Observations of this kind enable one to see and feel more clearly what was in the minds and hearts of the old Orientals. This is true of the whole of Scripture, from the first page to the last; but in an especial manner is it true of the Psalms and of the Gospels. Before I visited the East I saw their meaning through the, to a certain extent, false medium of modern English thought. Elements of feeling and meaning, which before were unobserved and unknown, now stand out clear and distinct. I seem to be conscious of and to understand, in a manner that would have been impossible before, the depth and the exaltation of feeling of the Psalms, and their wonderful didactic beauty, the result, clearly, of the feelings that prompted them, rather than of the amount and variety of knowledge they deal with. The simplicity, the single-mindedness, the self-forgetting heartiness of the morality of the Gospel, also, I think, gains much from the same cause. I think, too, that I understand now, better than I did before, the fierce tone in which the Prophets denounced existing wrongs, and their unfaltering confidence in a better future. And as it is in great matters and on the whole, so is it in small particulars. For instance, I heard a tall bony half-grey Syrian Arab, in whose mind I had but little doubt that the thought of God was ever present, cursing the God of the Christians. It had never crossed his mind that the God of the Christians was the same as the God of the Mahomedans. Here was the persistence to our own day of the old exclusive idea. A poor native Christian at Jerusalem told me that he believed the holy places were not known now, because, in these days, men were not worthy of such blessed knowledge. The old idea again of the superior holiness of past times. And so one might go on with a multitude of similar instances. I will here give a tangible and distinct example of the change in one’s way of looking at things, and of the consequent change in feeling, which travel in the East actually brought about in one’s mind, naturally and without any effort, just by allowing the trains of thought that spontaneously arose to take their own courses, and, in combination with pre-existing material, to work themselves out to their own conclusions.