There had been the wonderful temple where God was worshipped, built on the place where abraham was ready to sacrifice Isaac; the Psalms of David had been, many of them, written for the temple; there the "tribes of the Lord" had made glad music on Sabbaths to His great name. O what memories clung about the temple! How could young man who had that old city, so full of sacred memories, always in his mind, cease to worship his God for a month at the bidding of a heathen king? It simply could not be done. No. He thought of the young Isaiah in the temple, when the pillars were moved and a seraph took coals from the altar and touched his lips, and he was clean and offered himself to the service of God, saying "Here.I am, send me." Floods of inspiring memories filled his mind, and set fire to his heart, when he turned: to that window "open to Jerusalem."
There was warning as well. For he would remember that he and his kin were in exile from that sacred land of their fathers because they had forgotten the Lord God and had turned to worship the idols of the heathen and, it may be, that he had made up his mind by. the help of God, that he would never sin their sin. Jerusalem suggested the Shekinah, the Holy of Holies, the presence of the God of his fathers, merciful and gracious and full of compassion. When he turned to the "'window towards Jerusalem," you see, the lad' was taken out of his present environment into a grander and holier one. He had to be subject in a heathen court to all kinds of influences that would destroy the purity of his religious life if he let them. You know how it is. Many a man, has done that after he has come out to this coast. But Daniel kept his "'window open towards Jerusalem," to another world,
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.