Wherever the nails have torn His hands and His feet, where the cruel spear has pierced His side, these are the cracks and crevices where the roots and fibres of my heart can so fix and fasten themselves that when earthquakes social and cyclones moral shall come, I will be uprooted never. I may bow and bend with the breezes, but when the earthquakes have passed and the storms are no more; when the waves of infidelity have passed, as always passed they have and always pass they must, then I will look up smilingly in the face of Jehovah and say: “I thank thee, O God, that none of these things move me; that I can say with Paul of old, ‘I am rooted and grounded in Christ;’ that I stand now and forever unmoved and immovable, like the Cedars!”
Reader, I have just stated that Solomon secured timber from this mountain to build the great temple in Jerusalem. It is quite possible that some of the trees before me were here in Solomon’s day, and that because of their knots and roughness they were rejected by his workmen. We are told that God is building another temple in that other Jerusalem, and that our characters are to furnish the sticks of timber out of which it is to be built. We should see to it that our characters will not be rejected, but that they will be smoothed and polished ready to be wrought into that spiritual temple which shall stand throughout the endless cycles of eternity!
The Cedars of Lebanon have almost become sacred, holy trees. I am therefore grieved to find so few of them left. This long mountain range that was once covered with them is now as bare as if it had never known any vegetation. Seeing that only a few hundred of the old Cedars remain, I am reminded of the language of Zechariah: “Open thy doors, O Lebanon, that the fire may devour thy Cedars. Howl, fir-tree, for the Cedar is fallen. Howl, O ye oaks of Bashan, for the forest of the vintage has come down.” Most of the Cedars have indeed “come down,” but some of the remaining ones are splendid enough to make up for those that are gone. One of these patriarchs of the forest is forty-eight feet in circumference. Some of them rise up in their pillared majesty for eighty, one hundred or one hundred and twenty-five feet high, I suppose. Some of the largest ones are probably one hundred and fifty feet across, from bough to bough. The limbs usually grow out from the trunk at right angles. Other limbs grow out from those at right angles and so on, until even the smallest branches and twigs are horizontal like arbor vitæ, except that arbor vitæ stands up and the Cedar lies down flat like a shingle. One limb of the Cedar is very much like a square of shingles on a flat-roofed house, and when limb is placed above limb they form a roof that turns water very well, and shuts out much of the sunlight. Another peculiarity of the Lebanon Cedar is that it bears a cone something like our pine burrs, except that it never opens.
Again, I say it is a grand, a glorious, a sweet privilege to sit beneath the wide-spreading branches of these time-honored trees and read what holy men of old wrote concerning them. But the day is far spent. Amnon is saddled. I must mount and see if he proves worthy of his new name.
CHAPTER XXVI.
FROM THE CEDARS OF LEBANON TO BAALBEK.
Returning to Tents—Mountain Spurs and Passes—A Modern Thermopylae—Two Caravans Meet—A Fight to the Death—How Johnson Looks—Victory at Last—Into the Valley where the King Lost his Eyes—Playing at Agriculture—Squalid Poverty—Baalbek—Its Mighty Temples—Men, Mice and Monkeys—A Poem Writ in Marble.