mitate, in all but vice and effeminacy, the very Medes whom
he had conquered. And of this there is no doubt--that his sons and their
empire ran rapidly through that same vicious circle of corruption to
which all despotisms are doomed, and became within 250 years, even as the
Medes, the Chaldeans, the Lydians, whom they had conquered, children no
longer of Ahura Mazda, but of Ahriman, of darkness and not of light, to
be conquered by Alexander and his Greeks even more rapidly and more
shamefully than they had conquered the East.

This is the short epic of the Persian Empire, ending, alas! as all human
epics are wont to end, sadly, if not shamefully.

But let me ask you, Did I say too much, when I said, that to these
Persians we owe that we are here to-night?

I do not say that without them we should not have been here. God, I
presume, when He is minded to do anything, has more than one way of doing
it.

But that we are now the last link in a chain of causes and effects which
reaches as far back as the emigration of the Persians southward from the
plateau of Pamir, we cannot doubt.

For see. By the fall of Babylon and its empire the Jews were freed from
their captivity--large numbers of them at least--and sent home to their
own Jerusalem. What motives prompted Cyrus, and Darius after him, to do
that deed?

Those who like to impute the lowest motives may say, if they will, that
Daniel and the later Isaiah found it politic to worship the rising sun,
and flatter the Persian conquerors: and that Cyrus and Darius in turn
were glad to see Jerusalem rebuilt, as an impregnable frontier fortress
between them and Egypt. Be it so; I, who wish to talk of things noble,
pure, lovely, and of good report, would rather point you once more to the
magnificent poetry of the later Isaiah which commences at the 40th
chapter of the Book of Isaiah, and say--There, upon the very face of the
document, stands written the fact that the sympathy between the faithful
Persian and the faithful Jew--the two puritans of the Old World, the two
haters of lies, idolatries, superstitions, was actually as intense as it
ought to have been, as it must have been.

Be that as it may, the return of the Jews to Jerusalem preserved for us
the Old Testament, while it restored to them a national centre, a sacred
city, like that of Delphi to the Greeks, Rome to the Romans, Mecca to the
Muslim, loyalty to which prevented their being utterly absorbed by the
mo