Palestine sits in sackcloth and ashes. Over it broods the spell of a
curse that has withered its fields and fettered its energies. Where
Sodom and Gomorrah reared their domes and towers, that solemn sea now
floods the plain, in whose bitter waters no living thing exists—over
whose waveless surface the blistering air hangs motionless and
dead—about whose borders nothing grows but weeds, and scattering tufts
of cane, and that treacherous fruit that promises refreshment to
parching lips, but turns to ashes at the touch. Nazareth is forlorn;
about that ford of Jordan where the hosts of Israel entered the Promised
Land with songs of rejoicing, one finds only a squalid camp of fantastic
Bedouins of the desert; Jericho the accursed lies a moldering ruin
to-day, even as Joshua’s miracle left it more than three thousand years
ago; Bethlehem and Bethany, in their poverty and their humiliation, have
nothing about them now to remind one that they once knew the high honor
of the Saviour’s presence; the hallowed spot where the shepherds watched
their flocks by night, and where the angels sang “Peace on earth, good
will to men,” is untenanted by any living creature, and unblessed by any
feature that is pleasant to the eye. Renowned Jerusalem itself, the
stateliest name in history, has lost all its ancient grandeur, and is
become a pauper village; the riches of Solomon are no longer there to
compel the admiration of visiting Oriental queens; the wonderful temple,
which was the pride and glory of Israel, is gone, and the Ottoman
crescent is lifted above the spot where, on that most memorable day in
the annals of the world, they reared the Holy Cross. The noted Sea of
Galilee, where Roman fleets once rode at anchor and the disciples of the
Saviour sailed in their ships, was long ago deserted by the devotees of
war and commerce, and its borders are a silent wilderness; Capernaum is
a shapeless ruin; Magdala is the home of beggared Arabs; Bethsaida and
Chorazin have vanished from the earth, and the “desert places” round
about them, where thousands of men once listened to the Saviour’s voice
and ate the miraculous bread, sleep in the hush of a solitude that is
inhabited only by birds of prey and skulking foxes.
Palestine is desolate and unlovely. And why should it be otherwise? Can
the _curse_ of the Deity beautify a land?