My Journey To, Through, and From the Christ-Land
Others might write a L,ife of Christ without seeing the Holy Land, but I could not. So in October, 1889, I embarked for that sacred country, accompanied by my wife, daughter and my friends Mr. and Mrs. IvOuis Klopsch, determined to see with my own eyes, and press with my own feet many of the memorable places connected with the life of the patriarchs and the ministrations of our Lord.
We were told that as we proposed crossing the Atlantic at that season we should have a very rough passage and that as we were to cross the Mediterranean in winter we should suffer from appalling marine treatment, and that we would freeze in the Holy Land. Just the opposite has been our experience. We had crossed the Atlantic eight times before, but this was the smoothest of all our voyages — sunshine from New York to Liverpool, sunshine from Liverpool to Rome, sunshine from Rome to Athens, sunshine from Athens to Egypt.
In a small boat, pitching till it threatened to capsize us, we come ashore at Patras, Greece, and take rail-train for Corinth and Athens, the skies blue as the bluest, and the sea a deep green, save where it is white-crested. We enter now the realm of the classics. What an opportunity, if at the close of college course and before entering a profession every young man could take a journey to see the places vividly associated with the birth, the life and the writings of the ancient poets, essayists and orators. May some philanthropist with large means see the opportunity and embrace it for hundreds and thousands of j-oung students!
But now we rush along on a rail-train in regions where Paul went afoot. What a contrast between the fatigues and slowness of ancient travel and the comforts and velocities of the modern journey; the difference between weary limbs and ptarmigan’s pinion. But why tarry at all on my way to Palestine amid these Pauline scenes? I want gradually to come upon the Christly places. Beside that, Paul was only a .sublime echo of Christ. Nothing but the divine occurrences of Palestine could make the Apostle’s life possible. There would have been no epistle to the Corinthians if there had been no sermon on the 3 (33)
MRS. TALMAGE.
were enacted was grand enough for
What a solemn place it is to
me! All the ancient city gone,
but the Acro-Corinthus, the fortress two thousand feet high,
still standing. It not only looks
down upon a vast realm of
scenery but looks down upon
the ages. Paul’s eyes were
lifted toward that proud eminence as he came from the mobocracy of Athens. The fortress
is a great heap of black basalt.
O thou doomed and dead and
buried Corinth! Thy splendor
was overpowered by thy dissoluteness. Yet all is quiet now,
and, but for the clouds built
like another Acro-Corinthus
above the fortress, it is a rather
Mount. Mars’ Hill was blood
relation to Calvary. The spear
that pierced the sacred side had
answering flash in the beheading sword on the road to Ostia.
The foot that bled on the hill
back of Jerusalem was followed
by the bleeding foot of the
Pauline pilgrimage through this
Grecian peninsula.
The scenery through which
we are now riding is for grandeur absolutely appalling. No
sooner does the Mediterranean
subside at the beach, than the
knolls become hills, and the
hills mountains, and the moun-
’ tains a volcanic bombardment
- — q£ ^|-^g heavens. Surely the
stage on which martyrdoms
the mighty tragedies! We come to Corinth,
MISS MAY TAI.MAGE.
MR. LOUIS KLOPSCH.
of Salamis occurred, saw the Pentelicon
nearly to the battle-field of Marathon, saw the Parthenon, saw
the two miles of circle which
swept around a greater congregation of temples and architectural wonders and sculptured
exquisiteness than were ever
crowded into the same space.
Saw twenty centuries of columns, columns standing, columns fallen, columns beginning
to fall, the ages piled up in
Pentelicon marble, everything
old, terrifically old, overwhelmingly old. It looks like a
wrecked eternity. Have read
about the Acropolis all my life
and have seen pictures of it, but
find it a surprise unspeakable.
mines,
peaceful scene, birds flying,
sheep pasturing, peasant women
sewing. It was the same landscape on which Paul looked on
his gradual progress to martyrdom for Christ’s sake.
One o’clock a. m., at Athens. — Cannot sleep; and I might as
well be writing. Who could
sleep amid such circumstances?
Yesterday I saw the Acropolis,
and preached on Mars’ Hill,
and after dark went out and
wandered among the fifteen immense pillars which are the survivors of the one hundred and
twenty that surrounded the temple of Jupiter Olympus. From
the Acropolis I saw the same
scene where the great sea-fight
the birthplace of temples; saw
MRS. l,OUIS KI^OPSCH.
Doxologies in stone. The eloquence and poetry and art of two millenniums frozen into marble. All honor to the memory of Ikitnos and Kallikrates, the
PAiTL PRKACHiNG AT EPHESUS. — From the Painting by E. Lesueur. architects who planned it, and Phidias who chiseled it, and Pericles, under whose patronage it was lifted.
But this secular classic of the Acropolis did not move me like the Gospel classic of Mars’ Hill. What a bold man was Paul to stand there on those tumbled rocks and say what he did! I suppose he could be heard across to the Acropolis, which was covered with temples to heathen gods and goddesses. An Englishman standing there said he heard distinctly what I said while I was preaching on Mars’ Hill.
As Paul’s voice rang out over the valley, between Mars’ Hill and the Acropolis, he swung his hand toward that pile of heathen divinities and announced his belief in only one divinity, saying:” God that made the world and all things therein, seeing He is Lord of heaven and earth, dwelleth not in temples made with hands.” And then looking up at the glittering idols on the higher hill he continues:” We ought not to think that the Godhead is like unto gold or silver or stone, graven by art and man’s device; and the times of this ignorance God winked at, but now commandeth alF men everywhere to repent.” No wonder that meeting broke up in a riot, and that Paul had to ciear out and go to Corinth, €rom which we came day before yesterday. It was not yesterday afternoon so jiuch that the wind fluttered the leaves of my Bible as I was speaking about that address of Paul on Mars’ Hill, as it was emotion that shook the book when that Apostolic scene rose before my imagination. I obtained a block of stone from Mars’ Hill to be sent to Brooklyn for the pulpit table in our new church, now building. But has this Paul nothing to do with the blessed One whose life I am trying to write? Yes. Paul was Jesus Christ’s man. Mars’ Hill shall be to us only a stepping-stone to Golgotha.
We were presented by Mr. Tricoupi, Prime Minister of Greece and the chief statesman of that kingdom, to the Queen of Greece, who gave us a most cordial grasp of the hand and welcomed us to Greece. The Queen is a ver>^ beautiful and gracious woman, and we talked together as though we were old friends. We met also the ex-Empress of Germany, Fredericka. I was never so favorably impressed with any distinguished woman as with her. She had on not a single jewel, was in plain black, dignified, but not coldly so, with a countenance that indicated good sense and kindness, but it was a somewhat tearful face. This may have been partly due to the fact that she was leaving her newly-married daughter in Athens. But I think the sadness o the face was consequent upon the multitude of troubles through which she had passed, the long and terrible sickness and death of Frederick, and many other griefs, domestic and political.
Across the Mediterranean.
Now we are on the Mediterranean Sea. This morning we sailed by Crete, the island spoken of in the Acts of the Apostles; where Paul” desired to winter,” and near which they met the euroclydon, by which they ’ were driven up and down in Adria,” until shipwrecked. “Ye should not have loosed from Crete,
and have gained this harm and loss.” The engineer of our boat told me that
cyclones now are sometimes met in the same quarter. He says: “The winds
have a terrible sweep along that coast of Crete.” We are having a smooth sea,
but there is a rocking and a narrowness of limits on shipboard which makt me
long for shore. There are Mohammedans on board. To-day at noon, regardless
of spectators, they went through their devotions, first washing face and hands
and feet, then reciting their prayers, kneeling and putting their foreheads to the
rug which they had first spread beneath them. Their behavior is a ribuke
to Christians who, under such circumstances, would neglect or postpone their
devotions. Whatever else the Mohammedan neglects, he does not neglect his
genuflexions.
A Trip Through Egypt.
Now we enter Africa. Though a curse was of old pronounced upon those who went down into Egypt for help, it cannot be that the malediction was intended for those who go down into Egypt for help in writing a life of Christ. So I went. Some of our Lord’s most important years were spent in Africa. What a morning was the 25th of November, 18S9, for new and thrilling experiences, for then I first saw Egypt. I landed at Alexandria amid a Babel of voices; the boatmen clamoring for our luggage; the Pasha, with his five wives, descending the ladder on the side of the steamer; custom-house officers on the alert; friends rushing aboard to greet friends; Europeans, Asiatics and Africans commingling. After a few hours’ wandering about, and looking at Pompey’s Pillar which has stood as the sentinel of twenty-six centuries, and through the gardens of the Khedive, and through streets filled with people of strange visage and costume, we sleep an hour to regain equilibrium before taking the train for Cairo.
Now the train is rolling on through regions watered by canals and ditches that make the Nile the mightiest of aquatic blessings, through a country that otherwise would not yield food for one hungry man in all the land. We find here by irrigation the luxuriance of an American farm just after a spring shower. These Egyptian lands without a drop of rain direct from the heavens, have been drinking until they can drink no more. Thank God for water, canals of it, rivers of it, lakes of it, oceans of it, all the cups of the earth, and all the bottles of the sky at times overflowing! We meet processions of men and beasts on the way home from the day’s work. Camels, dromedaries, mules and cattle discharged of their burdens. But alas! for the homes to which the poor inhabitants are going. For the most part, hovels of mud. But there is something in the scene that thoroughly enlists us. It is a novelty of wretchedness, -a scene of picturesque rags. For thousands of years this land has been under a very damuation of taxes. Nothing but Christian civilization will ever roll back the influences which are spoiling the Egyptians.’
There are gardens and palaces, but they belong to
the rulers. This
is the land in which
Joseph and Mary
and Christ were
fugitives.
Wondrous Sights
in Egypt.
On the Mediterranean steamer
coming from
Athens to Alexandria, I met the
eminent scholar
a n d theologian,.
