It was to me a memorable night when, many years ago, I encamped, with some friends, among its ruins and watched the storm, which, as often in the days of Christ, had come up suddenly and was raging on the waters. The fishermen, Simon and Andrew and James and John, as they plied their craft of old, could see across the waves the walls of the palace by day and its gleaming lights by night. And not far away in the city of Capernaum, on the shore of the same lake, Matthew, when he was an unpopular publican or tax-gatherer, sat at the seat of the customs and took in the tribute money, which was for the treasury and government of Tiberius at Rome. It is not more than fifteen miles away over the hills to Nazareth, where Jesus was brought up; and we may well suppose that the wonderful boy sometimes came from there and looked down from the precipitous cliff into that deep natural basin where the lake lies and upon this city of Tiberias upon its bank. The shores were then inhabited by a great and busy population. About twelve miles long and six miles broad, it was then dotted by many a sail. Caravan roads connected its cities, and many races and languages were then represented there. Any youth from a rural home would take rich delight in coming thither and so getting into touch with the great outside world. And it was the scene of so much of his holy manhood’s ministry that it seems almost a desecration that the name of Tiberias should also have been fastened there. It has now little more to attract the eye than the circling banks, the rippling waters and the blue haze on the surrounding hills. Yet to the Christian student, acquainted with its past and in love with the character of Him who lived and taught there, it has taken on an interest that belongs to no other locality on earth. “O Galilee! Bright Galilee! Hallowed thoughts we turn to thee. Woven through thy history Gleams the charming mystery Of the life of One who came, Bearing grief, reproach and shame, Saviour of the world to be, God with us by Galilee!” It is thought to have been in the reign of Tiberius that the two granite obelisks, known as Cleopatra’s Needles, which in the nineteenth century before Christ had been set up by Thothmes III, a monarch of Egypt, before the Temple of the Sun at Heliopolis, were removed to Alexandria and placed in front of a temple dedicated to Cæsar. In our own time they have been carried very much further from their original location. One of them stands on the Victoria Embankment in London. The other is in Central Park, New York. The latter is 68½ feet high and nearly 8 feet wide on each side of the base. Who knows but that Joseph and Mary on their flight with the sacred child into Egypt from Bethlehem looked with wonder on its curious hieroglyphics at Heliopolis? At any rate, as it stands now in the park of an American city, it is a venerable and heavy link between the life of to-day and far distant ages.