A hundred little points of illumination flash into memory as I look back over the hours that we spent beside the Sea of Galilee. How should I write of them all without being tedious? How, indeed, should I hope to make them visible or significant in the bare words of description? Never have I passed richer, fuller hours; but most of their wealth was in very little things: the personal look of a flower growing by the wayside; the intimate message of a bird's song falling through the sunny air; the expression of confidence and appeal on the face of a wounded man in the hospital, when the good physician stood beside his cot; the shadows of the mountains lengthening across the valleys at sunset; the laughter of a little child playing with a broken water pitcher; the bronzed profiles and bold, free ways of our sunburned rowers; the sad eyes of an old Hebrew lifted from the book that he was reading; the ruffling breezes and sudden squalls that changed the surface of the lake; the single palm-tree that waved over the mud hovels of Magdala; the millions of tiny shells that strewed the beach of Capernaum and Bethsaida; the fertile sweep of the Plain of Gennesaret rising from the lake; and the dark precipices of the "Robbers' Gorge" running back into the western mountains. The written record of these hours is worth little; but in experience and in memory they have a mystical meaning and beauty, because they belong to the country where Jesus walked with His fishermen-disciples, and took the little children in His arms, and healed the sick, and opened blind eyes to behold ineffable things. Every touch that brings that country nearer to us in our humanity and makes it more real, more simple, more vivid, is precious. For the one irreparable loss that could befall us in religion,--a loss that is often threatened by our abstract and theoretical ways of thinking and speaking about Him,--would be to lose Jesus out of the lowly and familiar ways of our mortal life. He entered these lowly ways as the Son of Man in order to make us sure that we are the children of God. Therefore I am glad of every hour spent by the Lake of Galilee. * * * * *