The upper portion of the picture to the left is the Hill of Offence, with the village of Siloam on its lower slopes.] she is yet alive. The land is sick with ancient crimes whose blood “crieth from the ground.” The religions of the land seem to be in league with the powers of darkness for the propagation of magic lore. It is an extraordinary fact that Syria has sent forth to the ends of the earth a religion that is the Eternal Word of God to mankind, and yet herself has reverted to the religious conceptions of ancient Semitic paganism. One of the most fundamental of these conceptions was that of a religion whose essential element is not belief but ritual.[54] While in the West the free play of reason has tested and interpreted Israel’s faith, and discovered in it the unique revelation of the living God to man, the worshippers in the Holy Land itself seem to treat that same faith wholly as a department of magic lore. Certain rites have to be performed, no matter how unintelligently, and that is all. All creeds alike share the blame of this. Druse and Samaritan, Jew, Christian, and Mohammedan vie with one another to-day in the poor ambition of making the religion of Jehovah contemptible in the eyes of thinking men who investigate it as it is practised on its native soil. Much of the magic of the East is decadent or decayed religion. On rare occasions a marriage superstition may be met with, such as the foretelling of marriage destinies by tying green twigs with one hand,[55] which appears to be the creation of pure romance. But the great majority of those superstitions which hold the Eastern mind in bondage are evidently relics of pagan thought incorporated now in Jewish, Christian, or Moslem creeds, and absorbing all the interest of those who believe in them. If a Mohammedan saint’s bones flew through the air from Damascus to Mount Ebal, the Christians can match the miracle and more, for was not the very house of the Virgin carried off by angels from Nazareth to Loreto lest the Moslems should desecrate it? Magic dominates the mind of the East and explains everything there to this day. Every inscribed stone runs the chance either of being honoured by a place in the wall of a dwelling or of being heated with fire and split with water, according to the sort of magic it is supposed to represent. It is difficult to realise that the men you converse with are actually living in the world of Tasso’s _Gerusalemme Liberata_, where a dealer in black art, by his incantation, unbinds the demons of the deep to do Deeds without name, or chains them in his cell, And makes e’en Pluto pale upon the throne of hell.