“What!” interrupted I, “must we first mingle in the cabals of Jerusalem and rouse the frigid debaters of the Sanhedrin into action? Are we first to conciliate the irreconcilable, to soften the furious, to purify the corrupt? If the Romans are to be our tyrants till we can teach patriotism to faction, we may as well build the dungeon at once, for to the dungeon we are consigned for the longest life among us. Death or glory for me. There is no alternative between, not merely the half slavery that we now live in, and independence, but between the most condign suffering and the most illustrious security. If the people would rise through the pressure of public injury, they must have risen long since; if from private violence, what town, what district, what family has not its claim of deadly retribution? Yet here the people stand, after a hundred years of those continued stimulants to resistance, as unresisting as in the day when Pompey marched over the threshold of the Temple. I know your generous friendship, Eleazar, and fear that your anxiety to save me from the chances of the struggle may bias your better judgment. But here I pledge myself, by all that constitutes the honor of man, to strike at all risks a blow upon the Roman crest that shall echo through the land. What! commit our holy cause in the nursing of those pampered hypocrites whose utter baseness of heart you know still more deeply than I do? Linger till those pestilent profligates raise their price with Florus by betraying a design that will be the glory of every man who draws a sword in it? Vainly, madly ask a brood that, like the serpent, engender and fatten among the ruins of their country to discard their venom, to cast their fangs, to feel for human feelings? As well ask the serpent itself to rise from the original curse. It is the irrevocable nature of faction to be base until it can be mischievous; to lick the dust until it can sting; to creep on its belly until it can twist its folds around the victim. No! let the old pensionaries, the bloated hangers-on in the train of every governor, the open sellers of their country for filthy lucre, betray me when I leave it in their power. To the field, I say—once and for all, to the field.” [Sidenote: Salathiel’s Ardor] My mind, at no period patient of contradiction, was fevered by the perplexity of the time. I was about to leave the chamber when Constantius gravely stopped me. “My father,” said he, with a voice calmer than his countenance, “you have hurt our noble kinsman’s feelings. It is not in an hour when our unanimity may fail that we should suffer dissensions between those whose hearts are alike embarked in this great cause. Let me mediate between you.” [Sidenote: The Support of the People] He led Eleazar back from the casement to which he had withdrawn to cool his blood, burning with the offense of my language.