them in their camps. I know them."

"Ah!" said Simonides. "Thou shalt be a master of legions for the
King, with millions to choose from."

"Millions!" cried Ben-Hur.

Simonides sat a moment thinking.

"The question of power should not trouble you," he next said.

Ben-Hur looked at him inquiringly.

"You were seeing the lowly King in the act of coming to his own,"
Simonides answered--"seeing him on the right hand, as it were,
and on the left the brassy legions of Caesar, and you were asking,
What can he do?"

"It was my very thought."

"O my master!" Simonides continued. "You do not know how strong
our Israel is. You think of him as a sorrowful old man weeping
by the rivers of Babylon. But go up to Jerusalem next Passover,
and stand on the Xystus or in the Street of Barter, and see him
as he is. The promise of the Lord to father Jacob coming out
of Padan-Aram was a law under which our people have not ceased
multiplying--not even in captivity; they grew under foot of the
Egyptian; the clench of the Roman has been but wholesome nurture
to them; now they are indeed 'a nation and a company of nations.'
Nor that only, my master; in fact, to measure the strength of
Israel--which is, in fact, measuring what the King can do--you
shall not bide solely by the rule of natural increase, but add
thereto the other--I mean the spread of the faith, which will carry
you to the far and near of the whole known earth. Further, the habit
is, I know, to think and speak of Jerusalem as Israel, which may
be likened to our finding an embroidered shred, and holding it
up as a magisterial robe of Caesar's. Jerusalem is but a stone
of the Temple, or the heart in the body. Turn from beholding
the legions, strong though they be, and count the hosts of the
faithful waiting the old alarm, 'To your tents, O Israel!'--count
the many in Persia, children of those who chose not to return with
the returning; count the brethren who swarm the marts of Egypt
and Farther Africa; count the Hebrew colonists eking profit in
the West--in Lodinum and the trade-courts of Spain; count the
pure of blood and the proselytes in Greece and in the isles of
the sea, and over in Pontus, and here in Antioch, and, for that
matter, those of that city lying accursed in the shadow of the
unclean walls of Rome herself; count the worshippers of the Lord
dwelling in tents along the deserts next us, as well as in the
deserts beyond the Nile: and in the regions across the Ca