From the Elder's Pen "Cities" 5/4/03 Past/Future Articles

 Three great cities have been remarkably representative of the basic temperaments of our nature.  The first is Athens, the representative of the Intellect.  Here was brought forth that marvelous intellectual civilization in which is seen the aim of the Greeks to create the perfect man by mental processes.  It raised man in his mental state to the highest plane.  If intellectuality could save the world then Greece would have been the Saviour of mankind.  But with all the brilliancy of her achievements, she failed utterly to do for the moral and spiritual needs of the race what she wrought for man in the realm of thought and art.
     The second great city was Rome, representative of the Will.  The Roman was as much the man of action as the Grecian was the man of thought.  He brought forth a vastly different civilization in the social sphere, in matters of law and government, and put forth his mighty energies in world-wide dominion.  This was the iron kingdom, that crushed, that broke in pieces.  It was well for humanity that Rome was preceded by Greece, that touched life with refinement, with a sense of the true and beautiful, and thus greatly modified what would have been the harsher and sterner Rome.
     The third city was Jerusalem, representative of the Sensibility, the moral and spiritual nature of the race.  It speaks to the soul of man.  It is the cry that comes welling up from the heart seeking God.  It is the feeling for the Eternal and the Infinite, the deepest fact of our being.  It is that which cannot find itself  by mere intellectual processes, or satisfy itself by the actual tendencies of its nature.  It is that inner life that issues in God.  Man was not lost in the intellectual or social planes, but in the moral, the spiritual plane, and in this he finds salvation.  To meet this deepest need of the soul, Jerusalem brings him Calvary, the greatest self-revelation of God, and here in his groping it comes to rest.  There is no Cross, no Calvary, in Greece or Rome.  Next time we will learn more of that great city Jerusalem.