28. The Judean Desert and the Dead Sea, from the highest point of the Mount of Olives 217 29. Valley of Hinnom, with Hill of Offence 224 30. The Rock-cut Tombs of the Valley of Jehoshaphat 233 31. The N.E. End of Jerusalem and Mizpah, from the Mount of Olives 240 32. The Plain of Jericho, looking towards the Mountains of Moab 244 _Sketch-map on page viii_ [Illustration: SKETCH-MAP OF PALESTINE.] PART I THE LAND A journey through the Holy Land may reasonably be expected to be in some sort a sacramental event in a man’s life. Spiritual things are always near us, and we feel that we have a heritage in them; yet they constantly elude us, and need help from the senses to make them real and commanding. Such sacramental help must surely be given by anything that brings vividly to our realisation those scenes and that life in the midst of which the Word was made flesh. The more clearly we can gain the impression of places and events in Syria, the more reasonable and convincing will Christian faith become. Everything which revives the long past has power to quicken the imagination, and site-hunters and relic-hunters in any field have much to say for themselves. Now, apart altogether from the Christian story, Syria has the spell of a very ancient land. The mounds that break the level on the plain of Esdraelon represent six hundred years of buried history for every thirty feet of their height. Among the first objects pointed out to us in Palestine was a perforated stone which serves now as ventilator for a Christian meeting-house in Lebanon, but which was formerly a section of Zenobia’s aqueduct. In Syria the realisation of the past is continual, and the centuries mingle in a solemn confusion. Its modern life seems of little account, and is in no way the rival of the ancient. In London, or even in Rome, the new world jostles the old; in Palestine the old is so supreme as to seem hardly conscious of the new. All this reaches its keenest point in connection with men’s worship; and what a long succession of worshippers have left their traces here! The primitive rock-hewn altar, the Jewish synagogue, the Greek temple, the Christian church, the Mohammedan mosque--all have stood in their turn on the same site. His must be a dull soul surely who can feel no sympathy with the Moslem, or even with the heathen worship. These religions too had human hearts beating in them, and wistful souls trying by their help to search eternity. To the wise these dead faiths are full of meaning. Through all their clashing voices there sounds the cry of man to his God--a cry more often heard and answered than we in our self-complacency are sometimes apt to think.