The Jewish Temple was one of the grandest architectural works that the genius of the ancients produced. The successive enclosures raised one above the other, and crowned by the gigantic pylons of the sanctuary, built of white marble, were the result of an inspiration of genius that has never been realised except in this instance, and all antiquity had but one voice to proclaim its imposing majesty. “When the rays of the rising sun struck upon the metal plates which covered the doors and roof of the sanctuary, when they illuminated the gilding on the façade, and the gigantic golden vine which spread its tendrils over the white marble of the pronaos, the spectator’s eyes were dazzled, and he was forced to turn them away, and the stranger who perceived the temple in the distance thought he saw a mountain covered with glittering snow.”[85] Such was the temple of the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, restored by Herod, in which many of the scenes of the Gospels took place, and which was destined for so dramatic and mournful a fate. At once a public market, a house of prayer, and a fortress, it was condemned to be the tomb of Jewish nationality. Besieged and taken by the Romans, after a resistance unique in the annals of antiquity for its heroic desperation, it succumbed before the violence of Titus, and was profaned by Roman legionaries with torches and pickaxes in their hands. The echo of its fall, solemnly marked in the pages of human destiny, still resounds among us, for it was the overthrow of antiquity, and the irreparable destruction of the old civilisation of the East. § II. THE DECORATION AND FURNITURE OF THE TEMPLE. The house of the Eternal was adorned with unheard-of splendour; precious woods, gold, silver, ivory and gems--nothing was spared by this people, jealous for the honour of their God; the accessories also of the worship of Jehovah, sacred vessels, knives, basins and utensils of every kind were works of art in which the chiseller and the metal-founder had each emulated the other’s skill. But the artists who decorated the former temple, let us not forget it, were Phœnicians. Now, the Phœnicians always confined themselves to the imitation of Egypt and Assyria; their technique has a hybrid character, which is, like Syria itself from a geographical point of view, a sort of compromise between Asia and Egypt. On these principles of criticism alone can we attempt to restore the decoration and furniture of Solomon’s temple.