Lycidas was a native of the very land of eloquence; he had been, as it were, cradled amidst "thoughts that breathe, and words that burn." He had studied the philippics of Demosthenes, and felt the spirit of the dead orator living in them still. Lycidas had listened to the eloquence of the most gifted speakers of his own time, expressing in the magnificent language of Greece thoughts the most poetic. He had experienced the power possessed by the orator on the rostrum, the tragedian on the stage, the poet in the arena, to stir the passions, subdue by pathos, or excite by vehement action. But never had the Athenian listened to any oration which had so stirred his own soul, as the simple prayer of Judas Maccabeus before the battle of Bethsura. There was no eloquence in it, save the unstudied eloquence of the heart; the Hebrew but uttered aloud in the hearing of his men the thoughts which had made his own spirit as firm in the hour of danger as was the steel which covered his breast.

There was much in the scene and in the congregation to add to the effect of the act of worship on the mind of Lycidas. He beheld adoration paid to no image formed by man's art, no fabled deity, capricious as the minds of those in whose imaginations alone he had existence, but to the holy, the high and lofty One who inhabiteth eternity, "whose robe is the light, and whose canopy space." And it was in no building raised by mortal hands that Maccabeus bent his knee to the Lord of Hosts. He knelt on the soil of the glorious land which God had given to his fathers--the one spot chosen out from the expanse of the whole mighty globe to be the scene of events which would influence through eternity the destinies of the world! On the verge of the southern horizon lay Hebron, where had dwelt the father of the faithful, where the ground had been trodden by angels' feet, and the feet of the Lord of angels, with whom Abraham had pleaded for Sodom. It was that Hebron where David had reigned ere he was hailed king over all Israel. And the nearer objects were such as gave thrilling interest to the prayer of the Asmonean prince: the view of the towers of Bethsura which he was about to assail, the hosts of the enemy whom he--with far inferior numbers--was going to attack; this, perhaps, even more than associations connected with the past, made every word of Maccabeus fall with powerful effect on his audience.

And that audience was in itself, probably, the noblest that could at that time have been gathered together in any laud, not excepting Italy or Greece. It was composed of men whom neither ambition nor the lust of gold had drawn from t............