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Updated: May 1, 2025
Again, "We must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ." This is the Bema in the air. Now, if they are all to appear before that seat in the air on the day of Christ they must all have been taken up. When He comes at the end of the tribulation He comes with all His Saints.
After Mutimer, Alfred Waltham had probably more genuine satisfaction in the ceremony than any one else present. Mr. Westlake he was not quite satisfied with; there was a mildness and restraint about the style of the address which to Alfred's taste smacked of feebleness; he was for Cambyses' vein. Still it rejoiced him to hear the noble truths of democracy delivered as it were from the bema.
To convince the Greeks that their orthodox empire was extinct, Mahomet ordered a mollah to ascend the bema and address a sermon to the Mussulmans, announcing that St. Sophia was now a mosque set apart for the prayers of the true believers.
The latter seems, more than any one else, to have been the cause of the corruption of the democracy by his wild undertakings; and he was the first to use unseemly shouting and coarse abuse on the Bema, and to harangue the people with his cloak girt up short about him, whereas all his predecessors had spoken decently and in order.
Then a voice close to the Bema rang out loudly:— “And is this all the message, Callias?” “The voice of Glaucon the Fortunate,” cried many, finding relief in words. “He is a friend to the ambassador. There is a further prophecy.” The envoy, who had made his theatrical pause too long, continued:— “Such, men of Athens, was the answer; and we went forth in dire tribulation.
Under the open azure, at the focus of the semicircle, with clear view before of the city, and to right of the red cliffs of the Acropolis, rose a low platform hewn in the rock,—the “Bema,” the orator’s pulpit. A few chairs for the magistrates and a small altar were its sole furnishings.
Men sat in helpless silence, while many a soul, as the gaze wandered up to the temple-crowned Acropolis, asked once, yes twice, “Is not the yoke of Persia preferable to that?” Then after the silence broke the clamour of voices. “The other seers! Do all agree with Xenagoras? Stand forth! stand forth!” Hegias, the “King Archon,” chief of the state religion, took the Bema.
We left the Parthenon to keep its watch over old Athens, as it had kept it for twenty-three hundred years, and went and stood outside the walls of the citadel. In the distance was the ancient, but still almost perfect Temple of Theseus, and close by, looking to the west, was the Bema, from whence Demosthenes thundered his philippics and fired the wavering patriotism of his countrymen.
A life do I say? a hecatomb of lives! How many wars would have been prevented, how many thrones would be standing, dynasties flourishing, commonwealths brawling round a bema, or fitting out galleys for corn and cotton, if an inch or two more of apology had been added to the proffered ell!
If such a man fails to obtain any portion of his just weight, it is through institutions or usages which keep him out of sight. In the old democracies there were no means of keeping out of sight any able man: the bema was open to him; he needed nobody's consent to become a public adviser.
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