“I cannot believe that I am in Palestine,” said the young daughter of a British officer who was to see her father for the first time in four years. “I have not been able to think of it as a real land. I know, in a way, that Moses and Joshua fought here. But think of father’s fighting here, too!” The girl had expressed the thought of hundreds of others who have studied the Bible stories, become familiar with the difficult names, drawn maps and located the cities of Moses and of Paul, marked the journeyings of Christ, but to whom the land has never been a real land and its records, shrouded in vague mystery, have never seemed a part of the earth. But now we knew it to be real. We began to comprehend “the wilderness and the solitary place.” It is only about the size of my own state of Massachusetts, I told myself again and again. Its greatest length is but one hundred eighty miles and it is nowhere more than fifty-five miles wide. If I had the railways and engines of home I could cross it in less than two hours. I could travel its entire length easily in five or six. But the present train, with its light engine, on a roadbed hastily made, parts of it finished under fire from enemy guns, moves slowly. We are stopping at Gaza. Once Gaza was the largest city of the old country of the Philistines. I can almost see Samson, strong and powerful, coming down over the hill called today Samson’s Ridge, bearing the great city gates upon his shoulders while men stood aghast. I can see him too, blinded and powerless, walking the treadmill of his enemies. As I look out over the desert road, I remember the Ethiopian struggling to find the meaning of the words of the prophet Isaiah and young Philip running by his chariot, eagerly responding to the invitation to sit with him and explain the prophecy. Riding along through the dust, I can hear him talking with the ruler about Jesus and what He had taught of God and man; and, half-astonished at the quick response, I can hear the Ethiopian, as they came near to a place with water, saying, “Behold, here is water, what doth hinder me to be baptized?” But I am brought back suddenly from the long past. Men in British uniform are on the platform of the little station. They follow the mail bag eagerly, joking each other in clear English accents about the probable contents.