ding for himself: "As for me, and my house, we will serve the Lord."

Cradled in these gracious associations, Shechem enjoyed the repute of an ancient and holy place five hundred years before Jerusalem became a Hebrew town, and many of the tribes objected to the capital being pitched on a desolate rock, in a distant corner of the state. Thus, Shechem was the city of Joshua and the Judges, Zion that of David and the Kings. Shechem was Moscow, Jerusalem was only St. Petersburgh. Old memories and associations clung about it; the grace, the poetry, the spell of an heroic time, which no material grandeur could impart to its rival in the south. A Muscovite prince is not owned as Czar until he has been crowned in the Kremlin. And it seemed to Rehoboam that his power in Israel would lack a final grace unless he went down from the new city of Judah to the ancient city of Ephraim, to be there made king.

That going down to Shechem had been his ruin. Proud of his descent, vain of his power, the young King had threatened and alarmed the haughtiest of the tribes. Ephraim had never been reconciled to the line of David, for that powerful tribe disputed the ascendancy with Judah; and could not brook to see king after king ascending the throne from a rival house. So when Rehoboam threatened the men of Shechem, the people turned away from their king, stoned his officer to death, and raised Jeroboam, the son of Nebat, one of their own tribe to a separate throne. Benjamin had gone with Judah, its mighty neighbour, but the other nine tribes had fol

lowed the fortunes of Ephraim; the Kingdom of David parting into two grand fragments; never to unite again, until welded for a few brief years in the strength of Herod the Great.

But long before that event the royal Ephraim had sunk into the despised Samaria.

5

The Holy Land. II.

CHAPTER VIII.

Jacob's Well.

HOLDING in their possession the soil of Ephraim, the holy city and the famous well, the people of Samaria seemed to have some grounds for their boast of being the descendants of Joseph, the wisest of the twelve sons of Jacob. The Jews of Jerusalem answered such claims to high rank and pure blood, with an assertion that every living man of the Ten Tribes had been lost when the people were carried off captive into Persia and Assyria by Shalmaneser; that Esar-haddon, seeing the land of Samaria rich and fruitful, had brought into it a colony of Syrians; that Alexander the Great had poured a flood of Greeks into this province, as well as into the neighbouring Galilee; that all those strangers from the Tigris and Eurotas had introduced into the land their gods of brass and stone, Baal and Ashtoreth, Zeus and Aphrodite; so that the people who had come to possess the soil of Ephraim were a mixture of heathen races, aliens in blood, in language, and in creed to the actual Jews. All these assertions were in one sense true; for the tribes had certainly been swept away; their places had been filled by strangers; but then it is well known, from the history of war in many countries, that no invasion and no

captivity ever clears the soil of all its cultivators. Many persons remain, and many come back. A sweeping raid may empty a town; but the open country defies this doom. A brake, a cave, a mountain, a glen, a forest, known to the native, unknown to his foe, may serve as a refuge in the hour of flight; and when the rage of victory is spent, and the season for repeopling the soil returns, it is the interest of all new comers into the land that some of the old inhabitants should come back, if only to assist in finding the wells and clearing the waste. So it always happens that a remnant, more or less large, of an ancient race remains; and that such was the case in Ephraim is clear, as otherwise both the old language and the old creed must have perished from the land.

The Greek and Syrian colonists had in time been won to the local faith; an easy thing on their side, for men who believe in the religion of nature yield to a local god as readily as to a change of climate; but then this change of creed in the new comer implies the continued presence on the soil of a people possessing a local god.

The descendants of these Syro-Hellenic Jews, taking wives from the Ephraimites still dwelling in the land, formed the upper classes in Samaria, the priests, the nobles, the professional men; a people of bright, urbane, and plastic genius, fond of art and architecture; servants of Jehovah, because they thought Him the god of their new territory; but also mindful that other countries possess other deities, and that their fathers had worshipped Bel and Zeus,

in Babylon and Greece. In becoming Jews, these Samaritan colonists had not ceased to be Gentiles; and with many of them, the only change in their religious condition was this they had placed a new god in their Pantheon.

Of course the strict Jews of Judea contemned these Pagan Jews of Samaria as men unworthy to join in the Temple rites; and the Samaritans, finding that the High Priests, rejecting them as Jews, forbade them to enter the Temple courts, built for themselves a new temple on Gerizim, the Mount of God. From that time forward, the feuds of Shechem and Moriah became hot as those between Rome and London after the bull of Paul the Third and the consolidation of the English church.

In the age of JESUS, a Samaritan ridiculed a Separatist Jew as a narrow bigot; the Jew replying that a Shechemite was an outcast from society, a stranger to the one true God. Each, in his own heart, assumed himself to be the salt of the earth; the only righteous under heaven. Each boasted of possessing the purer blood, and the older law. On the side of the Samaritan it was urged that he descended, through the proud line of Ephraim, from Joseph and Rachel, and that his seat on Gerizim had been chosen by Moses, as the sacred spot from which a new publication of the Law should be made. On behalf of the Jew it was answered, that while his own descent from Judah was certain, a Samaritan could bring no proof of his descent from Ephraim; that on the contrary there was reason to believe him a mere alien in the land, offspring of a