We got down from our carriage and walked slowly along, looking now at the crosses and now at the place where in agony of soul Christ had prayed for the strength to meet the test of Calvary that has made the Cross forever the symbol which shall mark the spots on earth most sacred to us. These lying out on the hillside had also been to Calvary.
A little farther on in the road we passed men in the British uniform. They had survived the terrible test of those wind-swept hills with the rain falling in torrents, the benumbing cold, the soft, thick, gray mud, the night in the open with no shelter save a little wall of stones built up with care only to be blown over by a sudden vicious blast, with little food and only the ammunition that could reach them on the backs of the pack donkeys. It was through this they had won that peaceful city lying contentedly there in the sun, even the shining dome of its Mohammedan Mosque unharmed.
The German hospice, Kaiserin Augusta Victoria, lies out on this road. It is exceedingly well built and untouched by shell fire. Although the Turk utterly demolished the mosque of Nebi Samwill and shot away its stately minaret, he turned no gun on this that was German property. Even when his airmen, flying over Olivet, knew that an enemy signal station had been set up in the garden of the hospice no shot fell upon it. “This house,” said Jamil, “is like a German castle on the inside. The tower was built higher than any tower on the Mount, the trees set out with care. The picture of the Saviour is painted in the chapel and the pictures of the Kaiser and the Kaiserin are on the long wall. It was common talk at the beginning of the war that the Crown Prince should live here when he became King in Palestine. Now it is the Headquarters for the British Army.... It is the Will of God!” he added solemnly after a moment. We took a picture of the hospice with two British Tommies standing at the gate.
We had to leave our carriage and walk to the point where the Greek Church tower looks down over the stretch of rugged upland crossed by many a wadi, over the walled-in level spaces where green things were growing, over the plains of the Jordan and the Dead Sea so blue in the distance, away to the far mountains of Moab. It was a wonderful picture at which one could look for long hours and come back to enjoy again and again. It was from this point of vantage that the relief workers watched the taking of Jericho. In the grove we found the “husks that swine did eat,” lying about on the ground. Jamil picked one of the long brown pods from the tree and under the pressure of his urging we tasted it. It was sweeter than sugar cane, nauseatingly sweet. It took no imagination to understand why one would accept it as food only as a last resort. In this grove we found the hyssop which the women at the hospice use both as medicine and for the whitening of their clothes. In a sunny sheltered spot we found violets, although we were wearing our warmest wraps.
Jamil sat down on a stone to talk with a workman while we, wandering about on the slopes of the hill, found a warm sheltered spot looking toward Mount Moriah. In all the days that we were in Jerusalem we could not fully sense the fact that the Christian was now free to visit all the sacred places, that the Temple area was open to him, that he might enter the sacred Mosque of Omar which once it had been death to enter. The Turk had gone! We took out the Book and read the old instructions for the building of the Tabernacle, read the orders for the building of Solomon’s temple and the majestic words of its dedication when at last the building was finished:—“and Solomon stood before the Altar and said—‘O Jehovah, God of Israel, there is no God like thee in heaven above or on the earth beneath; who keepest covenants in loving kindness with thy servants that walk before thee with all their hearts.... But will God in very deed dwell on the earth? behold the heaven and the heaven of heavens cannot contain thee; how much less this house that I have builded!... When thy people Israel are smitten down before the enemy because they have sinned against thee; if they turn again to thee and confess thy name and pray and make supplication unto thee in this house then hear thou in heaven and forgive thy people Israel and bring them again unto the land which thou gavest to their fathers.’” Of Solomon’s Temple scarce a vestige remains, yet Israel again is returning to the land of its fathers. We read of the visits of Jesus to the new temple which, great as it was, had so little of the glory of the old. How it must have thrilled Him, a little country boy from the village of Nazareth, when He saw it for the first time at the great feast. He seems to have had no fear, as with all simplicity He pressed near to the great doctors of learning, listening eagerly and asking keen questions, the keenest questions that can be asked—those that leap from the alert and hungry mind of a boy of twelve.
And we read of that other day when He heard the quarrelings and cursings, saw the gross wickedness of the bargainings of the money-changers and those who bought and sold the sacrifices, and cried aloud in words of burning denunciation, “My house shall be called of all nations the house of prayer but ye have made it a den of thieves!”
Little wonder that the scribes and Pharisees looked aghast at the crowds that pressed to hear as He taught daily in the temple, or that they demanded by whose authority He did these things and asked each other helplessly what they could do, since “the people were very attentive to Him,” and “the whole world had gone after Him.” In the temple courts how keen were His answers to their clever questioning designed to condemn Him, so keen that after awhile none dared ask Him any more questions. Yet when the teaching was over and, leaving the half-hostile, half-admiring crowd, He went out to the Mount of Olives to pray—then He knew that He must die.
It all seemed very real as we sat looking down upon the City. So real that we dreaded to read of the days before Him, of the hard way that the rulers of the synagogue, because of their jealous conservatism, the desire to make their own places secure, the fear lest the people should follow Him as prophet and leave them as priests, had already in their hearts condemned Him to go. So we closed the Book.
Leaving the carriage again at the Damascus Gate we wandered back past the convents, through Christian Street. The city was becoming a very live thing to us. The children smiled at us as we passed through the narrow arcade to our hotel. Oranges and dainty soft spring flowers from the valley were in our room.
“I have lived thousands of years today,” said my friend. “I have been fighting all the battles from the days of King David to the days of King George and I am weary.” I smiled in sympathy, for one does not live in days or years in Palestine but in centuries. The march of events over broken cobblestones, past walls crumbling with age, catches one in its onward sweep and leaves him breathless as he hurries on from what has been to what is, and from what is to what is to be.