Before the inventions
of modern science, all his countrymen used to flock hither. Then why do
they not now? Is the Holy Land no longer hallowed? Is it not the land of
sacred and mysterious truths? The land of heavenly messages and earthly
miracles? The land of prophets and apostles? Is it not the land upon
whose mountains the Creator of the Universe parleyed with man, and the
flesh of whose anointed race He mystically assumed, when He struck the
last blow at the powers of evil? Is it to be believed that there are no
peculiar and eternal qualities in a land thus visited, which distinguish
it from all others? That Palestine is like Normandy or Yorkshire, or
even Attica or Rome.
There may be some who maintain this; there have been some, and those,
too, among the wisest and the wittiest of the northern and western
races, who, touched by a presumptuous jealousy of the long predominance
of that oriental intellect to which they owed their civilisation, would
have persuaded themselves and the world that the traditions of Sinai
and Calvary were fables. Half a century ago, Europe made a violent and
apparently successful effort to disembarrass itself of its Asian faith.
The most powerful and the most civilised of its kingdoms, about to
conquer the rest, shut up its churches, desecrated its altars, massacred
and persecuted their sacred servants, and announced that the Hebrew
creeds which Simon Peter brought from Palestine, and which his
successors revealed to Clovis, were a mockery and a fiction.
Pages:
232
233
234
235
236
237
238
239
240
241
242
243
244
245
246
247
248
249
250
251
252
253
254
255
256