“On Jordan’s stormy banks we stand,
And cast a wishful eye
To Canaan’s fair and happy land,
Where our possessions lie.”
THE RIVER JORDAN WHERE IT IS SUPPOSED CHRIST WAS BAPTISED.
It is well to walk in the footsteps of great men; so having followed Moses out of Egypt, let us now follow Joshua into Canaan. Leaving Nebo’s summit, and coming down on the north side of the mountain, we find at its base a bold spring which bears the name of the great law-giver. Around this spring of Moses the hosts of Israel, it is supposed, pitched their tents. Still following Joshua, we soon find ourselves standing on the banks of the Jordan. Ah, sacred river! How it thrills me to be here! “Thy banks, winding in a thousand graceful mazes, are fringed with perpetual verdure; thy pathway is cheered with the sight and song of birds, and by thy own clear voice of gushing minstrelsy. There is a pleasure in the green-wooded banks, seen far along the sloping valley; a tracery of life, amid the death and dust that hem thee in, so like some trace of gentleness in a corrupt and wicked heart.”
I have crossed many important streams. I have been on the Rio Grande; I have sailed up and down the Mississippi and the Ohio, the Hudson and the St. Lawrence; I have sailed on the Thames through London; on the Seine through Paris; on the Tiber through Rome; on the Rhine through Germany; on the Danube through all western Europe; and the Nile through Egypt,—and yet I freely acknowledge that I was never so moved by any stream as by the sight of this historic river. It was the Jordan that divided and let the children of Israel pass over on dry ground. It was the Jordan whose waters cleansed Naaman of his leprosy. It was the Jordan whose stream floated an ax at the prophet’s command. It was the Jordan, also, on whose banks another prophet stood and preached repentance, and in whose waters he buried Christ in baptism. John the Baptist was a man after my own heart. He came on the stage of action filled and fired with a purpose. He was conscious of a commission from God. He believed, therefore he spoke; and, as he spoke, the people left their homes and hovels in Jerusalem, Judea, and all the region round about Jordan, and flocked to hear him.
Reader, we are on historic ground. Stand here with me on the banks of the stream, and let us behold a sacred scene together. The river here makes a graceful curve towards the east, and is at this point about fifty yards or one hundred and fifty feet wide. The western bank, on which we stand, is low and level, not more than eighteen inches or two feet above the surface of the river, and gently slopes down to the water. The opposite bank is a wall of rock, rising up perpendicularly for eighteen or twenty feet, then receding beautifully in a terrace, another terrace, and another one still. Terraces rise above and beyond each other like seats in an opera-house. These terraces gracefully stretch themselves along the rocky bluff of this river for two hundred yards or more, until at least a hundred and fifty or two hundred thousand people could be so seated along the terraced bluff as to look down upon its watery surface. Let us in our imagination re-people all these terraces with the Jews of old, with their quaint, Eastern costumes, with their hard faces and beaming eyes. There they sit, rising tier above tier.