the organized hierarchical system, though acting from this time, took its rise not from any sacerdotal arrangement, but from that union of King and Priest in. the person of Solomon, which had been already foreshadowed in David, and which, in a moral and spiritual sense, was to be realized in the future Messiah.

Such was the Temple of Solomon. Its peculiarities, as a place of worship, are best understood by a succession of contrasts.

with the

It differed from the former sanctuary of the Tabernacle in durability and in splendor. It was a Contrast house instead of a tent; a palace instead of a Tabernacle. hovel. It also became the centre of a ceremonial system, which before had existed but very imperfectly. The collegiate buildings for the priests, their weekly courses, their guard by night, their cleaning of the altar, the arrangements for the slaughter of the victims, all date more or less from this time.

Herod's

On the other hand, it differed from the later Temple of Herod, partly by its more primitive charac- With ter, partly by its greater freedom. The wooden Temple. covering must have retained something of the almost savage appearance of the ancient sanctuary; its dimensions, too, were for the most part the mere double of those of the Tabernacle; whereas the dimensions of the second Temple, at least in its courts and altar, extended beyond all proportion to the original model. But in some important respects there was a wider adoption of foreign ideas in Solomon's Temple than was ever the case before or after. The single candelabrum, which was restored by imitation in the second Temple, was, as we have seen, superseded by ten candlesticks in the first. The colossal cherubic figures in the Holy of - Joma and Tamid. Reland, Loc. Sacr. 180.

1 As described in Mishna

3

Holies, as well as the figures of lions and oxen, which appeared for the first time in the outer court of the first. Temple, are condemned by Josephus1 as contrary to the Second Commandment, and, apparently, had no place in Herod's Temple. The adoption of Tyrian and Egyptian architecture in the Temple of Solomon, was only in part retained by the second. The likeness of the ancient sacred grove which adorned the first was entirely removed in the second.2 Steps to the altar, which in the Tabernacle and in the second Temple were forbidden in accordance with the Levitical law, were allowed by Solomon. The barriers which divided the Gentile worshippers from the outer court, and the women from the inner court, in the second Temple, had no existence in the first. The ancient trophies of war, the shields of David, had disappeared from the porch, and in their place was hung the colossal cluster of golden grapes, which represented the new idea of Israel under the figure of the vine.

with Pagan

Still more forcibly is the peculiarity of the Religion Contrast which the Temple represented brought out by Temples. its contrasts both with Pagan shrines and Christian churches. Of the two main differences from Pagan Temples, the first was more fully brought out in the sanctuary of Herod than in that of Solomon, but still was conspicuous in both; namely, the absence of any statue or sacred animal to represent the indwelling Divinity. With the exception of the cherubs, which were merely ornamental and symbolical, the awestruck description of Pompey when he entered the Holy of Holies was already true,- Vacuam sedem, inania arcana."

1 Ant. viii. 7, § 5.

2 Hecatæus, in Josephus, c. Apion,

3 Exod. xx. 26.

4 Tacitus, Hist. v. 9.

The negative theology, so to speak, of the Jewish system, there reached its highest pitch. There was nothing in the innermost sanctuary and yet that nothing was everything. The second distinction was the Unity of the Temple: A well-known modern writer has spoken of "the Temples" of Judea. It would have been difficult for a single letter to have betrayed so much ignorance of a whole religious system. And this too was of supreme importance in its effects on the nation. Not only did the fixedness of the building act as a check on the local superstition which had previously attached to the Ark and to the Tabernacle, moved about as they were like charms from one scene of danger to another, to protect the hosts or the Kings of Israel; but the centralization of the religious feeling and life of the nation on a single spot, acted as a protest against the tendency to isolated and multiplied forms of worship, to which, as we see from the subsequent history, the Israelites, like all other nations, were so prone. And the Temple became in consequence a symbol of the unity of religious and national life, such as no other ancient sanctuary could exhibit. The great size of the courts compared with the building itself; the chambers and guards; the union on one spot of Forum, Fortress, University, Sanctuary, was peculiar to the Temple of Jerusalem. This was the full meaning of the oracle, here probably first delivered, and the key-note of much of the subsequent history. "In this house, and in Jerusalem, will I put my name for ever."1

K

These were the points of difference between the Temple and all Pagan sanctuaries. In most other With

Christian

outward respects, as it resembled them, so it dif- Churches. fered from all Christian churches, though more nearly

12 Kings xxi. 4, 7; compare 1 Kings viii. 29; ix. 3; xi. 36.

resembling those of Eastern, than of Western Christendom. In the outer courts, the widest difference was caused by the presence of the sacrificial system in the Jewish, and its absence in the Christian worship. Every one knows the peaceful aspect of the precincts of a Christian cathedral. It needs a strong stretch of imagination to conceive the arrangements for sacrifice, which filled the Temple courts with sheep, and oxen, and goats, with blazing furnaces, with pools of blood, with masses of skins and offal, with columns of steam and smoke. And again, the contrast of the darkness and smallness of the edifice of the actual Temple with the light and the size of Christian churches, arose, as a matter of course, from the circumstance that the worship of the Jew was carried on round the altar in the outer court; whereas the worship of the Christian is carried on round the Holy Table within the inner chancel. The Jewish Temple would have been contained five times over within one of our great cathedrals. Christian congregations of men, women, and children penetrate, even in Eastern churches, into the interior of the building, where in the Jewish sanctuary none but the priests could enter; in all Western churches, even into the recesses where the High Priest could hardly enter.

But there are points of connection as well as points of contrast, between the Jewish Temple and a Christian church.

The Temple itself became no doubt the object of a local veneration, at times amounting almost to idolatry. The Jews regarded it as a talisman that was to guard them in spite of all their sins. The Jews in the siege of Titus clung to it as a refuge in the last agony of their nation. The Jews at the present day recall its

glories, and murmur their wailings at the crevices of its walls, "with a tenacity unmatched by that of any other people to any other building in the ancient world." 1 But, nevertheless, in this excess of local devotion, there was a spiritual and moral element.

our own.

Spiritual as

Temple wor

The very combination of a spiritual religion with material splendor and foreign art in such a building, carried with it the germs of all Christian pect of the architecture, and the principle of national wor- ship. ship in fixed places forever. In some forms of the Christian Church, even its outward details have been perpetuated. The name at least of the "altar" has been retained in the Roman Catholic and Lutheran Churches, and, although to a very limited and doubtful extent, in The name and partly the idea of "the Holy of Holies" has been copied in the Eastern Church. The architects of the middle ages, and, it is said, the Freemasons of our own time, made a boast of tracing back their legendary lore and strange usages to those of Solomon's Temple. And the first great ecclesiastical builder of Christendom, the Emperor Justinian, when he had finished the first metropolitan cathedral of the world, recurred in thought to his first imperial prototype, and exclaimed, "I have vanquished thee, O Solo“mon.” The chief entrance to the national sanctuary of England was known by the name of "Solomon's Porch."

The concentration of public life round the Temple raised the whole idea of worship from the edifice to the people who encompassed, and, as it were, absorbed it. The transfer of the image of "the Temple" to the con gregration or community of the Christian Church was such as could not have taken place, had the Jewish wor

1 Mr. Fergusson, art. TEMPLE, in Dict. of Bible.