had known personally most of the great men of that world--its poets,
lawmakers, warriors, ascetics, kings--even the Prophet. And now they
came one by one, as one by one they had come in their several days, and
kissed the insensate thing; and between the coming and going time was
scarcely perceptible. The mind has the faculty of compressing, by one
mighty effort, the incidents of a life, even of centuries, into a
flash-like reenactment.

As all the way from the first view of the sanctuary to arrival at the
gate, and thence to this point, the Jew had promptly followed his guide,
especially in recitation of the prescribed prayers, he was about to do
so now; already his hands were raised.

"Great God! O my God! I believe in Thee--I Believe in thy Book--I
believe in thy Word--I believe in thy Promise," the zealous prompter
said, and waited.

For the first time the votary was slow to respond. How could he, at such
a juncture, refuse a thought to the Innumerables whose ghosts had been
rendered up in vain struggles to obey the law which required them to
come and make proof of faith before this Stone! The Innumerables, lost
at sea, lost in the desert--lost body and soul, as in their dying they
themselves had imagined! Symbolism! An invention of men--a necessity of
necromancers! God had his ministers and priests, the living media of his
will, but of symbols--nothing!

"Great God! O my God!" the guide began again. A paroxysm of disgust
seized the votary. The Phariseeism in which he was born and bred, and
which he could no more outlive than he could outlive his body asserted
itself.