Doctor Lansing,
who for thirty-five
3’ears has been a
resident of Cairo,
and he told me
that he had been
all over the road
that the three fugitives took from
Bethlehem to
Egypt. He says
it is a desert way
and that the forced
journey of the infant Christ must
have been a terrible journey. Goi n g up from
Egypt, Doctor
Lansing met peo-
■ple from Bethlehem, their tongues
siRHi-r IN aRo rHKoiGH WHICH MAR A.Nn JOSEPH I’ASSED. swollcu and liaugmg out from the inflammation of thirst, and although his party had but one goat skin of water left, and that was important for themselves, he was so moved with the spectacle of thirst in these poor pilgrims that, though it excited
the indignation of his fellow travelers, he gave water to the strangers. Over this
THE SPHINX. — From a Photograph taken by I i T ‘mage’s Party, dreadful route Joseph and Mary started for this land of Egypt. No time to make much preparation. Herod was after them, and what were these peasants before an irate king? Joseph, the husband and father, one night sprang up from his mattress in great alarm, the beads of sweat on his forehead, and his whole frame
quaking. He had
dreamed of massacres of
his wife and babe. They
must be off that night,
right away. Mary put
up a few things hastily,
and Joseph brought to
the door the beast of
burden, and helped his
wife and child to mount.
Why, those loaves of
bread are not enough,
those bottles of water
will not last for such a
long way. But there is
no time to get anything
more. Out and on.
Good-bye to the dear
home they expect never
again to see. Their
hearts break. It does
not need that ours be a
big house in order to
make us sorry to leave
it. Over the hills and
down through the deep
gorge the)^ urge their
wa)-. By Hebron, by
Gaza, through hot sand,
under a blistering sun,
the babe crying, the
cijMBiNG THE PYRAMID. mother faint, the father
exhausted. How slowly the days and weeks pass. Will the weary three ever reach the banks of the Nile? Will they ever see. Cairo? Will the desert €ver end? When at last they cross the line beyond which old Herod has no right to pursue, their joy is unbounded. Eree at last. Let them dismount and rest. Now they resume their way with less anxiety. They will find a place somewhere for shelter and the earning of their bread. Here they are at Cairo, Eg>’pt. They wind through the crooked streets which are about ten feet wide, and enter the humble house where I have been to-day. It is nine steps down from the level of the street. It is such a place as no reader of this book would like to dwell in. I measured the room and found it twenty feet long, and seven and a half feet high. There are three shelvings of rock, one of which I think was the cradle of our Lord. There is no window, and all the light must have come from lantern or candle. What a place for the King of heaven to live in I
Monuments of the Ages.
During the two or more years when this family of three made it their home I suppose they occasionally walked forth and found many things looking about as I saw them to-day. As now, there stood the Sphinx with a cold smile,, looking down upon the ages. It was old when the distinguished three arrived from Bethlehem in Egypt. It took three thousand years to make one wrinkle in its red cheek. It was then, as now, dreadful for its stolidity. Its eyes have never wept a tear. Its cold ears have not listened to the groans of the Egyptian nation, the sorrows of which have never ceased. Its heart is stone. It cared nothing for Joseph or Mar>^ in the first century. It will care nothing for the man or woman who looks into its imperturbable countenance in the last century. Within the sight of the Bethlehem pilgrims there also stood the Pyramid of Cheops, from the top of which you may see the Ruins of Memphis, the living and dead Cairos, the Nilometer, that skillful finger of stone which feels the rising and falling pulse of the great river; the place where Moses lay in the boat caulked with bitumen; the deserts of Africa, which have swallowed up in their thirsty sand explorers, caravans and armies. Yes, the immortal three from Bethlehem gazed at the out side of palaces, which within were the most gorgeous of the earth; palaces aflame with red sandstone, entered by gateways that were guarded with pillars; bewildering with hieroglyphics and wound with brazen serpents, and adorned with winged creatures, their eyes and beaks and pinions glittering with precious stones. There were marble columns blooming into white flower buds; there were stone pillars, at the top bursting into the shape of the lotus when in full bloom. Along the avenues, lined with sphinx and fane and obelisk, there were princes who came in gorgeously upholstered palanquin, carried by servants in scarlet, or else drawn by vehicles, the snow-white horses, golden-bitted and six abreast, dashing at full run. There were fountains from .stone- wreathed vases, climbing ladders of light. You would hear a bolt shove, and a door of brass would open like a flash of the sun. The surrounding gardens were saturated with odors that mounted the terrace and dripped from the arbors and burned their incense in the FRONT VIEW OF THE MUMMV OF PHARAOH.
Egyptian noon. On floors of mosaic, the glories of Pharaoh were
spelled out in letters of porphyry
and beryl and flame. There were
ornaments twisted from the wood
of the tamarisk, embossed with silver breaking into foam. There
were beds fashioned out of a single
precious stone. There were chairs
spotted with the sleek hide of leopards. There were sofas footed with
the claws of wild beasts and armed
with the beaks of birds. As you
stand on the level beach of the sea
on a summer day and looking either
way see miles of breakers white
with ocean-foam dashing shoreward,
so it seems as if the sea of the
world’s pomp and wealth in the
Egyptian capital flung itself up in
breakers of white marble, temple, mausoleum and obelisk. Yet, Egypt which
had so much grandeur and glory
for her rulers had only a room
twenty feet long and seven and
a half feet high for the infant
Monarch of the skies.
The Mummy of Pharaoh.
We saw Pharaoh to-day. The
very one that oppressed the Israelites. His body lies in the
museum al Cairo, Visible are
the very teeth that he gnashed
against the ^staelitish brickniakers, the sockets of the merciless eyes with which he looked
upon the overburdened people of
God, the hair that floated in the
breeze off” the Red Sea, the very
lips with which he commanded
SIDE VIEW OF THE MUMMY OF PHARAOH.
them to make bricks without straw. Thousands of years after, when the wrappings of the mummy were unrolled, old Pharaoh lifted up his arm as if in imploration, but his skinny bones cannot again clutch his shattered sceptre.
On a camel’s back on the way to Memphis, Egypt, I am writing *yis. How many millions have crossed the desert on this style of beast! Proud, mysterious, solemn, ancient, ungainly, majestic and ridiculous shape, stalking out of the past. The driver with his whip taps the camel on the fore-leg and he kneels to take you. But when he rises, hold fast, or you will first fall off backward as he puts his fore feet in standing position, and then you will fall off in front as his back legs take their place. Not a house or an inhabitant in all Memphis, though it was the mightiest city under the sun. I bring away a few stones from Pharaoh’s palace, and recall, as well as I can, the once gorgeous capital of Egypt. Israelites.
From Memphis back again to Cairo, exhausted by travel, wearied by reflection on the mutations of the ages. But this morning, I especially thank God for sleep. I feel rested and buoyant. Sleep puts a bound to weariness. It says: “Thus far shalt thou go and no farther.” It pours light into the eyes and geniality into the disposition and faith into the heart and makes a new world every morning. And now just think of it! We start out of Egypt for Canaan, the way the Israelites went thousands of years ago. But they went afoot, we with flying express train; they fugitive slaves, we American freemen; they amid the hardships that slew most of them, we amid the luxuries of modern travel for recuperation and sight-seeing. What a compliment to modern civilization and the principles of liberty which have begun to range the world! No; I can put it in a more righteous way: what obligation we are under to the blessed -God and our glorious Christianity! Farewell, land of Pharaoh and Joseph and Jacob, and the regions through which the infant Christ passed both ways, from Palestine to Egypt, and from Egypt to Palestine!
Battle=field of Tel=el=Kebir.
Now we are passing through Goshen, the land into which Pharaoh turned Jacob’s cattle. It is still flowing with milk and honey. Where the grass ends the crops begin. Cattle browsing, camels laden on the way to the markets, palm trees and cactus, acacia and sycamore, line the way Some of the dark-faced farmers gathering the old crops, others planting for new crops. “So the ploughman overtakes the reaper.” But this verdant and foliaged form scene is surrounded by desert, and into that we pass and arrive at Tel-el- Kebir, the great battle-field where the English, under Wolseley, and the Egyptians met, and from which field the only harvest ever reaped was an awful harvest of immortal men. Over these sands, not in this balmy atmosphere, but in consuming summer, the hosts of Englishmen marched and fought and fainted and died. On one side is a fenced and shaded cemetery, with marble headstones, in which many of the officers sleep the last sleep. But many of the troops, the thousands of private soldiers who had fathers and mothers and wives and sisters and children, are in trenches where they were tumbled, far away from home and without a prayer. The siroccos of this African desert will make playthings of the skeletons of the fallen cohorts. Now we are on the Suez Canal. Between Egypt and Arabia we are sailing over this wonderful sheet of water which marries the Mediterranean and the Red Sea. We have just passed a great ocean steamer that has on it all the marks of
JAFFA OR JOPPA.
wrestling with mighty waters. Wonderful De Lesseps, that he should have had this canal in his brain before he projected it in the presence of all nations. What independence of character, what’ courage, what persistence it all implies on his part. What a grand thing for a man to do that which all the world pronounces impossible. How many hands, how many spades, how many weary arms and shoulders and feet were required for a work like this!
I am impressed all along this route with the fact that in eight days the Israelites would have reached Can.ian if they had gone straight, though it took them forty years. But it was best that they be lost in the wilderness. They were a nation of slaves, and had they gone into Canaan thus undisciplined and unorganized, the nations of Canaan would have made only one meal of them. But they had forty years of schooling and became developed heroes and then were ready in the name of the God of Israel to defy and rout opposing hosts.
A Dangerous Harbor.
