If their Lord was a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief, truly may it be said of them that they have been through the centuries a nation of sorrows and acquainted with grief; but the sorrows were unlike those of their Lord. He carried the sorrows, the griefs and woes of others that He might relieve them; they carried their own sorrows put upon them by the wickedness and cruelty of others until tears were their meat and drink night and day.
Behold how the prophecies have been fulfilled in respect to their land.
For centuries it has kept a sabbath of rest.
It has rested from the toil of man; harvests have neither been sown nor reaped, nor the vintage gathered save here and there as with the sword in one hand and the sickle in the other.
The land is there as a land just as it was in the days when the man of Nazareth walked by the shores of blue Galilee or trod the hills of Judah. The mountains of Moab draw their lines of beauty against the measureless deeps of an orient sky. The valleys lie between like fruitful bosoms where wheat and barley may grow. The olive trees stand dusky in the deepening shade. Pomegranate and apricot stretch forth their weighted boughs and the grapes in Eschol clusters hang purple in the slant of westering suns. It is even yet a land of brooks and fountains of waters and men may still dig iron and brass from out of its rugged hills.
Yonder in Bashan within the range of your eyes you may count sixty cities of stone, walls and roofs and windows of stone, great swinging doors of stone. The centuries have beaten the wind, the rain, the storms and flying sand upon them. They remain. They have outworn the centuries. They are silent. No footfall is heard upon the threshold. The houses are empty save for a fox, a swiftly gliding viper, or a belated Bedaween who may stable his horse in a deserted room where once a happy family dwelt in the long ago.
The stone cities are waiting and every stone in door and window seems to be crying out:
“We are waiting till they return whose right alone it is to live and dwell here.”
But what of the nations that scattered them and made them to suffer?
Where is Babylon the proud empire that took them captive; where is Babylon the golden city that saw them hang their harps upon the willows, sit down upon the banks of the strange river and give way to weeping as they yearned for their own land again?