eir delegation.

_XVIII. THE MESSIANIC IDEA ROMANIZED._

The Romans, so far from looking with the Jews to the Tigris, looked to
the Jews themselves. Or at least they looked to that whole Syria, of
which the Jews were a section. Consequently, there is a solution of two
points:

1. The wise men of the East were delegates from the trans-Tigridian
people.

2. The great man who should arise from the East to govern the world was,
in the sense of that prophecy, _i.e._, in the terms of that prophecy
interpreted according to the sense of all who circulated and partook
in--or were parties to--the belief of that prophecy, was to come from
Syria: _i.e._, from Judea.

Now take it either way, observe the sublimity and the portentous
significance of this expectation. Every man of imaginative feeling has
been struck with that secret whisper that stirred through France in
1814-15--that a man was to come with the violets. The violets were
symbolically Napoleonic, as being the colour of his livery: it was also
his cognizance: and the time for his return was _March_, from which
commence the ever memorable Hundred days. And the sublimity lies in the
circumstances of:

1. A whisper running through Christendom: people in remotest quarters
bound together by a tie so aerial.

2. Of the dread augury enveloped in this little humble but beautiful
flower.

3. Of the awful revolution at hand: the great earthquake that was mining
and quarrying in the dark chambers beneath the thrones of Europe.

These and other circumstances throw a memorable sublimity upon this
whisper of conspiracy. But what was this to the awful whisper that
circled round the earth ([Greek: he oikoumene]) as to the being that was
coming from Judea? There was no precedent, no antagonist whisper with
which it could enter into any terms of comparison, unless there had by
possibility been heard that mysterious and ineffable sigh which Milton
ascribes to the planet when man accomplished his mysterious rebellion.
The idea of such a sigh, of a whisper circling through the planet, of
the light growing thick with the unimaginable charge, and the purple
eclipse of Death throwing a penumbra; that may, but nothing else ever
can, equal the unutterable sublimity of that buzz--that rumour, that
susurrus passing from mouth to mouth--nobody knew whence coming or
whither tending, and about a being of whom nobody could tell what he
should be--what he should resemble--what he shou