supporting galleries of rooms for the lodging of the priests and
Levites, many hundreds in number. The main building was of white marble,
and the Holy of Holies was overlaid even to the roof outside with plates
of gold, flashing back the sunshine. Even this was but a poor token of
the Shechinah, that glorious light which descended at Solomon's prayer
of consecration, and filled the Sanctuary with the visible token of
God's Presence on the Mercy Beat, to be seen by the High Priest once a
year.

That consecration was the happiest moment of the history of Israel,
What followed was mournful. Even David had been like the kings of other
eastern nations in the multitude of his wives, and Solomon went far
beyond him, bringing in heathen women, who won him into paying homage
to their idols, and outraging God by building temples to Moloch and
Ashtoreth; though as a prophet he had been inspired to speak in his
Proverbs of Christ in His Church as the Holy Wisdom of God. A warning
was sent that the power which had corrupted him should not continue in
his family, and that the kingdom should be divided, but he only grew
more tyrannical, and when the Ephraimite warrior, Jeroboam, was marked
by the prophet Ahijah as the destined chief of the new kingdom, Solomon
persecuted him, and drove him to take refuge with the great Shishak,
King of Egypt, where he seems to have learnt the idolatries from which
Israel had been so slowly weaned. Sick at heart, Solomon in his old age,
wrote the saddest book in the Bible; and though his first writing, the
Canticles, had been a joyful prophetic song of the love between the Lord
and His Church, his last was a mournful lamentation over the vanity and
emptiness of the world, and full of scorn of all that earth can give.