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Let the heathen be wakened, and come up to the valley of Jehoshaphat: for there will I sit to judge all the heathen round about. Put ye in the sickle, for the harvest is ripe: come, get you down; for the press is full, the fats overflow; for their wickedness is great. Multitudes, multitudes in the valley of decision: for the day of the LORD is near in the valley of decision.
May we not, therefore, say, that neither the true Hebraism of this good man, willing to spend and be spent for these sunken multitudes, nor what I may call the spurious Hebraism of our free-trading Liberal friends, mechanically worshipping their fetish of the production of wealth and of the increase of manufactures and population, and looking neither to the right nor left so long as this increase goes on, avail us much here; and that here, again, what we want is Hellenism, the letting our consciousness play freely and simply upon the facts before us, and listening to what it tells us of the intelligible law of things as concerns them?
The loud and unanimous voice of a great nation has mighty authority over weak minds; and even later historians are so swayed by the concurring judgment of such multitudes, that some of them have esteemed themselves sufficiently moderate, when they affirmed, that many circumstances of the plot were true, though some were added, and others much magnified.
Nor was the idea of his great mind altogether a delusion. The new continent was in future ages to be used as the highway from Europe to the Orient; China, Japan, India, vast regions filled with innumerable multitudes of human beings, had, so far, scarcely been touched, could scarcely be touched, by Catholicism coming from Europe.
In Spain and Portugal the Inquisition alone took cognizance of the crime. It is impossible to search the records of those dark, but now happily nonexisting tribunals; but the mind recoils with affright even to form a guess of the multitudes who perished. The mode of trial in the other countries is more easily ascertained.
The waves come running up to shore sending silver reflections glinting along the beach, always blending beauty and usefulness; the air about the linden trees is melodious with multitudes of murmuring toilers preparing for a winter's need; the purple fox-glove, that good Samaritan among the flowers, in modest beauty holds aloft its purple bells all unmindful of the cheer it brings to lonely hearts or the hope it bears to thousands of sufferers.
The lives of multitudes of so-called Christians are divided between strained energy in their business or trade or profession and self-regarding repose. No doubt competition is fierce, and, no doubt, a Christian man is bound, 'whatsoever his hand finds to do, to do it with his might, and, no doubt, rest is as much a duty as work.
But let us take these passages at their nakedest. Let us ignore as completely as Jesus did that the legal penalty of "eye for eye" had been commuted into a money penalty by the great majority of early Pharisaic lawyers. Is not that very maxim to-day the clamoured policy of Christian multitudes? "Destroy them from under the heavens of the Lord!"
But fail not, above all, to bring the one who comprehends the whole; whose name is to be found in every school-boy book, written in living letters words that breathe; to whom the hearts of multitudes were as one most simple instrument, which he could tune and tone unto his pleasure.
18 And it came to pass, as he was praying apart, the disciples were with him: and he asked them, saying, Who do the multitudes say that I am? 19 And they answering said, John the Baptist; but others say, Elijah; and others, that one of the old prophets is risen again. 20 And he said unto them, But who say ye that I am?
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