It seems a strange paradox, but it is a very weighty fact, that the possession of the Holy Land by the conservative Turk preserves all such tokens of the past for the elucidation of the Christian’s Bible. Were this land in possession of a “Christian” Power, I fear that the service of Mammon would soon necessitate the obliteration of these tokens so precious to our Faith. Railways, factories, mines and new towns “run” by greedy syndicates, would very soon make an end of them all. There was a Christian proposal a little while ago, I believe, to flood the whole of Palestine for commercial purposes. My ideal would be (oh, vain dream!) that some great confederation of earnest people whose God is not the Dollar, belonging to the various European Powers and America, should purchase the little Holy Land as a possession “for ever” for Christendom—real Christendom.
To-day, Thursday, we saw the “School of the Prophets,” a curious and awesome cavern in the side of the mountain. These have been quiet days, wherein I have been able to write much and assimilate the events of our glorious journey.
Looking back along these days of travel, many flitting thoughts that came and went as we journeyed on, return to one’s mind in the stillness of repose. One of the facts that have struck us most in this ancient land which is yet so fresh—so fresh in its surprises and in its stirrings of the heart—is the fact that no book of human authorship dealing with the subject is readable on the spot. You may take with you Dean Stanley, Dr. Thomson (The Land and the Book), Miss Martineau, or any of the delightful works on Palestine that have fascinated you in times gone by: you will open them once but not again. The Bible is the only book you can read here! All the others are inadequate: no man can measure himself with the Infinite. (Such books as Père Didon’s sublime Jésus Christ or Father Gallwey’s Watches of the Passion I do not consider as being of human authorship, because they are illustrative accompaniments of the Scriptures.)
The feeling I have when on the point of leaving the Holy Land is one difficult to describe worthily. We seem to have been allowed a glimpse into the other world through this sacred portal. To have stood on the summit of Olivet whence Our Redeemer ascended into heaven in the form He reigns in now at the right hand of the Father, is as though one had touched heaven itself. And then the force with which one realises certain episodes of His revealed life on earth makes one see the Incarnation so vividly that the human mind bends beneath the might of the revelation.
When I saw our boatmen the other day on Galilee pulling with all their might, but in vain, against the sudden west wind, so peculiar to that particular lake, I saw before me the fishermen of Peter’s type, dressed in the same loose garments, going through the same dangerous work that he and his fellows had to face habitually. How easy it was, with that living illustration before me, to see the struggling boat’s crew on the night that Jesus, remaining to pray alone on the mountain on the eastern shore, sent them forward to Capernaum without Him, and how easy to see them trying to make their way as described in Matthew xiv. 24. “But the boat in the midst of the sea was tossed with the waves: for the wind was contrary.” And then the divine Figure following them, moving over those tossing waves, can be imagined, approaching, full of calm reassurance, to still their fears at His apparition—“It is I, be not afraid.” The direction in which the boat was steered, the mountain whence the divine Figure came forward and overtook the boat—all now appears to the mind’s eye in powerful vividness, in the setting of land and water that one has seen.
Again, the poor demoniacs that lived in the tombs that are cut out of the sides of those same mountains “over against Galilee” (there are outcast maniacs like them to-day in the deserts, if not “possessed” as these men were),—I fancy I can see the look of the wild animal in their faces as they met our Lord, and hear the quick, wild cry of one of them: “What have I to do with thee, Jesus, Son of the most high God?”—and the hoarse answer to Christ’s question, “My name is Legion!” I have before me the recollection of a strange creature I saw running out of a sepulchral chamber in a ruined temple on the Upper Nile, like the incarnation of Satan in some of the Old Masters’ pictures: the head bald, and of the same cinder-coloured hue as the evil face, with its large pointed ears, and the muscular body. I do not mean that the possessed man of the Gospel might have been like this dweller in tombs, but one sees strange beings in the deserts whose shelters are the resting-places of the dead.
I continue to be haunted by the feeling that the sight of the Holy Places is too easily and too unceremoniously obtained nowadays. I hope we do not feel less devoutly with regard to them than in the “Ages of Faith,” and that it is only our modern way to take these things as we do. Do you remember how history tells us that Richard Cœur de Lion, after his defeat by the Saracens some distance short of Jerusalem, falling back towards the coast, baffled in his heroic efforts to redeem the Holy Sepulchre from the Infidel, refused to look on the city which came in sight in the rear of his line of march as he and his knights crested a high hill near Emmaus? He would not look; he had failed; his eyes were too unworthy to rest upon the City of the Lord. And to-day, with the Infidel still in possession, the Christian tourist, nothing doubting, takes a good look through his binocular on sighting the same Jerusalem. I remember hearing that as some friends of ours, forming part of a mixed company,
