=1. The Land.=--Palestine is a very different land from either Egypt or Mesopotamia. They are made by the irrigation of rivers. Palestine is fertilized by rain from heaven. In them the scenery is monotonous; they are river valleys each of which was once in part an arm of the sea, but now filled up by the gradual deposit of mud. Palestine was formed in one of the greatest geological upheavals the earth ever experienced. This was nothing less than a great rift in the earth’s crust extending from the Lebanon mountains to the Indian Ocean. The strata on the west side of this rift slipped downward past those on its east side for a mile or more. Those on the west were bent at different points in this long course in different ways, but the result of the rift itself was to form the Jordan valley and the bed of the Dead Sea, the valley which runs from the Dead Sea to the Gulf of Akaba, and that deep rift between Asia and Africa which forms the Red Sea itself. In Palestine the strata on the west of this rift bent up into two parallel ridges, to the west of which a narrow plain of varying width, ancient Philistia, rises from the sea. To the east of this rift the land remained at approximately its old level. The various ridges of the country are, on account of the birth-pangs of their origin, intersected with valleys innumerable, so that in no country of the world can such variety of scenery and climate be found within such narrow limits. _Rainfall._--This land, with all its variety of form, is redeemed from the desert by the moisture which the west winds drive in from the Mediterranean Sea. These winds in the winter months bring clouds, which, when they come into contact with the colder air over the elevated hills, deposit their moisture in rain. The Jordan valley is so warm that little rain falls upon it, but it drains the water from the rainfall on both sides of it. Just so far back as the clouds reach before their moisture is exhausted, just so far the fertile land extends; beyond that is the Arabian Desert. When the rainfall during a winter is good, bountiful crops are raised the following season; when it is scant, the harvest fails and famine follows. In Egypt and Babylonia a man could water his garden by kicking a hole in a dyke; they were lands which were watered “with thy foot” (Deut. 11:10); Palestine was dependent on heaven for its life, and we cannot doubt that this fact was one of the instruments for the training of the Israelites for their great religious mission. In a land of such variety--a land in which for nine months in the year snow-capped Hermon may be seen from many an elevated point and from the whole stretch of the tropical Jordan valley, where oleanders are blooming and mustard seeds are growing into trees--it was possible to think of God in a way that was at least more difficult in Egypt or in Mesopotamia.