True, one may not altogether regret the crusades. They made romance and the high achievement to be celebrated in picture and in song. It was fine, indeed, to ride away in shining mail in a vast army in which all were officers--splendid knights battling for glory in a cause. Aching hearts and forsaken homes were plentiful behind, yet even they reflected the glamour of romance, the fervor of a faith.
But there was one crusade in which there was neither romance nor glory--nothing except heartbreak and anguish, and the long torture of the years.
That was the Children's Crusade--the crusade in which fanaticism spelled its last word--when a countless number of children of all ages, as young as seven some of them, flocked to the standard of a boy of seventeen and wandered off down through Europe, to faint and fall and die by hundreds and by thousands from hunger and heat and thirst--moaning and grieving unheeded among the stones and bushes--to reach the Mediterranean at last, a scattered remnant, there to be taken on board some vessels and sold into slavery in Algiers!
There was no glory, no triumph however imaginary, in that crusade; no romance, no glamour after the first day's march. It was only weariness and torture after that--only wretchedness and the fevered cry for the comfort of a mother's arm. And all for the sake of this dime-museum of faith, this huge ecclesiastical joke. The pity of it, indeed! Here to-night, a stone's-throw away, my heart bleeds for those little weary feet struggling on and on, for those little fainting souls, moaning, grieving, trying to keep up, lying down at last to coax the blessed release of death, and I would like to stand here on the housetops of Jerusalem and cry out against this insult to the memory of One who, when He said, "Suffer little children to come unto me," could hardly have foreseen that His words would bear such bitter fruit.
I do not do it, however. I want to live to get home and print this thing, and have it graven on my tomb.
We set out early next morning for Mount Moriah, the site of Solomon's temple and those that followed it.
It was really David's temple in the beginning, undertaken to avert a pestilence which he had selected from three punishments offered by the Lord because he, David, had presumed to number his people. A Hebrew census was a sin in those days, it would seem, and seventy thousand of the enrolled had already died when David saw an angel with a drawn sword--the usual armament of an angel--standing by the threshing-floor of Oman the Jebusite. Through Gad, his Soothsayer, David was commanded to set up an altar on that spot, to avert further calamity. Negotiations with Oman were at once begun, to the end that Oman parted with the site for "six hundred shekels of gold, by weight"; the threshing-floor was quickly replaced by an altar, and here, on the top of Mount Moriah--on the great bowlder reputed to have been the sacrificial stone of Melchizedek--and of Abraham, who was said to have proffered Isaac here--King David made offering to the Lord, and was answered by fire from heaven on the newly erected altar. And the angel "put up his sword again into the sheath thereof."