and twenty-seven million pounds of silver,--an amount not easy to
estimate. But the plates of gold which overlaid the building, and the
cherubim or symbolical winged figures, the precious woods, the rich
hangings and curtains of crimson and purple, the brazen altars, the
lamps, the sacred vessels of solid gold and silver, the elaborate
carvings and castings, the rare gems,--these all together must have
required a greater expenditure than is seen in the most famous temples
of Greece or Asia Minor, whose value and beauty chiefly consisted in
their exquisite proportions and their marble pillars and figures of men
or animals. But no representation of man, no statue to the Deity, was
seen in the Temple of Solomon; no idol or sacred animal profaned it.
There was no symbol to indicate even the presence of Jehovah, whose
dwelling-place was in the heavens, and whom the heaven of heavens could
not contain. There were rites and sacrifices, but these were offered to
an unseen divinity, whose presence was everywhere, and who alone reigned
as King of Kings and Lord of Lords, forever and forever. The Temple,
however, with its courts and porticos, its vast foundations of stones
squared in distant quarries, and the immense treasures everywhere
displayed, impressed both the senses and the imagination of a people
never distinguished for art or science. And not only so, but Fergusson
says: "The whole Mohammedan world look to it as the foundation of all
architectural knowledge, and the Jews still recall its glories, and sigh
over their loss with a constant tenacity unmatched by that of any other
people to any other building of the ancient world." Whether or not we
are able to explain the architecture of the Temple, or are in error
respecting its size, or the amount of gold and silver expended, or the
number of men employed, we know that it was the pride and glory of that
age, and was large enough, with its enclosures, to contain a
representation of five millions of people, the heads of all the families
and tribes of the nation, such as were collected together at its