Crusaders built hundreds of lighter and shorter columns into their walls to thorough-bind them, so that, in Oliphant’s exact and graphic words, “the butts project like rows of cannon from the side of a man-of-war.” Which thing is for an allegory; and one of the most eloquent of all sermons in stone it is. Rome did more for Christianity than all its friends, while she was as yet its enemy. Without her courts of justice Paul would have had short shrift from his countrymen. Her roads and her citizenship gave to the first missionaries of the Cross their exit upon the world and their opportunity. Her laws gave them not protection only, but a groundwork for much that entered into that theology which conquered the thought of the world. Paul appealed unto Cæsar, and he wrote to the Romans his gospel expressed in the forms with which they were most familiar. And it was at Cæsarea that he made his appeal, doing in flesh and blood what his disciples a thousand years later did in stone--thorough-binding the walls of the building of Christian faith with Roman columns. PART III THE SPIRIT OF SYRIA In the first and second parts of this book we have been collecting impressions of the Land and its Invaders. It remains for us in the third part to gather these together into something which may enable us to realise more clearly the general meaning and quality of the spirit of Syria. In the main two things must be noted, and the first of them is religious. Whatever else Palestine may be, she is certainly a land with a God. The meaning of Syria is disclosed in her Israelite and Christian periods, whose great fact and characteristic process is the revelation of God to men on earth. All her other invasions have to reckon with that fact. Some of them were bitterly hostile to it, but they were powerless to efface it. Others were indifferent, entering Syria for ends of their own; but history shews them bent over to God’s purposes and unconsciously made the instruments of working out His will. That will brought Israel to her land, isolated her there, hemmed her in, bore her and carried her in everlasting arms on through her centuries, finally was incarnate in her life. For Jesus Christ was a Syrian, and we must orientalise our thoughts of Him before we can rightly understand the Christian revelation.