Glory to God in the highest, we have arrived at Joppa. I^ast night we made our exit from Egypt and have come through the sea dry-shod, and are now about to enter the” Promised Eand,” through the gates of Joppa. The sea is as smooth as a polished floor, although the harbor has the worst reputation for shipwrecks. The guide-books and all the tourists have prophesied a terrible debarkation at this place. The bottom of this harbor, they tell us, is strewn with human bones. Fifteen years ago a boat with twenty-seven pilgrims went down. But we personally know nothing against the harbor of Joppa. Hardly a ripple on the sea. Floods of sunshine. May all the rough stories about death prove in our cases as untrue, and our entrance into the promised land of heaven be as placid! May it be a radiant harbor! We are ashore and are met by people of many nationalities. While I am writing this, the air is full of fragrance, gardens all a-bloom though the first of December, and we are surrounded by acacia, tamarisk, oleander, palm, mulberry, century plant and orange groves, the oranges either ripe or ripening, the orange tree in March having both fruit and blossom, and all the year round in foliage, so that it fulfills the prophecy, “Their leaf also shall not wither.”
On the back of hills Joppa is lifted toward the skies. It is as picturesque as it is quaint, and as much unlike any city we have ever seen as though it were in another world, Jupiter or Saturn or Mars. It comes out into the sea to meet one so that I felt like shouting to it in salutation from the deck of the steamer Senegal. Jonah and the Whale.
We this morning disembarked where Jonah embarked. How vividly now the stor>^ comes to mind! God told Jonah to go to Nineveh and, declining that call, he came here to Joppa. I have been consulting some weeks past with tourist companies as to how I could take Nineveh on this trip. They have not encouraged me to go. It is a most tedious route and a desert. Now I see an additional reason why Jonah did not want to go to Nineveh. He not only revolted because of the disagreeable message he was called to deliver at’ Nineveh, but because it was a long way and rough and bandit-infested. So he came here to Joppa and took ship. But alas for the disastrous voyage. Why people should doubt the story of Jonah and the whale is more of a mystery than the Bible event itself. The same thing has occurred a thousand times. The Eord always has a whale waiting outside the harbor for a man who starts in the wrong direction. Recreant Jonah! 2 do not wonder that even the whale was sick of him.
Now the sun is sinking
ff behind the hills, and my first
day in Palestine is closing.
Never will I forget Joppa, the
city by the sea, city of architecturaled hill; city where Dorcas immortalized her needle
and conquered death on her
own pillow; and city where
the two dreams of Peter and
Cornelius met: and where Napoleon on the retreat had his
sick soldiers poisoned because
I’- Applcluu &Co.
ROADSIDE FOUNTAIN AND TOMB.
he could not take them down through Egypt; city at whose harbor floated the timber rafts for two temples, the ox-teams drawing through these streets the cedars for Jerusalem.
To-day I have seen floating the American flag, the English flag, the Russian flag, the Turkish flag, and the Mohammedan dropping his forehead to the earth in devotion, and all nations on the streets of one of the strangest cities I ever beheld.
This morning for the first time I have seen a man “take up his bed and walk.” He had slept out of doors, and now he rolls together a blanket and pillow and a mattress, with a cord binds them securely, and then shoulders the bundle which he easily carries away.
All Aboard for Jerusalem.
Glad that we came now instead of some years hence, when much of the religious romance will have been banished forever. A banker of Joppa, assisted by others, is about to begin to build a railroad from Joppa to Jerusalem. When this railroad is done, the steam whistle will be heard at Joppa, and the conductors’ cry, “All aboard for Jerusalem! “Then branch roads will be built and the cr>^ will be “Twenty minutes for dinner at Nazareth,” Change cars for Damascus,” “All out for the Grand Trunk to Nineveh,” and camel and mule and dragoman will go their way, and lightning wheel will be substituted for hoof and diligence!
Now it is Monday morning, and we are on the way to Jerusalem. Along the route I am amazed beyond expression at the boldness and jaggedness of the scenery of the Holy Eand. I expected to see it rough, but not Alpinian and Sierra Nevadian in grandeur. The hills are amphitheatres, piled-up galleries of gray rock, with intervals of soil brown and maroon, until the eye and head and heart surrender, and the lips that for a long time were exclamatory become speechless.
Before sundown we will see Jerusalem. I never had such high expectations of seeing any place as of seeing the Holy City. I found myself singing “Jerusalem, my happy home,” while dressing myself this morning. I think my feelings may be slightly akin to that of the Christian just about to enter the Heavenly Jerusalem. My ideas regarding the earthly Jerusalem are bewildering. Have I not seen pictures of it? Oh yes, but they- ha’e only increased the bewilderment. They were taken from a variety af standpoints. If twenty artists attempt to picture Brooklyn or New York, they will plant their cameras at different places and take as many different pictures. I must .see the city with my own eyes. I must walk around about it, and” tell the towers thereof.”
On the Sacred Hill Golgotha.
Arrived in Jerusalem, the first place we seek is Mount Calvary.
This noon-day hour on Golgotha is the most solemn and overwhelming hour of my life. I tried to read two of the Bible accounts of the Crucifixion, but it was done with many pauses. I defy any one on this spot to read with firm voice and consecutive utterance the description given by L,uke and John of the mightiest scene of all the ages which was enacted here. Our group lying down
“XHU ri^ACE OF A SKULL.” — (The path shown at the foot of the cliff is the same that Jesus followed on his way to crucifixion.)
on the place where the three crosses stood, I read to them, and I think the prayer of the penitent malefactor became the prayer of each one of us.” Lord, remember me.” It was about this hour that the sun was darkened and midnight fell on midnoon. There can be no doubt that this hill dbove the place heretofore called “Jeremiah’s Grotto,” is the hill on which Christ was put to death. The late General Gordon has made a tnold of this hill, and the opinion being adopted by nearly all who visit Jerusalem in these days is that the hill 011 which we now sit was the place of the Great Tragedy. The New Testament calls the locality of execution, Golgotha, or the ‘’ Place of a skull.’’ I care not from what direction you look at this hill, you recognize the shape of a human skull — you have but to feel of your own cranium to realize the contour of Calvary. The caverns a little way beneath the top suggest eyeless sockets. The grotto underneath is also the shape of the inside of a skull. This hill is the only hill anywhere near Jerusalem that corresponds with the Bible description of being skull-shaped. We have inspired authority for saying that Christ was crucified outside the gate. This hill is just outside the Damascus Gate. Moreover, all traditions agree that this hill I speak of was the place where malefactors in olden time were put to death, and Christ was executed as a malefactor. The Bible lets us know that the Hill of Calvary was near a great thoroughfare, the people passing by” wagging their heads.” This hill was then, as it is now, beside a great thoroughfare. The arguments in behalf of this particular hill as the place of the Lord’s violent death are conclusive. In pamphlets and books those arguments are now appearing, and all intelligent people will yet ag:ee upon this” Place of a skulV as the centre from which continents have been touched and from which all the world will ^-et be moved. So certain am I of this that to-day with my own hands I have rolled down from this hill a stone which I shall take to America as a memorial stone for my new Church now building. That stone placed on top of a .stone from Mount Sinai, for the obtaining of which camels are now crossing the Desert, will, after all the lips now living shall have become speechless, preach with two lips of stone the Law and the Gospel.
What a place of interest is Jerusalem, whichever way we look. It is the mo<5t sacred city of our planet. There is much squalor here now, but the present is, in my mind, overwhelmed with the past.
The Glory of Solomon.
The procession of kings, conquerors, poets and immortal men and women pass before me as I stand here. Among the throng are Solomon, David and Christ. Yes, through these streets and amid these surroundings rode Solomon, that wonder of splendor and wretchedness. It seemed as if the world exhausted itself on that man. It wove its brightest flowers into his garland. It set its richest gems in his coronet. It pressed the rarest wine to his lip. It robed him in the purest purple and embroidery. It cheered him with the sweetest music in that land of harps. It greeted him v.’ith the gladdest laughter that ever leaped from mirth’s lip. It sprinkled his cheek with spray from the brighte.st fountains. Royalty had no dominion, wealth no luxury, gold no glitter, flowers no sweetness, song no melody, light no radiance, upholstery no gorgeousness, waters no gleam, birds no plumage, prancing coursers no mettle, architecture no grandeur, but was all his. Across the thick grass of the lawn, fragrant with tufts of camphire from Engedi, fell the long shadows of trees brought from distant forests. Fish-pools, fed by artificial channels that brought the streams from hills far away, were perpetually ruffled with fins, and golden scales shot from water-cave to water-cave with endless dive and swirl, attracting the gaze of foreign potentates; birds that had been brought from foreign aviaries glanced and fluttered among
PORTIONS OF THR ANCII<;nT WALIv OF JKRUSAI^KM, KRECTKD BEFORE THE TIME OF SOtOMON.
the foliage, and called to their mates far beyond the sea. From the royal stables there came up the neighing of twelve thousand horses, standing in blankets of Tyrian purple, chewing their bits over troughs of gold, waiting for the king’s order to be brought out in front of the palace, when the official dignitaries would leap into the saddle for some grand parade, or, harnessed to some of the fourteen
TOMB OF ABSALOM IN THK VALK OK JKHOSHAI’HAT.
LS7)
hundred chariots of the king, the fiery chargers with flaunting mane and throbbing nostril would make the earth jar with the tramp of hoofs and the thunder of wheels. While within and without the palace you could not think of a single luxury that could be added, or of a single splendor that could be kindled; down on the banks of the sea the dry-docks of Ezion-geber rang with the hammers of the shipwrights who were constructing larger vessels for a still wider commerce; for all lands and climes were to be robbed to make up Solomon’s glory. No rest till his keels shall cut every sea, his axemen hew every forest, his archers strike every rare wing, his fishermen whip every stream, his merchants trade in every bazaar, his name be honored by every tribe; and royalty shall have no dominion, wealth no luxury, gold no glitter, song no melody, light no radiance, waters no gleam, birds no plumage, prancing coursers no mettle, upholstery no gorgeousness, architecture no grandeur, but it was all his.
