And now let us look at another order of suppositions. Suppose the traveller is desirous of understanding something about the efforts that have been made to interpret, and to shape man’s moral and spiritual nature under a great, and, on the whole, progressive variety of circumstances, out of which has arisen, from time to time, a necessity for enlarging and recasting former conclusions, so as to include the results of the new light, and to adapt ideas and practices to new circumstances: then what he sees of the East, and of its people, will help him mightily in understanding what he wishes to understand. We are supposing that he has limited his expectations to certain clearly-defined objects, such, for instance, as the observation of what now can be seen, that will throw light on the history of the people, whose record is in the Sacred volume, on what kind of people they were, and how it came to pass that they became what they were; and on what it was in the natural order that made their minds the seed-bed for the ideas, with which, through their Scriptures, we are all more or less familiar; and on what there was in the people that made the moral element more prominent and active in their civilization than in that of Greece and Rome: that is to say, if his objects are strictly limited to what can be investigated and understood by what one sees in the East, because it is the investigation and understanding of what may be seen in the Eastern man, and in Eastern nature; then I think that travel in Egypt and Syria will not cause any shocks or disappointments. On the contrary, I think the traveller will feel, on his return home, that he has brought back with him some light, and some food for thought, he could not have obtained elsewhere. As to myself: for of course I can only give my own experience; and equally, of course, it is only that that can be of value, should it happen to possess any, in what I may have to say on this question: I now feel, as I read the sacred page, that I understand it in a way I never did before. It is not merely that I can, sometimes, fit the scene to the transactions—that is something; but that, which is more, I am better able to fit the people to the thoughts, and even to understand the thoughts themselves. The interest, therefore, and possibly the utility, too, of what I read is increased for me. I have seen the greater simplicity of mind of these oriental people. I have seen that the moral element in them is stronger, either relatively to their intellect, or absolutely in itself—I know not which—and obtains more dominion over them than over our beef-eating, beer-drinking, and indoor-living people; that the idea of God is more present to them than to us, and has a more constant, and sometimes a deeper, power over them.