Prophet: "For from Zion shall go forth the Law, and the word of
God from Jerusalem."

To Aaron the vision came like a divine intoxication. He stamped his
feet, clapped, cried, shouted. He felt tears streaming down his cheeks
like the rivers that watered Paradise. What! This hope that had
haunted him from boyhood, wafting from the pages of the holy books,
was not then a shadowy splendor on the horizon's rim. It was a
solidity, within sight, almost within touch. He himself might hope to
sit in peace under his own fig-tree, no more the butt of the street
boys. And the vague vision, though in becoming definite it had been
transformed to earthliness, was none the less grand for that. He had
always dimly expected Messianic miracles, but in that magic afternoon
the plain words of the soldier unsealed his eyes, and suddenly he saw
clearly that just as, in Israel, every man was his own priest, needing
no mediator, so every man was his own Messiah.

And as he squeezed out of the synagogue, unconscious of the
chattering, jostling crowd, he saw himself in Zion, worshipping at the
Holy Temple, that rose spacious and splendid as the Manchester
Exchange. Yes; the Jews must return to Palestine, there must be a
great voluntary stream--great, if gradual. Slowly but surely the Jews
must win back their country; they must cease trafficking with the
heathen and return to the soil, sowing and reaping, so that the Feast
of the Ingathering might become a reality instead of a prayer-service.
Then should the atonement of Israel be accomplished, and the morning
stars sing together as at the first day.

As he walked home along the squalid steeps of Fernie Street and
Verdon Street, and gazed in at the uncurtained windows of the
one-story houses, a new sense of their sordidness, as contrasted with
that bright vision, was borne in upon him. Instead of large families
in one ragged room, encumbered with steamy washing, he saw great farms
and broad acres; and all that beauty of the face of earth, to which he
had been half blind, began to appeal to him now that it was mixed up
with religion. In this wise did Aaron become a politician and a
modern.

Passing through the poulterer's on his way to his room--the poulterer
and he divided the house between them, renting a room each--he paused
to talk with the group of women who were plucking the fowls, and told
them glad tidings of great fowl-rearing farms in Palestine. He sat
down on the bed, which occupi