To say that Solomon was a millionaire gives but a very imperfect idea of the property he inherited from David, his father. He had at his command gold and silver in amounts that stagger all arithmetic. About his exact wealth authors have differed, but all agree that it was far ahead of any other man’s possessions, beyond all modern millionairdom. The Queen of Sheba made him a nice little present of seven hundred and twenty thousand pounds, and Hiram made him a present of the same amount. If he had lost the value of a whole realm out of his pocket, it would have hardly been worth his while to stoop down and pick it up. He wrote one thousand and five songs. He wrote three thousand proverbs. He wrote about almost everything. The Bible says distinctly he wrote about plants, from the cedar of Eebanon to the hyssop that groweth out of the wall, and about birds and beasts and fishes. No doubt he put off his royal robes, and put on hunter’s trappings, and went out with his arrows to bring down the rarest specimens of birds; and then with his fishing apparatus he went down to the stream to bring up the denizens of the deep, and plunged into the forest and found the rarest specimens of flowers; and then he came back to his study and wrote books about zoology, the science of animals; about ichthyology, the science of fishes; about ornithology, the science of birds; about botany, the science of plants.
The Grief of David.
But here passes through these streets, as in imagination I see him, quite as wonderful and a far better man, David, the conqueror, the king, the poet. Can it be that I am in the very city where he lived and reigned? Yes, I have since coming here stood in the very place where he received the news of Absalom’s death. He was wrapped up in his boy Absalom. He ws a splendid boy, judged by the rules of worldly criticism. From the crown of his head to the sole of his foot there was not a single blemish. The Bible says that he had such a luxuriant shock of hair that when once a year it was shorn, that which was cut oflf weighed over three pounds. But, notwithstanding all his brilliancy of appearance, he was a bad boy, and broke his father’s heart. He was plotting to get the throne of Israel. He had marshaled an army to overthrow his father’s government. The day of battle had come. The conflict was begun. David, the father, sat between the gates of the palace waiting for the tidings of the conflict. Oh, how rapidly his heart beat with emotion. Two great questions were to be decided: the safety of his boy, and the continuance of the throne of Israel. After a while a servant,
TOWKR OR IIOUSR OF DAVID IN JKRUSAI.lvM.
Standing on the top of the house, looks off and he sees some one running. He is coming with great speed, and the man on the top of the house announces the coming of the messenger, and the father watches and waits, and as soon as the messenger from the field of battle comes within hailing distance the father cries out. Is it a question in regard to the establishment of his throne? Does he say:” Have the armies of Israel been victorious? Am I to continue in my imperial authority? Have I overthrown my enemies?” Oh! no. There is one question.
that springs from his heart to the lip, and springs from the lip into the ear of the besweated and bedusted messenger flying from the battle-field — the question, “Is the young man Absalom safe?” When it was told to David, the king, that, though his armies had been victorious, his son had been slain, the father turned his back upon the congratulations of the nation, and went up the stairs of his palace, his heart breaking as he went, wringing his hands sometimes, and then again pressing them against his temples as though he would crush them in, crying: “O my son Absalom! my son! my son Absalom! Would God I had died for thee, O Absalom! my son! my son!” Stupendous grief of David resounding through all succeeding ages!
The Great Temple that Herod Built.
I am also thrilled and overpowered with the remembrance that yonder, where now stands a Mohammedan mosque, stood the Temple, the very one that Christ visited. Solomon’s Temple had stood there, but Nebuchadnezzar thundered it down. Zerubbabel’s Temple had stood there, but that had been prostrated. Then Herod built a temple because he was fond of great architecture, and he wanted the preceding temples to seem insignificant. Put eight or ten modern cathedrals together and they would not equal that structure. It covered nineteen acres. There were marble pillars supporting roofs of cedar, and silver tables on which stood golden cups, and there were carvings exquisite, and inscriptions resplendent, glittering balustrades and ornamented gateways. The building of this temple kept ten thousand workmen busy forty-six years. Stupendous pile of pomp and magnificence! But the material and architectural grandeur of the building were very tame compared with the spiritual meaning of its altars, its Holy of Holies, and the overwhelming significance of its ceremonies.
Where Elijah was Fed by Ravens.
Now we are on the road from Jerusalem to Jericho. We started out early and crossed the Jehoshaphat valley, which, if it had not been memorable in history and were only now discovered, would excite the admiration of all who look upon it, so deep, so wide, so long, so tunneled with graves, so overlooked by Jerusalem walls. With enough books in my saddle-bags, on a horse sure-footed for the mountain passes, and in good company, and within sight of Mount Olivet, and close by the Garden of Gethsemane, and with the heavens and the earth full of sunshine, we start on the famous road to Jericho. We pasg through ravines and gorges, and by dark caves which might be an entrenchment for robbers like those which the man fell among on his way to Jericho along this very road. We have to-day met several groups of Bedouins, who, judging from their countenances, might be easily turned into bandits. But the supremacy of law, even though it be Turkish law, and our accompaniment of twelve stout men, escorts and attendants, put us out of the danger of being like that previous traveler, stripped and wounded and left half dead. What scenery we are passing through! How any man can be disappointed with the Holy Land I cannot understand.
TOMR OF DAVID.
Some of the Palestine tourists have been chiefly impressed with the fleas, the filth and the beggars. To me the scenery, if it had no sacred associations, would be appallingly majestic. There is nothing in America or Europe that surpasses it for a mingling of beauty and grandeur. “What is that ravine?” I cry out to the dragoman. He says, “That is the brook. Cherith; here is where the ravens fed Elijah.” “Are there any ravens in this region now?” I asked. He answered,” Yes; they are large, in size between the buzzard and the eagle, and could carry a heavy piece of meat if they tried.” But how different is the brook Cherith from all my preconceived notions of it. It is like one of the awful gulches in Yellowstone Park. It is six hundred feet from the top of the bank. It has in its sides great caverns, where Bedouins make their home. The brook Cherith when in full force is a silver wedge splitting the mountains into precipices. But behold the valley of the Jordan and the Dead Sea bursting upon our vision, and in an hour we are at the two Jerichos, the one where, at the sound of the poor music played on “ram’s horns,” the walls crashed, and the other Jericho where short
Zaccheus from the gallery of a slcamore tree hailed the Lord, and the L,ord hailed him. It was here our Saviour so beautifully announced His mission,” The Son of Man is come to seek and save that which was lost,” By the warmth of a camp-fire I sit down to write this, and looking up see the Quarantania, the mountain of Christ’s temptation. I am at the foot of that” very high mountain” where Christ wa*’ “led up of the Spirit” to be tempted. Neither on the sides of it nor on the top is there a spear of grass or a flower. It is a desert mountain. Its robber dens are here visible. Amid these indentations and on the cold bleak heights, and alone, save when angels came to minister unto Him, Christ stayed in that awful struggle against pandemoniac cohorts which rode up to trouble and bafQe and destroy, if they could, the Son of God. As on the top of the city temple Christ battling with temptation illustrated His willingness to sympathize with those who are struggling with city allurements, so by the memory of His contest here in lonely places He is willing to come to the rescue of those who in .country places, or alone, confront the Satanic. A depression on either side the mountain seems to divide it from the other ranges so that the mountain is itself alone. And now the sun is setting, making the mountains look like balustrades and embattlements of
DR. TALMAGE ON THE BANKS OF THE DEAD SEA.
amber and gold, and the moon just above the crests seems to be a window of heaven through which immortals might be looking down upon the scene.
A Baptism in the Jordan.
Yesterday on horseback we left Jericho, and having dipped in the Dead Sea
we came with a feeling that we cannot describe upon the Jordan, a river which
more people have desired to see than any other. On our way we overtook an
American who requested me to baptize him by immersion in the river Jordan.
We dismounted at the place where Joshua and his host crossed the river drj’-shod.
We were near a
turn in the river
and not far off
from where rocks
and sands are
piled up in shape
of cathedrals,
domes and battlements. We
pitched our tent,
and after proper
examination of the
candidate for baptism, I selected
portions of Scripture appropriate.
One of our Arab
attendants had a
garment not unlike a baptismal
robe. With that dr. talmage baptizing a candidate in the jordan.
garment girdled around me, I led the candidate down under the trees on the bank, while near by were groups of friends and some strangers who happened to be there. After a prayer, I read of Christ’s baptism in the Jordan, and the commission “Go teach all nations, baptizing them.” The people on the bank then joined in singing to the familiar tune that soul-stirring song:
“On Jordan’s stormy bank I stand.”
With the candidate’s hand in mine, we waded deep into the Jordan, and I then declared, “In this historical river, where the Israelites crossed, and Naaman plunged seven times for the cure of his leprosy, and Christ was baptized and which has been used in all ages as a symbol of the dividing line between earth and heaven, I baptize thee in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost, Amen.” As the candidate went down under the waves and then rose, I felt a solemnity that no other scene could have inspired. As the ordinance was observed under the direction of no particular denomination of Christians, and no particular church could be responsible for it, I feel it my duty to report what I did to the Church Universal. On our way up from Jericho to Jerusalem the sini was very hot. I got oflT
JERICHO OF TO-DAY and .sat under the shadow of the horse. I felt as if I could not ride another step, but the dragoman informed us that a little way oif was a cool place. Soon we halted by a ledge of rocks, the mountain was between us and the sun, and threw a sombre blanket over us. And three or four of us spontaneoush’ cried out: * ‘This is the shadow of a great rock in a weary land!”
A Pilgrimage to the Birthplace of Christ.
