It was a sublime and thrilling spectacle this, of two nations facing each other in arms--nay, an act in a Divine drama, the true significance of which was understood by none present, except by Crispus and the very few that were of like faith with him. The struggle was more than it appeared upon the surface; it was not merely the subjugation of a revolted city, but a battle betwixt two religions; the religions, not, as might be thought, Judaism and Paganism, but Judaism and Christianity. The legions of Titus, though they knew it not, were truly soldiers of the Cross, continuing the work to which they had been divinely pre-ordained--_the work of the Church!_ For the Romans, by uniting the nations of the civilized world under one government, by establishing a universal peace--the “_Romana pax_” that was the just boast of their orators; by clearing the sea of corsairs, and the land from banditti; by linking all parts of their empire with a series of splendid roads; by diffusing among their provinces a knowledge of the Greek language; had created conditions such as had never before existed in the world’s history: conditions that were absolutely essential, if the Church were to make quick progress; conditions that enabled the evangelist, knowing one language only, to travel in safety and preach the faith from the banks of the Euphrates to the Pillars of Hercules. The Roman legionaries, paradoxical as it may sound, were the coadjutors of the apostles. They were now about to put the final touches to their work by demolishing the temple, whose further existence was an obstacle to the free development of Christianity; and by acting as the sword of the Lord against those who had cried, “His blood be on us and on our children.” A.D. 70 was the necessary sequel of A.D. 29; and he who refuses to see a Divine Judgment in the fall of Jerusalem has yet to learn the elements of history. Ignorant of the high mission assigned to him, Titus, distinguished by a purple mantle and by the splendor of his gilded arms, had taken up his station upon the central agger. Beside him, and clothed in a magnificent white robe, gold-embroidered, stood Theomantes, the priest of Jupiter Cæsarius, presiding at an altar of unhewn stones, upon which there flamed a sacrificial ox. Titus and the Romans in the immediate vicinity of this altar were standing bareheaded in reverential attitude. The Zealots upon the wall, keenly attentive to this religious ceremony, noticed that Theomantes, as he stood with his arms raised in prayer to some deity, kept his eyes fixed throughout upon their holy temple. A sudden suspicion fell upon them. They strained their ears in the hope of catching his utterance, though distance might well forbid that hope. Fortune favored them, however. A breeze blowing from the north at that moment wafted to their ears the word--JEHOVAH!--a word so sacred that it was seldom uttered even by the Jews themselves, and never in the presence of a Gentile.