“In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost, I baptize thee, Laodice.  Amen!”

While she knelt, he said: 

“I shall search for him also.  Christ have mercy on thee now and for ever.  Farewell.”

He was gone.

Chapter XXIII

THE FULFILMENT

When Nathan, the Christian, stepped into the streets once more there was an immense accession of tumult about him.

He turned to look toward the corner of the Old Wall in time to behold Jews in armor and Romans in blazing brass rush together in a great cloud of dust as the Old Wall went in and Titus swept down upon Jerusalem.

At the same instant from the ruined high place upon Zion came a roar of stupendous menace.  The Christian, with sublime indifference to danger, kept his path toward the concourse from which he had taken Laodice.  As he ascended the opposite slope of the ravine, he saw, descending toward the battle, the front of a rushing multitude, as irresistible and as destructive as a great sea in a storm.

He saw that the mob was turning toward Akra, and to avoid it, the Christian climbed up to the Tyropean Bridge, and from that point viewed the whole of Jerusalem sweeping down upon the heathen.

At the head of the inundation passed a melodious voice crying: 

“An end, an end is come upon the four corners of the land!  Draw near every man with his destroying weapon in his hands for the glory of the Lord!  For His house is filled with cloud and the Court is full of the brightness of the Lord’s glory!  A sword!  A sword is sharpened!  The way is appointed that the sword may come!  For the time for favor to Zion is here; yea, the set time is come!”

After this poured a gaunt horde numbering tens of thousands.  They bore paving-stones, stakes, posts, railings, garden implements, weapons from kitchens, from hardware booths and from armories; anything that one man or a body of men could wield; torches and kettles of tar; chains and ropes; knotted whips, and bundles of fagots; iron spikes, instruments of torture, anything and everything which could be turned as a weapon or to inflict pain upon the Roman, who believed at this moment that Jerusalem was his!

The Christian overlooked this ferocious inundation and shook his head.  On a mound near him stood the spirit of the mob concentrated and personified.  It was crazed Posthumus.

He was screaming:  “It is finished; the law is run out!  All prophecy is fulfilled!”

And over his head he was swinging a parchment fiercely burning.

It was the Scroll of the Law!

After uncounted minutes, vibrating with roar, the terrible flood rushed by.  Feeble arms clasped the Christian about the knees and he looked down on the tangled white locks of the palsied man, who had searched for him until he had found him.  The Christian laid his hand on the man’s head but did not speak.