Now we are back again in Jerusalem, and must make an excursion to our Lord’s birthplace. At nine o’clock this crisp December morning, for there was a sharp frost last night, I am afoot on the road from Jerusalem to Bethlehem; I have just crossed the valley of Hinnom. It is deep and impressive, a wall of rock on one side and a steep hill on the other, mounting toward the Holy City, a few olive trees on the way up as though they had climbed as far as Jthey- could, and then halted. I pass the plain where Absalom marshaled troops against his father David, and the hill of Evil Council, where Judas planned for the capture of Christ. I am on the road where the wise men went to find Christ at the order of Herod, men wise enough not to make report to the cruel monster. It is the road that marks the distance between the birthplace and the death-place of Him who made the world and will yet redeem it. Christ made long journeys, but after all, died within five miles of His early home. In all the region through which this road runs, the Davidic, Solomonic and Herodic histories overlap each other. I meet on the road many camels with heavy burdens on their way to Jerusalem. These animals set one thinking as does no other creature, and I enjoy meeting them on foot better than I enjoyed riding upon their backs. But now Bethlehem is in sight, and we are toiling up the hills which Joseph and Mary ascended in this same month of December, long, long years ago. The town of Bethlehem, to my surprise, is in the shape of a horseshoe, the houses extending clear on to the prongs of the horsehoe, between which I look and see the fields where Ruth gleaned and Boaz was fascinated with her charms, and about which is garlanded the immortal pastoral which, in the Bible, lies peacefully between the war-lyrics of Judges and Samuel. Though David was a “man of war,” his great-grandmother, Ruth, was a farmer’s wife and a woman of peace. Near one end of the semicircle of rocks on which Bethlehem stands is David’s well, now a wide, deep basin of stone, almost dry, but at certain seasons almost full. No wonder that when David was hounded of persecution and thirsty, he wanted a cool draught out of it, crying: “Oh that one would give me to drink of the water of the well of Bethlehem which is by the gate.” The mouth of the we cut out of the eternal rock is about four feet across from edge to edge, and a wet goat-skin bottle was lying near by. But we must not dwell too long on the topography of Bethlehem. Hills, hills, hills! Rocks, rocks, rocks! From the village, looking down, the backs of the mountains appear like the backs of the mountains of New Hampshire from the top of Mount Washington. The whole scene, more rough and rude than can be imagined. Verily Christ did not choose a soft and genial place in which to be born. But the scenery, though rough, is sublime, and the hills for width and precipitation are displays omnipotent. The gate through which our
AI.!.i;’ Ol’ IIINXOM, OX THE ROAD TO HKTHLEHKM.
Lord entered this world was a gate of rock, a hard, cold gate, as the gate through which He departed was a swing-gate of sharpened spears.
By Sacred Places of the Holy Land.
Now we leave Jerusalem for the long journey north through Palestine. A little way out we got on a hill and took the last look at Jerusalem, and I felt and remarked it was the last look at that sacred city on earth, and the next Jerusalem we shall see will be the heavenly. We went on within sight of Mizpah and Gibeon, where Joshua commanded the sun to stand still; on by Rama, connected with Samuel’s history; on by the traditional village where the parents of Christ missed their boy, about three and a half miles from Jerusalem. This is the road over which Jesus came and went from Jerusalem to Nazareth. To-night we encamp at Bethel, where was once a school of the prophets, a theological seminary. Elijah and Elisha were here. Near this Abraham and Eot divided the land. Here Jacob, pillowed on a stone, saw the ladder used by angels’ feet,
DAVID’S WiCLI, NKAR BETHLKHKM.
and he set up a stone and consecrated it. To-night the heavens were full of ladders, first a ladder of clouds, then a ladder of stars, and all up and down the heavens are the angels of beauty, angels of consolation, angels of God ascending and descending. “Surely God is in this place,” said Jacob, “and I knew it not.” But to-night God is in this place and I know it.
The next night we encamp on the ruins of Ahab’ s ivory palace and within sight of the pillars of one of Herod’s temples. But this place is more distinx^ .^,.,,r,^,,,„.„^,^ — ,-^ — .,,,^^.^ 1^,,.,^,,.^^ Copyright. 1881,
FIEt,D NEAR BETHLEHEM, WHERE DAVID GRAZED HIS FATHER’S FLOCKS.
guished for Elijah’s vision and the equipage of fire. The place is girt with a blue sash of mountains. The next day we saw the tomb of Joseph. His bones were brought up from Egypt. Gentile and Jew, Protestant and Catholic, and Mohammedan, agree that this is the place of that Prime Minister’s burial. What a funeral it must have been and what a procession from Egypt to Canaan!
At the Well of Jacob. We dismounted from our horses in a heavy rain at “Jacob’s Well,” and our dragoman on the slippery stones nearly fell into the deep chasm of this most
JACOB’S WRTX.
memorable of all the wells ever digged. I measured the well at the top and found it six feet from edge to edge. Some grass and weeds and thorny growths overhang it. In one place the roof is broken through. Large stones embank the well on all sides. Our dragoman took pebbles and dropped them in, and from the time they left his hand to the instant they clicked on the bottom you could hear it was very deep. It is a rich region of land,” the parcel of ground that Jacob gave to his son Joseph,” and I do not wonder the old patriarch bought it, for it is a farm field of great luxuriance, and however much he paid for it he
got it cheap. Within sight, as we stood at the well, were Mount Gerizim and
Mount Ebal, each eight hundred feet high, the mountains of cursing and blessing.
The woman of Samaria, who met Christ at this well, told the truth, as my
own eyesight testifies, when she said,” The well is deep,” and no wonder she
cried out, “Thou hast nothing to draw with.” She knew not that Christ was
speaking of spiritual supply. For that well God gives everyone a pail if he will
only let it down into the floods. Within fifteen minutes of Jacob’s well is the
village called Sychar, to which the disciples had gone when the woman of Samaria
came to the well, as He in the heat of twelve o’clock at noon asked to have His
thirst slaked. The topography of the surroundings of this well and of other
localities visited this week, led me to say then what I feel now:” Any man who
goes through Palestine and remains an infidel, is either a bad man or an
imbecile.”
A Watering Place.
Six o’clock in the morning. L,ast night I heard a hyena. Its voice is a loud, resounding, terrific, almost supernatural sound, splitting up the darkness into a deeper midnight. Beginning with a howl and ending with a sound something like a horse’s whinnying. Here we are, squat by a fire, under the starlight with two Arabs, I knowing as much of Arabic as they of English, namely, nothing. Skies above the mountains of Samaria crimsoning with the morning, A few hours pass and we come to the well of Dothan, mentioned in Bible story. Cattle, donkeys, camels at the well. Women with pitchers on their heads or lowering their vessels to have them filled. Men with pails attached to strings struggling in pleasantry. The water plashing over the stones, while caravans of camels just arrived wearily lie down with a grunt and wait their turn for water. In the trough girding the well the mouths of beasts are thrust thirstily. There is Rachel watering the camels. There are young men and maidens looking at each other roughly bewitching. There are herdsmen angry with each other and ready to strike, and looking daggers because some other camel, or cow, or calf, or donkey, than their own, has won precedence at the trough.
A Plague of Dogs.
On the following night we encamped where I, for the first time, understood why the Bible writers have such dislike for dogs. The dogs of Palestine are an idiosyncratic race of curs. I am fond of dogs and like to pet them, but upon these I could not think of bestowing a friendly pat of the hand or an inviting whistle. First of all, they seem afflicted with parasites. They carry abottt with them insectile colonies. These unseen invaders, without right of lease or any kind of permission, make the poor dog a plateau for perpetual residence, and
MOUiiRN WOMEN OK SAMARIA. — Ffoui a sketch by Bida. though the canine serves on them writ of ejectment they will not go. They fear neither bite nor growl nor scratch. They have made up their mind that the dog owes them a living. They enjoy his perturbation. They ask him what he intends to do about it. They particularly delight in ensconcing themselves where neither his tooth nor nail can touch them. They seem to have measured the distance and secured the exact spot. They play hide and seek with his nose. To take revenge for their tormentors these Arab dogs make the night hideous. I am writing this at midnight, because they will not let me sleep. Near my tent a dog began with a deep bass and that waked up a whole choir of voices on all keys. They let off whole volleys of racket. One would think that they would get hoarse or exhausted. But, no; when they “stop it seems that the music required that they rest a few notes. But they come in a little further on, no more tired than a cornet that is being shaken and wiped while the performer is waiting for his next turn. But now they all come in together. This is the full band. This must be the chorus, voices deep, voices shrill, voices snappy, voices a-growl, voices defiant. Only those can fully appreciate my meaning who have encamped for the night in the outskirts of a Palestine village.
Next day we arrived at Gideon’s Fountain, where the men lapped the water as they crossed. Out of an archway of rock the water bubbles. Yonder is Mount Gilboa, where Saul and his two sons died. This is the valley of Jezreel, through which Jehu drove furiously. To-day we are in sight of Mount Carmel. It looks like rain, after a drought; clouds larger than a man’s hand drifting across the top of Carmel. From a great height the mountain, first precipitately, then gradually, declines into the Mediterranean Sea.
At the Sepulchre.
As our caravan moved on at seven o’clock in the morning, through a village, we saw about fifty women, dressed mostly in black, on their way out of a graveyard; others were still seated by the graves and were crying,” Oh my mother f Oh my husband! Oh my child! Oh my father.” Our dragoman informed us that this was the continuance of a very old custom. The bereft women go at day-dawn to the grave, three mornings after a burial, and after that every week for a year. “There it is,”. said. “Turn over and read in L,uke and John, ‘Very early in the morning they came unto the sepulchre.’”
To-day at noon, I said to our dragoman, “What is that?” pointing to an old square building in the distance. He replied, “That is a khn.” Delighted was I to have an opportunity of seeing the kind of building in which Christ was born. We rode in under the arched entrance and dismounted. We found the building of stone, and around an open square, without roof. The building is more than two thousand years old. It is two stories high. In the centre are camels, horses and mules. Caravans halt here for the night or during a long, storm. The open square is large enough to accommodate a whole herd of cattle,, a flock of sheep or caravan of camels. The neighboring Bedouins here find market for their hay, straw and meats. Off from this centre, occupied by beasts of burden, there are twelve rooms for human habitation. The only light is from the door. I went into one of these rooms and found a woman cooking the evening meal. There were six cows in the same room. On a little elevation
ANCIENT RAMLEH AS IT APPEARS TO-DAY. — From Tilt’ Christian Herald.
there was some straw, where the people sat and slept when they wished to rest. It was in such a room as that our Eord was born.
