Look down from these tranquil heights of Jebel Osha, above the noiseful, squalid little city of Es Salt, and you see what Moses saw when he climbed Mount Pisgah and looked upon the Promised Land which he was never to enter.
"Could we but climb where Moses stood,
And view the landscape o'er,
Not Jordan's stream, nor death's cold flood,
Should fright us from the shore."
Pisgah was probably a few miles south of the place where we are now standing, but the main features of the view are the same. These broad mountain-shoulders, falling steeply away to the west, clad in the emerald robe of early spring; this immense gulf at our feet, four thousand feet below us, a huge trough of gray and yellow, through which the dark-green ribbon of the Jordan jungle, touched
with a few silvery gleams of water, winds to the blue basin of the Dead Sea; those scarred and wrinkled hills rising on the other side, the knotted brow of Quarantana, the sharp cone of Sartoba, the distant peak of Mizpeh, the long line of Judean, Samarian, and Galilean summits, Olivet, and Ebal, and Gerizim, and Gilboa, and Tabor, rolling away to the northward, growing ever fairer with the promise of fertile valleys between them and rich plains beyond them, and fading at last into the azure vagueness of the highlands round the Lake of Galilee.
Why does that country toward which we are looking and travelling seem to us so much more familiar and real, so much more a part of the actual world, than this region of forgotten Greek and Roman glory, from which we are returning like those who awake from sleep? The ruined splendours of Jerash fade behind us like a dream. Samaria and Galilee, crowded with memories and associations which have been woven into our minds by the wonderful Bible story, draw us to them with the convincing touch of reality. Yet even while we recognise this strange
difference between our feelings toward the Holy Land and those toward other parts of the ancient world, we know that it is not altogether true.
Gerasa was as really a part of God's big world as Shechem or Jezreel or Sychar. It stood in His sight, and He must have regarded the human souls that lived there. He must have cared for them, and watched over them, and judged them equitably, dividing the just from the unjust, the children of love from the children of hate, even as He did with men on the other side of the Jordan, even as He does with all men everywhere to-day. If faith in a God who is the Father and Lord of all mankind means anything it means this: equal care, equal justice, equal mercy for all the world. Gerasa has been forgotten of men, but God never forgot it.
What, then, is the difference? Just this: in the little land between the Jordan and the sea, things came to pass which have a more enduring significance than the wars and splendours, the wealth and culture of the Decapolis. Conflicts were fought there in which the eternal issues of good and evil were clearly manifest. Ideas were worked out there which
have a permanent value to the spiritual life of man. Revelations were made there which have become the guiding stars of succeeding generations. This is why that country of the Bible seems more real to us: because its history is more significant, because it is Divinely inspired with a meaning for our faith and hope.
Do you agree with this? I do not know. But at least if you were with us on this glorious morning, riding down from the heights of Jebel Osha you would feel the vivid beauty, the subduing grandeur of the scene. You would rejoice in the life-renewing air that blows softly around us and invites us to breathe deep,—in the pure morning faces of the flowers opening among the rocks,—in the light waving of silken grasses along the slopes by which we steeply descend.