A land which, if it could be possible to sweep it altogether out of earthly knowledge, would still live in the pages of one wonderful Book, and to the readers of that Book be of all countries the most familiar and well known. Many an untutored peasant, who knows no more of the road to our own capital than the half-mile of dusty highway under his own eyes, knows of the way to Bethany, signalised by many wonders—knows of the road to Gaza which is desert—knows of that road to Damascus where the traveller was solemnly arrested on his way; and is better aware of the wayside grave where her heart-stricken husband buried Rachel, “sweet Syrian shepherdess,” and of Absalom’s tomb which he built to preserve his name, than of where the royal ashes lie in our own land. Many a humble scholar, untaught in other history, is learned in the ancient wars of Israel, and apprehends Moab, and Edom, and Assyria with a stronger sense of reality than he can apprehend the Russian hordes embattled against ourselves; and sees Pi-ha-hiroth shut in with its mountains, Egypt behind and the sea before, as no description, however vivid, will ever make him see the marshes of the Danube, though he have a son or a brother militant on that disastrous shore to-day. Strong security has God taken for the universal remembrance of that beloved country, blessed by His own Divine preference: while there is a Bible, there must be a Judea; the landscape in all its glorious tints is associated for ever with the wonderful artist’s name; and neither its wretched population nor its heathen rulers, nor all its melancholy meanness and desolation, existing now, can make Christendom forget that this discrowned city is the city over which fell the tears of the Lord.