The sacramental quality of the Holy Land is of course felt most by those who seek especially for memories and realisations of Jesus Christ. Within the pale of Christianity there are several different ways of regarding the land as holy, and most of them lead to disappointment. The Greek and Roman Catholic Churches vie with one another in their passion for sites and relics there, and seem to lose all sense of the distinction between the sublime and the grotesque in their eagerness for identifications. A Protestant counterpart to this mistaken zeal is that of the huntsmen of the fields of prophecy, who cannot see a bat fluttering about a ruin or a mole turning up the earth without turning ecstatically to Hebrew prophetic books,--as if these were not the habits of bats and moles all the world over. Apart from either of these, there are others less orthodox but equally superstitious who have some vague notion of occult and magic qualities which differentiate this from all other regions of the earth. Benjamin Disraeli and Pierre Loti are representatives of this point of view. The former is persuaded that the land “must be endowed with marvellous and peculiar qualities”; and the hero of his _Tancred_ seeks and finds there supernatural communications from the unseen world. The latter tells in his _Jérusalem_ how he went to Palestine with the hope that some experience might be given him which would revive his lost faith in Christianity. He returned, a disappointed sentimentalist. The saddening and yet fascinating narrative reaches its climax in Gethsemane, where, beating his brow in the darkness against an olive tree, he waited (as he himself confesses) for he knows not what. His words are: “Non, rien: personne ne me voit, personne ne m’écoute, personne ne me répond.” The belief in miracle is always difficult: nowhere is it so difficult as on the traditional site. The earth is just earth there as elsewhere; and the sky seems almost farther above it. The rock is solid rock; the water, air, trees, hills are uncompromising terrestrial realities. It is wiser to abandon the attempt at forcing the supernatural to reveal itself, and to turn to the human side of things as the surest way of ultimately arriving at the divine. When that has been deliberately done the reward is indeed magnificent. An unexpected and overwhelming sense of reality comes upon the sacred narrative. These places and the life that inhabited them are actualities, and not merely items in an ancient book or the poetic background of a religious experience. More particularly when you look upward to the hills, you find that your help still cometh from them. Their great sky-lines are unchanged, and the long vistas and clear-cut edges which you see are the same which filled the eyes of prophets and apostles, and of Jesus Christ Himself.