form, this means that the Holy Land is a land of prophecies unfulfilled or half-fulfilled. But each such prophecy was an inspiration, by which the highest men saw possibilities for the nation, whose conditions the lower men failed to realise or to fulfil. Yet the possibilities were there, as to a great extent they still are there, and, as Coningsby puts it, “the East is a career.” As to what those possibilities and that career may actually be, the past history of the land may guide our speculation. Here, as elsewhere, the lines of hope for the future are pointed out by the failures of the past. The failure has been due to bad morality and disloyalty to religious faith; the hope of success lies in ethical and religious regeneration. When we sought for an explanation of the misery of Palestine we were thrown back on the ethical aspect of the case. Had the land been faithful to her high calling her story would have been very different. Never was a country honoured with so lofty a trust as hers; never did a country so often betray her trust. This was the despair of her ancient lawgiver, and the burden of her later prophets. When Christ came to her, she knew no better thing to do with Him than to break His heart and to crucify Him on Calvary. Within the century Jerusalem was crucified in turn; and soon a Christian Syria took the place of the perished Judaism. That in its turn decayed. Its creed became artificial, its spirit effeminate, and its morality corrupt. The spirit of Christianity had sunk so low in Palestine before the Mussulman occupation as to manifest its zeal by using every effort to defile that part of the Temple area which they regarded as the Jewish Holy of Holies. The young faith of Islam, fresh and vigorous, and not as yet embittered, made an easy conquest of the effete religion, which has lived since then on sufferance, lamenting its sufferings, but never realising its desert of them. To this day the Christian travelling in Syria is oppressed by the sense of its desertion. Christ has forsaken the desolate shores of the Sea of Galilee. He walks no more in the streets of Jerusalem. It is the old story--“They besought Him that He would depart out of their coasts, and He entered into a ship, and passed over and came unto His own city.”