captains, under the eye of their
great commander. With rapid precision the columns were formed; but
before they moved on to the attack, Maccabeus, in brief but earnest
supplication, besought the Divine blessing on their arms.

[1] The student of history need not be reminded that the fall of
Babylon through the stratagem of Zopyrus was quite distinct from and
subsequent to its conquest by Cyrus. (See Rollins's "Ancient History.")

CHAPTER XXXV.

THE BATTLE-PRAYER.

Lycidas was a native of the very land of eloquence; he had been, as it
were, cradled amidst "thoughts that breathe, and words that burn." He
had studied the philippics of Demosthenes, and felt the spirit of the
dead orator living in them still. Lycidas had listened to the
eloquence of the most gifted speakers of his own time, expressing in
the magnificent language of Greece thoughts the most poetic. He had
experienced the power possessed by the orator on the rostrum, the
tragedian on the stage, the poet in the arena, to stir the passions,
subdue by pathos, or excite by vehement action. But never had the
Athenian listened to any oration which had so stirred his own soul, as
the simple prayer of Judas Maccabeus before the battle of Bethsura.
There was no eloquence in it, save the unstudied eloquence of the
heart; the Hebrew but uttered aloud in the hearing of his men the
thoughts which had made his own spirit as firm in the hour of danger as
was the steel which covered his breast.

There was much in the scene and in the congregation to add to the
effect of the act of worship on the mind of Lycidas. He beheld
adoration paid to no image formed by man's art, no fabled deity,
capricious as the minds of those in whose imaginations alone he had
existence, but to the holy, the high and lofty One who inhabiteth
eternity, "whose robe is the light, and whose canopy space." And it
was in no building raised by mortal hands that Maccabeus bent his knee
to the Lord of Hosts. He knelt on the soil of the glorious land which
God had given to his fathers--the one spot chosen out from the expanse
of the whole mighty globe to be the scene of events which would
influence through eternity the destinies of the world! On the verge of
the southern horizon lay Hebron, where had dwelt the father of the
faithful, where the ground had been trodden by angels' feet, and the
feet of the Lord of angels, with whom Abraham had pleaded for Sodom.
It was that Hebron where