Memorable Spots.
Now we are at Nazareth, the place of the Saviour’s boyhood. We came along the very road that Christ took when he returned from Jerusalem after hisinterMew with the Doctors of the Law. Through the ‘alley of Esdraelon, the battle-field of nations; and by round-topped, beautiful Tabor, from the edge of which Deborah signaled Barak to open the battle; and near awful Megiddo, and across plains where nine hundred iron chariots rolled their lacerations and crushings; and within sight of where Sisera forsook the chariot and afoot fled until Jael nailed him; and within sight of where “the only son of his mother” was resurrected; (and I know if the Eord could aftbrd to make a Resurrection Day for one young man, he can afford to make a Resurrection Day for all our dead); the same road in sight of Endor, where Saul went in the night to consult the witch and came to no good, as those who consult witches never do; and then the road comes to the foot of Mount Nazareth, not ascending by the steep and jagged path which Christ ascended, but by a new way which modern engineering has built, and we go zigzagging up the heights, steep above steep, until we seem to hover over Nazareth, a village of such overpowering interest that all the world has seen or wishes to see it.
How the Omnipotent has scooped out these -valleys and molded these hills on which and through which Jesus, the lad, walked, sometimes with his father, sometimes with his mother, sometimes with village contemporaries, and sometimes alone. We halt at the very fountain where Joseph and Mary and ChrisL used to fill the goat-skins. We stop for the night at a Russian convent, and for the first time in many nights, have a pillow in-doors. Before dark I open my Bible and within sight of the hills to which the young Christ so often looked up, while they looked down, I read the story of Jesus of Nazareth, which appears so vivid and strange and new, it seems as if I had never read it before.
Jesus Afoot.
In traveling along the roads of Palestine, I am impressed as I could not otherwise have been with the fact that Christ, for the most part, went afoot. We find Him occasionally on a boat, and once riding in a triumphal procession, as it is sometimes called, although it seems to me that the hosannas of the crowd could not have made a ride on a stubborn, unimpressive and funny creature like that which pattered with Him into Jerusalem very much of a triumph. But we are made to understand that generally He walked. How much that means only those know who have gone over the distances traversed by Christ. We are accustomed to read that Bethany is two miles from Jerusalem. Well, any man in ordinary health can walk two miles without fatigue, but not more than one man out of a thousand can walk from Bethany to Jerusalem without exhaustion. It is over the Mount of Olives, and you must climb up among the rolling stones, and descend where exertion is necessary to keep you from falling prostrate. I, who am accustomed to walk ten or twelve miles without lassitude, tried part of this road over the Mount of Olives, and confess I would not want to try it often, such demand does it make upon one’s physical energies. Yet Christ walked it twice a day, in the morning from Bethany to Jerusalem, and in the evening from Jerusalem to Bethany. Likewise it seems a small thing that Christ walked from Nazareth to Jerusalem, but it takes us four days of hard horseback riding, sometimes on a trot
FROxM MANGKR TO THRONE. and sometimes on a gallop, to do it this week. The way is mountainous in the extreme. To those who went up to the “Tip Top House,” on Mount Washington, before the railroad was laid, I will say that this journey from Nazareth to
r. 1 1,
pletOQ &, Co.
Jerusalem is like seven such American journeys. So, all up and down and across and recrossing Palestine, Jesus walked. Herod rode. Ahab rode. Saladin rode.
Solomon rode. Antony rode. But Jesus walked. With swollen ankles, and
sore muscles of the legs, and bruised heel and stiff joints, and panting lungs
and faint head, along the roads and where there were no roads at all, Jesus
walked.
Cana and Mount of the Beatitudes.
Now we are waiting for orders to mount for Cana of Galilee. We find in the village at a Greek convent some of the water-pots, or specimens of the same kind, that were used at the famous wedding where Christ turned the contents of them from common water into grape juice. We were surprised at the size of these water-jars. I measured them and found them eighteen inches in width from edge to edge, and nineteen inches in depth. What a bountiful and strange vintage at that wedding. Not a grape, not a wine press, yet six of these great jars filled with a beverage richer than Malaga, and yet so harmless that after all the wedding banqueters had partaken till they could drink no more, there was in all the festal hall, not a flushed cheek, nor a glassy eye, nor a dizzy head, nor a disturbed stomach. But let not the modern guzzler pat himself approvingly as though he were, in drinking wine, doing only what the lyord helped the people of Cana to do. There is not one drop of that kind of wine in any of the flasks, decanters, or rum jugs of the present day. Christ, by a glorious miracle, turned water into wine, but the devil by infernal miracle turns wine into suicide, and poverty, and assassination, and orphanage, and woe, and death. Take your choice of miracles.
The most fearful climb in Palestine is the ascent of the Mount of Beatitudes. The horses fairly groan with the effort of transporting one up the first mountain, which is only a stepping-stone to the Mountain of Blesseds. Then we ride across fields where every step seems a trap for the feet of the horses. They stumble with their fore feet, and knuckle with their back feet, until it is only by a stout grip of mane or saddle we stay on. But oh, what a sweep of vision, now that we have reached the top. It is like the Valley of the Hudson, from Catskill Mountain House. I am entranced. Hail, hills of Galilee! Hail, Lake Gennesareth! Yonder, clear up and most conspicuous, is Safed, the very city to which Christ pointed for illustration in the sermon preached here, saying,” A city set on a hill cannot be hid.” There are rocks around me on this Mount of Beatitudes enough to build the highest pulpit the world ever saw. Ay, it is the highest pulpit. It overlooks all time and all eternity. The Valley of Hattin, between here and Lake Galilee, is an amphitheatre, as though the natural contour of the earth had invited all nations to come and sit down and hear Christ preach a sermon in which there were more startling novelties than were ever announced in all the sermons that were ever preached. To those who heard Him on this very spot, His word must have seemed a contradiction of everything they had ever heard or read or experieuced. The world’s theory had been,” Blessed are the arrogant; blessed are the (79)
8o supercilious; blessed are the tearless; blessed are they who have everything their own way; blessed are the war eagles; blessed are the persecutors; blessed are the popular; blessed are the Herods and the Caesars and the Ahabs.” “No! No !! No !!! “says Christ, with a voice that rings over these rocks and through yonder Valley of Hattin, and down to the opaline lake on one side, and the sapphire Mediterranean on the other, and across Europe in one way, and across Asia in the other way, and around the earth both ways, till the globe shall yet be girdled with the nine Beatitudes. But as we were climbing to the top, I could not help remarking to the one who rode next to me,” It is appropriate that the ascent to the
Mount of the Saviour’s Blesseds should
be difficult, for some of the attainments commended there by our Eord
are heights most difficult to reach.
For instance: Who really loves his
enemies? We may not wish them
harm, indeed, you may wish them
well. But there are not many who
have a real affection for those who
maltreat them. I never, personally,
knew of but one person who, without doubt, gained the glorious height.
That was David T. Talmage, my
father. More like Christ was he than
any person I ever knew, unless it
were my mother. Dead, a quarter
of a centur>% j-et their example is to
me pillar of cloud by- day and pillar
of fire by night. But such characters
are not frequent. Eoving your enemies is a grace not easily attained. Was I not right in saying to our dragoman, “David, the Mount of Beatitudes is hard to climb.”
A Funeral in the Holy Land.
We saw to-day a procession, mostly dressed in black, approaching. Soon we heard the wailing of many women. It was a sad moaning outcry. They followed an ornamented box which contained the dead body of a girl. At the front of the box was a pole on which was a sort of cap with locks of the hair of the deceased floating from beneath it. On the same covered pole were some adornments which I imagine had been worn by the deceased during her lifetime. The box was on the shoulders of four men. The procession of weeping women
EASTERN BIER AND COFFIN.
was led by one whom I supposed to the mother of the dead child. She had in her hands a narrow piece of blue cloth about a yard long, which she lifted into the air, now by one hand and now by the other, and as if in effort to break it and no doubt carrying out the oriental custom of rending in grief. I thought I could see her sorrow was genuine, and it was the real mother bewailing her dead, and so no doubt there was as much heart-break in the lamentation as there is when an American mother bemoans her childlessness. There may also have been other relatives in the throng who were agonized. But the most of the crowd seemed to dramatize bereavement, and careful inspection discovered the tearless eyes, and that they were enacting something that seemed called for by the proprieties of the occasion. The corpse was carried into a sacred enclosure, and two or three men went through genuflexions which meant no doubt much to them but nothing to us; meanwhile the women of the procession sat down at the distance of a city block away from the enclosure, but the men sat nearer by. Then the box with the floating tresses of the departed girl was brought out and the procession resumed its march to the grave and the wild and bitter cry again ascended. I followed to the gates of the cemetery and was passing in, when my friend called attention to the fact that we had no right to enter. Some twenty of the women were, by angry voice and violent gesticulation, forbidding our going in. They evidently discovered that we were strangers and of another nationality and religion, and our intrusion would be a sacrilege. So we halted, but we had seen for the first time the type of an oriental burial. It was to us a deeply sad and solemn spectacle. No element of the ludicrous disturbed our minds as others have sometimes been impressed. While the grief of the mother stirred our sympathies, the affectation of sorrow by others was only what we have witnessed in civilized lands, where sometimes a long row of carriages and a profusion of crape and costly silver handles to a casket mean nothing except that the funeral must be fashionable, although perhaps the most of the people in the procession are glad the old man is at last dead, for now there will be a distribution of his property.
Lake Galilee.
