Nothing proves and exemplifies all this more strikingly than the apparently unreasonable view of the fertility, beauty, and general perfection of Palestine which its inhabitants have always cherished. Visitors from the West are often disappointed, and as they move from place to place their wonder grows as they recall the Biblical descriptions of the land flowing with milk and honey. Allowing for the many centuries of misrule and deterioration, it still remains obvious that Palestine never can have been that dreamland of natural delight which piety has imagined. But the inhabitant views it, as Dr. Smith has pointed out, not in contrast with the West, but in contrast with the desert. We have to remember how “its eastern forests, its immense wheat-fields, its streams, the oases round its perennial fountains, the pride of Jordan, impress the immigrant nomad.” This contrast exaggerates all his blessings in a heat of appreciation. Coming in from the desert, a man sees trees and fountains not as they are in themselves, but as they are in contrast with burning sand: he welcomes them as the gift of God’s grace. The sound of wind among the leaves or of flowing water is to him truly the speech of a god.[4] To many a wayfarer the poorest outskirts of the Syrian land have meant salvation from imminent death, and so appreciation enlarges to optimism, and the very barrenness of the desert becomes a challenge to hope and faith. Streams will break forth there, as in his happy experience they have already broken forth, until the whole barren waste shall blossom as the rose. It is by such hope and faith that the tribes of Palestine have lived. There is a magnificent indomitableness in the spectacle of Jews after two thousand years of exile still celebrating their vintage festival in the slums of great cities, or in the “squalid quarter of some bleak northern town where there is never a sun that can at any rate ripen grapes.” One seems to find the key to this in that tradition of the Arabs that certain ruins near the Dead Sea are the remains of ancient vineyards. The Syrian land can never be seen but as a miracle of life and beauty rescued from the desert, and that appreciation becomes the incentive for a larger hope.