[Sidenote: Salathiel Rescues Constantius] A sudden flash showed me that we had reached the foot of the rampart. The besieged, carried away by their native impetuosity, poured down in crowds. Their leader, cheering them on, was struck by a lance and fell. The sight rallied the Romans. I felt that now or never was the moment for my escape. I rushed in front, and called aloud my name. At the voice the wounded leader uttered a cry which I well knew. I caught him from the ground. A gigantic centurion darted forward and grasped my robe. Embarrassed with my burden, I was on the point of being dragged back; the centurion’s sword glittered over my head. With my only weapon, a stone, I struck him a furious blow on the forehead. The sword fell from his grasp; I seized it, and keeping the rest at bay, and in the midst of shouts from my countrymen, leaped the trench, with the nobler trophy in my arms—I had rescued Constantius! Jerusalem was now verging on the last horrors. I could scarcely find my way through her ruins. The noble buildings were destroyed by conflagration and the assaults of the various factions. The monuments of our kings and tribes were lying in mutilation at my feet. Every man of former eminence was gone. Massacre and exile had been the masters of the higher ranks; and even the accidental distinctions into which the humbler were thrown by the few past years, involved a fearful purchase of public hazard. Like men in an earthquake, the elevation of each was only a sign to him of the working of an irresistible principle of ruin. But the most formidable characteristic was the change wrought in the popular mind. A single revolution may be a source of public good, but a succession of great political changes is always fatal, alike to public and private virtue. The sense of honor dies in the fierce pressures of personal struggle. Humanity dies in the sight of hourly violences. Conscience dies in the conflict where personal safety is so often endangered that its preservation at length usurps the mind. Religion dies where the religious man is so often the victim of the unprincipled. Violence and vice are soon found to be the natural instruments of triumph in a war of the passions; and the more relentless atrocity carries the day, until selfishness—the mother of treachery, rapine, and carnage—is the paramount principle. Then the nation perishes, or is sent forth in madness and misery, an object of terror and infection, to propagate evil through the world. [Sidenote: The Wrecks of Pillage]