rescript in our hands!

If the 'years' in verses 1 and 8 are calculated from the same
beginning, some seven months were spent in preparation, and then the
foundation was laid. Two things are noted--the humble attempt at
making some kind of a display on the occasion, and the conflict of
feeling in the onlookers. They had managed to get some copies of the
prescribed vestments; and the narrator emphasises the fact that the
priests were 'in their apparel,' and that the Levites had cymbals, so
that some approach to the pomp of Solomon's dedication was possible.
They did their best to adhere to the ancient prescriptions, and it was
no mere narrow love of ritual that influenced them. However we may
breathe a freer air of worship, we cannot but sympathise with that
earnest attempt to do everything 'according to the order of David king
of Israel.' Not only punctiliousness as to ritual, but the magnetism
of glorious memories, prescribed the reproduction of that past. Rites
long proscribed become very sacred, and the downtrodden successors of
mighty men will cling with firm grasp to what the greater fathers did.

The ancient strain which still rings from Christian lips, and bids
fair to be as eternal as the mercies which it hymns, rose with strange
pathos from the lips of the crowd on the desolate Temple mountain,
ringed about by the waste solitudes of the city: 'For He is good, for
His mercy endureth for ever toward Israel.' It needed some faith to
sing that song then, even with the glow of return upon them. What of
all the weary years? What of the empty homesteads, and the surrounding
enemies, and the brethren still in Babylon? No doubt some at least of
the rejoicing multitude had learned what the captivity was meant to
teach, and had come to bless God, both for the long years of exile,
which had burned away much dross, and for the incomplete work of