After having had on our breakfast-table fish from Galilee, like that which Christ gave broiled to his disciples after their night of” poor luck” in fishing, I spread my overcoat on the snow-white pebbles of the lake and began to read the Poems of the Evangelists, descriptive of what took place on or near these waters, more sacred than any that ever gleamed in any other bowl, whether of Divine or human sculpturing. A sail boat glides near, but as there is no wind, the sails are down and the oars propel the prow through the splattering crystal. Again Christ walks this lake, and He comes to me in a feeling of peace which He only can breathe into the soul. We can understand now how high winds can lift this lake. The canons, as they are called in Colorado, or the wadys as they are called in Palestine, are invitations to hurricanes. East night, from a calm that moved not a tassel of our tent, in one minute there rushed by a wind that tested every rope and pole of our encampment to the utmost, and blew away from the front of our tent, not only the coals of our bonfire, but the ashes and the wood, and caused a fright of some of our group which called the dragoman, who prophesied that in
C.KOf P wK MuIjKkN GaI.II.KANS.
twenty minutes it would be over, and sure enough in about that time there was not enough atmospheric motion to flutter a feather.
We are camped near the village of Tiberias. Many of the Lives of Christ say that Christ was never here. The Bible does not say He ever visited Tiberias, but it says: “Jesus went about all the cities and villages, “and I have no doubt He visited this city, which was second to none in importance. Some authors say Christ did not come to Tiberias because it was populated by a ver>’ degraded people. This was the very reason that would have brought Him here; the worse the disease, the more need of a doctor. Yes, Christ was here! What more can God in His goodness grant me in the way of natural scenery and religious opportunity than that I should see this lake? I have walked its banks, read the Book of Luke in its presence, worshiped a whole Sabbath at its crystal altars, bathed in its depths, letting the sacred floods roll over me, and to-morrow will sail on its surface. When I first thought of coming to Palestine, I went to the Tourist Company in New York and, unrolling the map of the Holy Land, I took my pencil and made on it two circles, saying,” I may not have time to see all the Holy Land, but those two regions I must see.” One circle was swept around Jerusalem and its approximates, the other circle around Lake Galilee and its approximates. I thank God that I have compassed what I came for and much
beside.
A Ride on the Lake, and a Storm.
Now, on Monday morning, I am in a boat on Lake Galilee. One sail up and four oars plying. It has been raining in the night and a fog hangs over the waters, but the fine lace veil of the morning mist is lifted and the Gadarene shore on one side and the Tiberias Hills on the other are coming to revelation and look like the banks of the Hudson in late September, after the frosts have. put their diligent and skillful pencil upon the foliage. Yes, on the right hand side are the very hills down which the swine ran when possessed of the devil. You see that Satan is a spirit of bad taste. Why did he not say,” Let me go into these birds,” whole flocks of which fly over Galilee? No, that would have been too high. * ‘Why not let me go into the sheep which wander over these hills?” No, that would have been too gentle.” Rather let me go into these swine. I want to be with the denizens of the mire. I want to associate with the inhabitants of the filth. Great is mud. I prefer bristles to wings. I would rather root than fly. I like snout better than wing.”
But the most of the memories of this sheet of water and its surroundings are elevating. What a sedative to Christ must have been a look at this lake after the hard religious work of the day. The air off the waters cooled His hot brow. Up and down these banks our Lord walked, and the best society He ever had was when He was alone with the mountains and the sea. But suddenly, this Monday morning, the winds rise, and our boat begins to rock. Never before in any waters have I seen such a change in five minutes. The oarsmen toil hard at their places. Fortunately we are near our landing at Capernaum. If the winds and the waves increase for the next half hour as they have in the last ten niinutes, and we were still out, our craft would be unmanageable and we would have to cry as did the disciples on the same lake, “Lord, save, or we perish.” While our boat is thumping on the rocks, some of our oarsmen plunge waist deep in the water and carry ashore those of our party who do not wish to wade. All is well. Peace, be still.
Few people see the ruins of Capernaum to advantage, for in spring and summer tall weeds cover the entire place, and snakes, undisturbed, crawl over the beautiful sculpturing of the fallen architecture. But now the old city has its gloves off and gives us its bare hand as we approach it. We climb over the stones of the synagogue where Christ preached oftener than in any other building and which might have been called the scene of His pastorate. There, on one of the
RURAI, SCENERY OK GALILEE.
fallen walls, I saw the ancient sculpturing, representing a pot 01 manna, to which
the people may have pointed when they said to Christ, “Our fathers did eat
manna in the desert,” and Christ replied,” My Father giveth you the true bread
iron heaven.”
The Mount of Transfiguration.
We are ending our Palestine journey. We will, in a few hours, pass into Syria and to Damascus, and then to Bevrout, and so homeward. Two more nights in tent. We have had all the conveniences and comforts of the most improved modern travel. Every evening in the long march we have found lires builded, tents spread and warm food ready, for the reason that most of our caravan starts an hour and a half earlier in the morning. We detain only two mules for carrying so much of our baggage as we might incidentally need, and a tent for a noonday luncheon. We are encamped now by Lake Meroni, in proximity to which Joshua fought his last great battle, scattering the allied kings in such utter rout as only an army experiences when the I^ord comes down in all His might against them. This is the place where the horses were hamstrung. Mount Hermon is in sight, on its brow a crystal coronet of ice and snow, for it is winter now. But in April these snows will melt and the dew will take its place. “As the dew of Hermon and as the dew that descended upon the mountains of Zion, for there the Lord commanded the blessing, even life for ever more.” This Hermon was the Mount of Transfiguration then, and to-day, by the bright clouds and a rainbow hovering, it is again, in its beauty and glory and almost supernatural radiance, a Mount of Transfiguration.
A Blizzard.
This is our last day in Palestine, Farewell to its mountains, its lakes, its valleys. I feel myself worn with the emotions of this journey in the Holy Land. One cannot live over the most exciting scenes of eighteen hundred or four thousand years, without feeling the result in every nerve of his body. Beside that, it is a very arduous journey. Six and seven hours of horseback in a country which is one great rock, split and shattered and ground into fragments, some of them as large as a mountain and some of them as small as the sand of the sea. This afternoon we are caught in a tempest that drenches the mountain. One of the horses falls and we halt amid blinding rain; It is freezing cold. Fingers and feet like ice. Two hours and three-quarters before encampment. We ride on in silence, longing for the terminus of to-day’s pilgrimage. It is, through the awful inclemency of the weather, the only dangerous day of the journey. Slip and slide and stumble and climb and descend we must; sometimes on the horse and sometimes off, until at last we halt at a hovel of the village, and instead of entering camp for the night, are glad to find this retreat from the storm. It is a house of one story, built out of mud. A feeble fire in mid-floor, but no chimney It is the best house in the village. Arabs, old and young, stand round in wonderment as to why we come. There is no window in the room where I write,. but two little openings, one over the door and the other in the wall, through which latter (^utlook I occasionally find an Arab face thrust to see how I am progressing. But the door is open and so I have light. This is an afternoon and a night never to be forgotten for its exposures and acquaintance with the hardships of what an Arab considers a luxurious apartment. We have passed from Palestine to Syiia, and are spending the last night out before reaching Damascus. To-morrow we shall have a forced march and do two days in one, and by ha’ing carriages sent some twenty miles out to meet us, we shall be able to leave stirrup and saddle, and by accelerated mode reach Damascus at six or seven o’clock in the evening. Let only tho.se in robust health attempt to take the length of Palestine on horseback. I do not think that it is because of the unhealthiness of the climate in the
ROAD BKTWKKN JKRUSALKM AND JICRICHO AS IT APPKARS AT THK PRICSHNT DAY.
Holy Land that so many have sickened and died while here, or afterwards, but because of the fatigues. The number of miles gives no indication of the exhaustions of the way. A hundred and fifty miles in Palestine and Syria on horseback demand as much physical strength as four hundred miles on horseback in regions of easy travel. I am to-night in good health notwithstanding the terrible journey; and seated by a fire, the smoke of which, finding no appropriate place of escape, takes lodgment in my nostrils and eyes. For the first time in my life I realize that chimneys are a luxury but not a necessity. The only adornments in this room are representations of two tree branches in the mud of the wall, a circle supposed to mean a star, a bottle hung from the ceiling, and about twelve indentations in the wall, to be used as mantels, for anything that may be placed there. This storm is not a surprise, for through pessimistic prophets we have expected that at this season we should have rain and snow and hail throughout our journey.
For the most part it has been a bright and tonic atmosphere, and not a moment has our journey been hindered. Gratitude to God is to-night the prominent emotion. “Bless the I^ord, O our souls, who redeemeth our lives
from destruction.”
On the Way to Damascus.
During the night the storm ceased and the next morning we rose at five o’clock, and at six o’clock were in the insufiicient light feeling for the stirrups of our saddles. We are on the road to Damascus. Before night we will pass the place were Saul was unhorsed at the flash of the supernal light, and will enter that city, the mere name of which is full of suggestiveness, solemnity and historical agitation. We do not want on the journey to be flung to the earth, but oh, for some great spiritual blessing, brighter than any noonday sun, and a new preparation for usefulness!
At six o’clock this evening we arrive at Damascus. The long horseback ride through Palestine is ended. A carriage met us twenty miles out and brought us to the city. The impressions one receives as he rides along the walled gardens of the place are different from those produced by any other city. To-morrow we will explore and see for ourselves the place about which we have heard and read so much, the oldest cit)’ under the sun.
Our first night past in Damascus, we were up early and abroad, and afl;er some days of tarrying here, feel that we have seen Damascus, the “street called Straight,” along which good Ananias went to meet Saul, the site of the palace of Naaman, the leper, the river Abana, as the other day we saw Pharpar, and have from the northwest of the city gazed upon this ancient metropolis that has had so much to do with the history of the world. The bazaars of this place could entertain us for weeks and months, but all these styles of articles have become a a part of American bric-a-brac, or gone into the furniture and upholstery- of the American parlor. Yet the people are as they have always been. No change in their headwear or sashes, or baggy and profuse coverings of their limbs. No one can imagine what Damascus is. Unlike all others in architecture, in merchandise, in general and minute appearance, it is worth while to cross the Atlantic and Europe to see it. Though it has been a place of battle and massacre and of ancient affluence and splendor, as well of present prosperity, to the Christian its chief po FROM MANGER TO THRONE
attraction arises from the fact that here the scales fell from Paul’s eyes, and that chief of apostles here began that mission which will not end until heaven is peopled with ransomed spirits. We took diligence from Damascus to Beyrout, a fourteen hours’ journey, rain-washed, crowded and uncomfortable.
