=1. One of History’s Miracles.=――If, shivering in the winter, we stand in a frozen field, full of dry brown trees, all stumps and twigs and branches, looking all alike and all lifeless, we can hardly believe that, six months hence, that bare field will be a blooming orchard, with the sunlight flickering down on it through a canopy of pink and white and green. It seems a miracle, and in a sense it is one. Like nature, history, too, has her miracles, and both sorts of marvels are easy to understand when we remember that ‘kings of the earth and all people,’ like ‘snow and hail and stormy wind’ עשָֹׁה דְבָרוֹ, ‘fulfil His word.’ Hadrian left Judea a desert, and the life, as he thought, crushed out of Judaism. He was hardly dead――he died on the first day of the year 138――when the seemingly sapless twigs began tremblingly to put out their little tender shoots. What one may call the oak of the forest, the glorious Temple, was hopelessly shattered by the storm, but, to keep up the simile, little cuttings from it were planted, and watered with tears, and they took root and grew. Small meeting-houses for prayer became general throughout the country. And these meeting-houses served, too, a double purpose, showing the intimate practical relation which exists between charity and religion. ‘He prayeth well who loveth well.’ These little buildings were used also as temporary homes for poor strangers, who were therein provided with free board and lodging. The recital of the קִדּוּשׁ in our synagogues on the eves of Sabbaths and holy days, and of the הַבְדָּלָה at the going out of Sabbaths and holy days, is a remnant of this institution. And in these ancient, humble synagogues, as in our grander modern ones, the presence of ten men (_minyan_) made a sufficient beginning of a congregation. One after another, too, the schools of Palestine reopened, and by the year 175 the Sanhedrin was in active work, with Simon, the sixth president in direct line from Hillel, at its head.