THE love and knowledge of the Holy Land were scarcely less valuable than the influence of the Bible and its language in paving the way for an understanding of Zionist aspirations. What is more natural than that the Land of _Israel_ most strongly attracted the Christian Englishman by its past history and its present condition? He could not lay his hand upon his Bible without being reminded of the _Jordan_, of the _Lebanon_, of the _Mount of Olives_. Every Sunday called to his mind the ancient history and lost prosperity of the “glory of all lands,” while the existing ruin and desolation of the country gave testimony to the truth of the Bible and the certainty of the promised blessings. While the familiar passages of Scripture concerning the Restoration were calculated to promote human effort in this great cause――for in many of these passages the spiritual application is not the most obvious, and all of them seem inspired by the vision of a real and natural return to the Land――the Biblical descriptions of the Holy Land contributed not less to the propaganda of what we may call the Zionist idea. There is no country whose geography is, if not better known, at any rate dearer to the heart of man than that of the land of which the Bible speaks. Apart from the divine character of the Scriptures, they have handed down through the centuries the earliest history of which we have any records, and have preserved for all time records of the economic, domestic and political life of a people which inhabited one of the most important provinces of the ancient world. The people and the land are no allegory, no abstraction; they are realities. They still exist, and they can be brought together again as they were in their natural condition. They are both equally typical, almost unique. There is no other country whose geographical features are so strongly marked as those of Palestine, the character of whose inhabitants so strikingly depends on peculiarities of position, soil and climate. And there is no other people whose character, history and destinies are so peculiar as those of the Jewish people.