salem fain would have offered Him their sympathy, He replied: " Daughters, weep not for Me, but for yourselves and for your children."
Thus many times and often did Christ prophesy Jerusalem's impending doom. For well-nigh forty years God chose to bide His time, the city meanwhile ripening for His vengeance." The historian Josephus relates that fully three millions of Jews had come for the feast of the Passover and were housed within the city walls, when suddenly the Roman legions swooped down on them and surrounded them. For three whole years the war had lasted, the Roman objective point ever being Jerusalem. During the siege, battles were daily fought between the Jew and Roman without, and between Jew and Jew within. Internal dissensions, war, famine, and pestilence — a very avalanche of woes — fell on the fated city. The streets were blocked with dead and dying, while the living fought like dogs for the little food there was. Nay, horrible to relate, famished mothers even slew and ate their babes. Not more awful in their miserable destruction were Sodom and Gomorrha, and not less visible in Jerusalem's fall was the hand of an angry God. He had purposely fostered the power of Rome, Pagan though it was, to be the instrument of His vengeance, and when the Romans would have stayed their hand, He urged them on. For, when finally the city fell and the enemy rushed in with fire and sword, Titus, then in command, — Vespasian having gone to Rome to succeed the banished Nero, — Titus gave orders that the Jewish Temple should be
