And now glance your eye along these roads that come winding over the hills by which Jerusalem is encircled. See! The whole country seems awakened into an intensity of life and animation. _It is the Passover._ Far off as the eye can reach, the great highways and the narrow paths are covered with masses of living beings, thousands upon thousands pouring onwards, and still succeeded by other thousands, till it seems as if the whole habitable globe was sending its inhabitants and its tribute to this sacred city. And it does. Here are “Parthians and Medes, and Elamites, and the dwellers in Mesopotamia, and in Judea, and Cappadocia, in Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, in Egypt and in the parts of Lybia about Greece, and strangers of Rome, and Cretes, and Arabians,” in their various costumes, and speaking their various tongues. The number that assembles here on this occasion is about three millions. They come, some purely from religious feeling, some also for commerce; for the occasion is seized by dwellers in far distant countries for the interchange of commodities. As they approach the city, however, a common feeling takes possession of all of them, delight, reverence, awe, wonder, admiration. As they gain the summits of the distant hills, and catch a view of the Temple, they burst into shouts of joy, they prostrate themselves upon the ground, they break out into hymns of praise. The air seems burdened by the noises that unceasingly ascend; one while they are like the roar of the ocean; at another, they rise, and sink, and swell upward again into lofty strains of wonder and thanksgiving; the earth trembles under the moving to and fro of these countless multitudes. See--still they come, thousands and yet still countless thousands pressing onward towards the city. The eye is wearied with beholding them; the senses are pained and overwhelmed. And now the sounds abate and sink into a deep but continuous murmur. They are preparing for the Paschal sacrifice. The multitudes are divided into companies of from ten to twenty, and each company, by a deputy appointed for that purpose, is to offer in the courts of the temple a lamb without blemish or spot; the blood is to be sprinkled at the foot of the great altar, and the fat is to be cast upon it for a burnt offering. There will be 250,000 of these sacrifices. See! the courts of the Temple, the flat roofs of the colonnades, are covered by the dense throngs; the walls and towers of the city, the terraces of the lofty dwellings of Jerusalem, are crowded by the multitudes; and the ascending plains around, and the slopes of the Mount of Olives, are all animated; it is an ocean of living beings.