the hills about Jerusalem of their magnificent olive-groves, and, from the destruction of the Holy City to the present century, Southern Palestine has been a vast common for the marauding and predatory bands of Saracens and Persians, of Mamelukes and Turks, whose innumerable herds and flocks have wandered at liberty over gardens and fields, through groves and forests, consuming and destroying both plants and trees, and thereby diminishing the usual quantity of rain in the proper seasons. While to every candid mind such are sufficient causes for this apparent sterility, yet to the Christian a miraculous interference with the ordinary course of nature for the attainment of a moral end is an additional consideration why Palestine is not now what it was in the days of Moses and David. Assuming to exercise a special care over the land, Jehovah represents himself as sending and withholding rain according to the obedience or disobedience of his chosen people: “Thou hast polluted the land with thy wickedness, therefore the showers have been withholden, and there has been no latter rain.”[16] “I have withholden the rain from you when there were yet three months to the harvest; and I caused it to rain upon one city, and caused it not to rain upon another city.”[17] Hazardous as it would seem, in human estimation, to suspend the continuance of rain and national prosperity upon the continued faithfulness of human beings, yet it most evidently appears that, so long as the Jews remained faithful and obedient as a nation, just so long, and no longer, was their land blessed with prosperity; and, whenever they became guilty of defection, the rains of heaven were withheld, and their land became desolate. The evil, however, experienced by the present tiller of the soil is not the want of rain, but rather its proper distribution. Whatever effect the denudation of the country of its foliage may have had to diminish the vernal and summer showers, it is a remarkable fact that it rains more copiously in Syria than in the United States; but, commencing in November, the rainy season continues only till February, while during the eight or nine succeeding months there is scarcely a shower falls. Such an unequal distribution of rain could not fail to injure the most fertile portions of the globe.[18]