The strangest thing of all is that these madmen were not wholly wrong. The fanatics of Jerusalem, who affirmed that Jerusalem was eternal even while it was burning, were nearer the truth than those who regarded them as mere assassins. They deceived themselves upon the military question, but not upon the distant religious result. These troubled days point out, in fact, the moment when Jerusalem became the spiritual capital of the world. The Apocalypse, a burning expression of the love which she inspired, has taken its place among the religious writings of humanity, and has there consecrated the image of the beloved city. Ah, how important it is never to predict the future of a saint or a villain, a fool or a sage! Jerusalem, a city of common people, would have pursued indefinitely its uninteresting history. It is because it had the incomparable honor of being the cradle of Christianity, that it was the victim of the Johns of Giscala, of the Bar-Gioras,--in appearance the scourges of their country, in reality the instruments of its apotheosis. These zealots, whom Josephus treats as brigands and assassins, were politicians of the highest order, but unskilful soldiers: still they lost heroically a country which could not be saved. They lost a material city: they established the spiritual reign of Jerusalem, sitting in her desolation far more glorious than she was in the days of Herod and of Solomon. What did these conservatives, these Sadducees, really desire? They wished something mean,--the continuation of a city of priests like Emesa, Tyane, Comane. Assuredly they did not deceive themselves when they declared that the surging enthusiasm was the ruin of the nation. Revolution and Messianism destroyed the national existence of the Jewish people; but revolution and Messianism were the true vocation of this people,--that by which they contributed to the universal civilization. II. The victory of Rome was complete. A captain of our race, of our blood, a man like us, at the head of legions in whose roll, if we could read it, we should meet many of our ancestors, had come to crush the fortress of Semitism, to inflict upon the revealed, accepted law the greatest injury which it had received. It was the triumph of Roman right, or rather rational right, a creation utterly philosophical, presupposing no revelation, above the Jewish Thora, the fruit of a revelation. This right, whose roots were partly Greek, but in which the practical genius of the Latins made so fine a part, was the excellent gift which Rome brought to the vanquished in return for their independence. Each victory for Rome was a victory for right. Rome bore into the world a better principle in several respects than that of the Jews: I mean the profane state, reposing on a purely civil conception of society.