At Beyrout.
Christmas we spent in Beyrout, and I preached in the Scotch Presbyterian chapel of that city. The majority of the audience were Syrians, but they all understood English, and a more attentive people I never addressed. The music was superb, solos, anthems and congregational singing. I will never forget the kindness of Dr. Bliss, the President of the college ‘and the illustrious educator; nor Dr. Jessup, the renowned missionary, and moderator in 1883 of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in the United States, and a mighty agent for the transference of the best of Christian literature into Arabic; nor Dr. Post, the surgeon, the botanist, the Christian philosopher and prince of Christian workers. We diiied at the hospitable home of Dr. Jessup and became acquainted with his lovely and accomplished family. It was an American Christmas dinner. At four o’clock we ‘went on the steamer Minerva bound for Constantinople.
The next morning we found ourselves off the island of Cyprus. We took a
boat and went ashore for three hours, visited the excavations from which Cesnola
took his famous collection of antiquities, and walked the strange streets in which
Paul and Barnabas went up and down when here preaching Christ to the people.
At midnight we stopped at the island of Rhodes, staying on deck to catch a
glimpse of it. The Colossus was not standing there to greet us, for it long agO’
fell and was broken up and sold, and nine hundred camels carried it away. We
were not permitted to go ashore, but saw lights and nine boats came out to take
freight and to bring three passengers. The next day we sailed by Coos. We
noticed the wonderful consecutiveness in the statement in Acts xxi. The order
of scenery is accurately observed. We are going in the opposite direction to that
which Paul traveled. So it is with us Syria, Cyprus, Rhodes, Coos, Ephesus;
while with him it was Ephesus, Coos, Rhodes, Cyprus, Syria. The record says
that he left Cyprus on the left hand. We, coming in the opposite direction, left it
on the right hand.
The Isle of Patmos.
We are approaching Patmos, the island of vision, where Domitian’s prisoner and exile was given to see all the victories and all the woes, and all the horrors and all the raptures of earth and heaven going by him in a panorama, pleasing and blistered, and blackened and illumined. The evangel John has made that island the most famous of all earthly islands. Not Scio in which Homer lived, nor Samos the birthplace of Pythagoras, nor Coos in which Hippocrates was born, nor Rhodes in which the Colossus stood, nor St. Helena where Napoleon died, nor Guernsey in which Victor Hugo was banished, has been so famous either on earth or in heaven. Patmos is a rock sheer down, a plateau at the top reaching to the foot of another rock, that lifts its bare forehead to great height, then a long line of rock, sinking, rising, growing more defiant or subsiding into valleys in which there is no verdure, but oidy desolation and barrenness are
BEYRoxrr. cradled. The island is a place where an evangelist and other offenders against sinful authority might easily be starved. John’s condition suggested no doubt much of the imagery of his inspired dream. As the famished are apt to dream of food, John writes of the deliverance of the righteous, saying, “They shall hunger no more.” Plenty of water but most of it salt, the hot tongue of the evangelist thought of the liquid supplies of heaven, saying, “They shall thirst no more.” The waves to-day are in commotion. A high wind is blowing the billows of the Mediterranean against the blufifs of Patnios, and each wave has a voice and all the waves together make a chorus, and so they may have done in John’s time and become symbols of the multitudinous anthems of heaven, and he says they are” like the voice of many waters.” But this morning the Mediterranean was very smooth. The waters were crystal and the sunlight seemed to set them on fire, and there was a mingling of white light and intense flame, and so some day while John looked out from his cavern home in yonder hillside he may have been led thereby to think of the splendors before the throne, and he speaks of them as the “sea of glass mingled with fire.”
On to Ephesus.
Arriving at Smyrna we disembark and enter a rail-train for Ephesus. From the depot of that city we took horse and went first to the ruins of one of the seven churches of Asia, then to the theatre, then to the gymnasium. The interest in Ephesus is surpassed by no other city, so intensely apostolic, Pauline and Johannian. Imagine our feelings when we stood in the theatre where Paul “fought with beasts at Ephesus,” for I suppose he had such contest literally as well as figurativel)^
Embarking again, the next place we went ashore was at the island of Mitylene. The Greek consul took us to see the city and introduced us to the archbishop of the Greek Church and the governor of the island at their residences. We visited also the ancient fort. I felt quite at home when I found many of my sermons on the table of the consul. We sailed along by Troas, the place where Paul left his overcoat. This persuades me that it was not at this season of the year he visited that place. No man would either forget or leave his overcoat in cold, crisp weather like that of this morning. ‘YotL remember he wrote” The cloak which I left at Troas bring with thee, and the books, but especially the
parchments.”
Tradition, History and Fact.
Are the places that I see in Palestine and Syria and the Mediterranean isles the genuine” places of Christly, patriarchal and apostolic association? Many of them are not, and many of them are. We have no sympathy with the bedwarfing of tradition. There are traditions contradicted by their absurdity, but if for several generations a sensible tradition goes on in regard to events connected with certain places, I am as certain of the localities as though pen and document had fixed them. Indeed, sometimes tradition is more to be depended on than written communication. A writer may, for bad purposes, misrepresent, misconstrue, misstate, but reasonable traditions concerning places connected with great events are apt to be true. I have no more doubt concerning the place on which Christ was crucified, or in which Christ was buried, than I have about the fact that our
Lord was slain and entombed. 13ut suppose traditions contradict each other?
Then try them, test them, compare them as you do documents. It is no more
difficult to separate traditions, true and false, than apocryphal books from inspired
books. Do not use the word tradition as a synonym for delusion. There is a
surplus of Christian infidels traveling the Holy Land who are from scalp to heel
surcharged with unbeliefs. A tradition may be as much divinely inspired as a
book. The scenery of Palestine is interjoined, intertwisted and interlocked with
the Scriptural occurrences. The learned Ritter, who has never been charged with
any weakness of incredulity, writes:” No one can trace without joy and wonder
the verification which geography pays to the history of the Holy Land.”
When the brilliant Renan went to Palestine he was stuffed with enough
incredulity to make a dozen Thomas Paines, and yet he gives the following
experience:” The marvelous harmony of the evangelical picture with the
countr>’ which serves as its frame, were to me a revelation. I had before my eyes
a fifth gospel, mutilated but still legible; and ever afterwards, in the recitals of
Matthew and Mark, instead of an abstract being that one would say had never
existed, I saw a wonderful human figure live and move.” So said an unbeliever.
In this, my visit to Palestine, in the year of our Lord 1889-90, I also find the
landscape a commentary. The rivers, the mountains, the valleys, the lakes, the
rocks, the trees, the costumes of the Holy Land, agree with Matthew arf3 Mark
and Luke and John. The geography and topography are the background of the
Gospel pictures. They carry a different part of the same song. Admit Palestine
and you admit the New Testament. A distinguished man, years ago, came here
and returned, and wrote: “I went to Palestine an infidel, and came home a
Christian.” My testimony will be, that I came to Palestine a firm believer in the
Bible, and return a thousand-fold more confirmed in the Divinity of the Holy
Scriptures.
Christ, the Out=door Teacher.
What I saw of the Christly and apostolic regions on this journey to the-Orient leads me to say that it was an open-air religion that Jesus founded. Indeed, the religion of the Old Testament and New was an out-of-door inauguration, .^oreseeing that the whole tendency of the human race would be toward a religion of Tabernacles and Temples and Synagogues and Churches, the two greatest things ever written, namely, the Ten Commandments and the Sermon on the Mount, were delivered in the open air. No depreciation of consecrated edifices, but all places consecrated where a good word is spoken or a merciful deed done. What were Christ’s pulpits? Deck of ship, pebbly beach of sea, black basalt of volcanic region, mouth of cavern, where mad man was inideviled; cr>’stallized wave, strong enough to uphold the storm-tamer; split sarcophagus, where death bad been undone; the wilderness, where a boy became the connni.ssary or provider
HOUSES BintT UPON THE WALI.S OF DAMASCUS.*
*This engraving
shows the manner
in which houses or
apartments are
built upon the walls
of the city, and
also the method of
communication by
.basket and rope,
the latter being the
means by which
St. Paul escaped
the fury of his enemies.
(9 J)
for a whole army of iniprovidents. You see the world needed a portable religion, one that the business man could take along the street, the farmer to the field, and the mechanic to the house-scaffolding, and the soldier in the long march and the sailor in the ratlines; a religion for the sheaf-binding and the corn-husking, for the plow, for the adze, for the pick-axe, for the hammer. What a rebuke to the man who worships in the church and cheats in the store, serving God one day of the week and the devil six. On Sunday night he leaves his religion in the pew and shuts the pew-door, saying: “Good-bye, Religion, I will be back next Sunday.” A religion that you do not take with you wherever you go is not the open-air religion of which our Lord was the founder.
Indeed, I have found a new Bible. I found it in the Holy Land and the Grecian Archipelago. A new Book of Genesis, since I saw where Abraham and Lot separated, and Joseph was buried. A new Book of Exodus, since I saw where the Israelites crossed the desert. A new Book of Revelation, since I read the Divine message to Smyrna at Smyrna, and to Ephesus at Ephesus. A new Book of John, since I saw Jacob’s well and Sychar and Samaria. A new Book of Luke, since I read its twenty-third chapter on the bluff of Golgotha, at the place where there is room for but three crosses. The Bible can never be to me what it was It is fresher, truer, lovelier, grander, mightier!
Z”A€ U-:^iiZ^ ?.
(.96)
From
to Throne....