The Great Controversy The Great Controversy | Page 36

“The slaughter within was even more dreadful than the spectacle
from without. Men and women, old and young, insurgents and priests,
those who fought and those who entreated mercy, were hewn down in
indiscriminate carnage. The number of the slain exceeded that of the
slayers. The legionaries had to clamber over heaps of dead to carry on
the work of extermination.”—Milman, The History of the Jews, book 16.
After the destruction of the temple, the whole city soon fell into the
hands of the Romans. The leaders of the Jews forsook their impregnable
towers, and Titus found them solitary. He gazed upon them with
amazement, and declared that God had given them into his hands;
for no engines, however powerful, could have prevailed against those
stupendous battlements. Both the city and the temple were razed to their
foundations, and the ground upon which the holy house had stood was
“plowed like a field.” Jeremiah 26:18. In the siege and the slaughter
that followed, more than a million of the people perished; the survivors
were carried away as captives, sold as slaves, dragged to Rome to grace
the conqueror’s triumph, thrown to wild beasts in the amphitheaters, or
scattered as homeless wanderers throughout the earth.
The Jews had forged their own fetters; they had filled for themselves
the cup of vengeance. In the utter destruction that befell them as a nation,
and in all the woes that followed them in their dispersion, they were but
reaping the harvest which their own hands had sown. Says the prophet:
“O Israel, thou hast destroyed thyself;” “for thou hast fallen by thine
iniquity.” Hosea 13:9; 14:1. Their sufferings are often represented as a
punishment visited upon them by the direct decree of God. It is thus that
the great deceiver seeks to conceal his own work. By stubborn rejection
of divine love and mercy, the Jews had caused the protection of God to be
withdrawn from them, and Satan was permitted to rule them according
to his will. The horrible cruelties enacted in the

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