to listen. At the mention of the Messiah the dream of
Israel had returned, and with it the pageants of its faith unrolled.

Behind the confines of history, in the naked desert he saw a bedouin,
austere and grandiose, preparing the tenets of a nation's creed; in the
remoter past a shadow in which there was lightning, then the splendor of
that first dawn where the future opened like a book, and in the grammar of
the Eternal the promise of an age of gold.

Through the echo of succeeding generations came the rumor of that initial
impulse which drew the world in its flight. The bedouin had put the desert
behind him, and stared at another. Where the sand had been was the sea. As
he passed, the land leapt into life. There were tents and passions, clans
not men, an aggregate of forces in which the unit disappeared. For
chieftain there was Might; and above, the subjects of impersonal verbs,
the Elohim from whom the thunder came, the rain, light and darkness, death
and birth, dream too, and nightmare as well. The clans migrated. Goshen
called. In its heart Chaldaea spoke. The Elohim vanished, and there was El,
the one great god, and Isra-el, the great god's elect. From heights that
lost themselves in immensity the ineffable name, incommunicable and never
to be pronounced, was seared by forked flames on a tablet of stone. A
nation learned that El was Jehovah, that they were in his charge, that he
was omnipotent, and that the world was theirs.

They had a law, a covenant, a future, and a god; and as they passed into
the lands of the well-beloved, leaving tombs and altars to mark their
passage, they had battle-cries that frightened and hymns that exalted the
heart. Above were the jealous eyes of Jehovah, and beyond was the
resplendent to-morrow. They ravaged the land like hailstones. They had the
whirlwind for ally; the moon was their servant; and to aid them the sun
stood still. The terror of Sinai gleamed from their breastplates; men
could not see their faces and live. They encroached and conquered. They
had a home, they made a capitol, and there on a rock-bound hill Antipas
saw David founding a line of kings, and Solomon the city of god.

It was in their loins the Messiah was; in them the apex of a nation's
prosperity; in them glory at its apogee. And across that tableau of might,
of splendor, and of submission for one second flitted the silhouette of
that dainty princess of Utopia, the Queen of Sheba, bringing riddles,
romanc