away? Yes, but only how soon and how triumphantly to take it again! The defeat of Golgotha meant the victory of the Resurrection. The failure of the cross was the triumph of the Crucified; and, though by living and preaching He could not conquer the indifference or awaken the apathy of Israel, by dying and rising again He did. It was the chief priests who amid the anguish of Calvary were the most scornful spectators and the most relentless foes. It was “a great company of the chief priests,” who, on the day of Pentecost, scarce fifty days after that dark and bitter Friday, “were obedient unto the faith.” And thus the tide was turned, and though Jerusalem was not rescued from the vandal hordes of Titus, Jerusalem and Judæa alike became the home and the cradle of the infant Church.

The Impenitent City

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