455. The City of Damascus

The City of Damascus

Act_9:3 : ’93As he journeyed, he came near Damascus.’94

In Palestine we spent a night in a mud hovel of one story, with camels and sheep in the basement, yet never did the most brilliant hotel on any continent seem so attractive to me as that structure. If we had been obliged to stay in tent, as we expected to do that night, we must have perished. A violent storm had opened upon us its volleys of hail and snow and rain and wind, as if to let us know what the Bible means when prophet and evangelist and Christ himself spoke of the fury of the elements. The atmospheric wrath broke upon us about one o’92clock in the afternoon, and we were until night exposed to it. With hands and feet benumbed, and our bodies chilled to the bone, we made our slow way. While high up on the rocks, and the gale blowing the hardest, a signal of distress halted the party, for down in the ravines one of the horses had fallen, and his rider must not be left alone amid that wildness of scenery and horror of storm. As the night approached, the tempest thickened and blackened and strengthened. Some of our attendants going ahead had gained permission for us to halt for the night in the mud hovel I speak of. Our first duty on arrival was the resuscitation of the exhausted of our party. My room was without a window, but had an iron stove without any top, in the center of the room, the smoke selecting my eyes in the absence of a chimney. Through an opening in the floor, Arab faces were several times thrust up to see how I fared. But the tempest ceased during the night, and before it was fully day we were feeling for the stirrups of our saddled horses to begin the long march to that city whose name cannot be pronounced in the hearing of the intelligent or the Christian without making the blood to tingle and the nerves to thrill, and putting the best emotions of the soul into agitation’97Damascus!

During the day we passed C’e6sarea Philippi, the northern terminus of Christ’92s journeyings. North of that he never went. We lunch at noon, seated on the fallen columns of one of Herod’92s palaces.

At four o’92clock in the afternoon, coming to a hilltop, we saw on the broad plain a city, which the most famous camel-driver of all time, afterward called Mohammed, the prophet and the founder of the most stupendous system of error that has ever cursed the earth, refused to enter because he said God would allow man to enter but one paradise, and he would not enter this earthly paradise lest he should be denied entrance to the heavenly. But no city that I ever saw so plays hide-and-seek with the traveler. The air is so clear the distant objects seem close by. You come on the top of a hill and Damascus seems only a little way off. But down you go into a valley and you see nothing for the next half hour but barrenness and rocks regurgitated by the volcanoes of other ages. Up another hill and down again. Up again and down again. But after your patience is almost exhausted you reach the last hilltop and the city of Damascus, the oldest city under the whole heavens, built by Noah’92s grandson, grows upon your vision. Every mile of the journey now becomes more solemn and suggestive and tremendous.

This is the very road’97for it has been the only road for thousands of years, from Jerusalem to Damascus’97along which a cavalcade of mounted officers went, over one thousand eight hundred years ago, in the midst of them a fierce little man who made up by magnitude of hatred for Christianity for his diminutive stature, and from whose eyes, though suffering from chronic inflammation, there flashed more indignation against Christ’92s followers than from any one of the horsed procession. This man, before his name was changed to Paul was called Saul. So many of the mightiest natures of all ages are condensed into smallness of stature. The Frenchman who was sometimes called by his troops ’93Old One Hundred Thousand,’94 was often styled ’93Little Nap.’94 Lord Nelson, with insignificant stature to start with, and one eye put out at Calvi, and his right arm taken off at Teneriffe, proves himself at Trafalgar the mightiest hero of the English navy. The greatest of American theologians, Archibald Alexander, could stand under the elbow of many of his contemporaries. Look out for little men when they start out for some especial mission of good or evil. The thunderbolt is only a condensation of electricity.

Well, that galloping group of horsemen on the road to Damascus were halted quicker than bombshell or cavalry charge ever halted a regiment. The Syrian noonday, because of the clarity of the atmosphere, is the brightest of all noondays, and the noonday sun in Syria is positively terrific for brilliance. But suddenly that noon there flashed from the heavens a light which made that Syrian sun seem tame as a star in comparison. It was the face of the slain and ascended Christ, looking from the heavens, and under the dash of that overpowering light all the horses dropped with their riders in the dust. And then two claps of thunder followed, uttering the two words, the second word like the first: ’93Saul! Saul!’94 For three days that fallen equestrian was totally blind, for excessive light will sometimes extinguish the eyesight. And what cornea and crystalline lens could endure a brightness greater than the noonday Syrian sun? I had read it a hundred times, but it never so impressed me before and probably will never so impress me again, as I took my Bible from the saddlebags and read aloud to our comrades in travel: ’93As he journeyed, he came near Damascus and suddenly there shined round about him a light from heaven, and he fell to the earth and heard a voice saying unto him, ’91Saul! Saul! Why persecutest thou me?’92 and he said, ’91Who art thou, Lord?’92 And the Lord said, ’91I am Jesus whom thou persecutest.’92’93

But we cannot stop longer on this road, for we shall see this unhorsed equestrian later in Damascus, toward which his horse’92s head is turned, and at which we must ourselves arrive before night. The evening is near at hand, and as we leave snowy Hermon behind us and approach the shadow of two hundred minarets and domes we cut through a circumference of many miles of garden which embower the city. So luxuriant are these gardens, so opulent in colors, so luscious of fruits, so glittering with fountains, so rich with bowers and kiosks, that the Mohammedan’92s heaven was fashioned after what are to be seen here of bloom and fruitage. Here in Damascus at the right season are cherries, mulberries, apricots, almonds, pistachios, pomegranates, pears, apples, plums, citrons, and all the richness of the round world’92s pomology. No wonder that Julian called this city ’93the Eye of the East,’94 and that the poets of Syria have styled it ’93the lustre on the neck of doves,’94 and historians said: ’93It is the golden clasp which couples the two sides of the world together.’94

Many travelers express disappointment with Damascus, but the trouble is they have carried in their minds from boyhood the book which dazzles so many young people’97the Arabian Nights’97and they come into Damascus looking for Aladdin’92s lamp, and Aladdin’92s ring, and the genii which appeared by rubbing them. But, as I have never read the Arabian Nights, such stuff not being allowed around our house in my boyhood, and nothing lighter in the way of reading than Baxter’92s Saints’92 Everlasting Rest, and d’92Aubigny’92s History of the Reformation, Damascus appeared to me as sacred and secular history have presented it; and so the city was not a disappointment, but, with few exceptions, a surprise. Under my window in the hotel at Damascus I hear the perpetual ripple and rush of the river Abana. Ah, the secret is out! Now I know why all this flora and fruit, and why everything is so green, and the plain one great emerald. The river Abana! And not far off, the river Pharpar, which our horses waded through today! Thank the rivers, or rather the God who made the rivers! Deserts to the north, deserts to the south, deserts to the east, deserts to the west, but here a paradise. And, as the river Gihon and Pison and Hiddekel and Euphrates made the other paradise, Abana and Pharpar make this Damascus a paradise. That is what made General Naaman of this city of Damascus so mad when he was told for the cure of his leprosy to go and wash in the river Jordan. The Jordan is much of the year a muddy stream, and it is never so clear as this river Abana that I hear rumbling under my window tonight; nor as the river Pharpar that we crossed today. They are as clear as though they had been sieved through some especial sieve of the mountains. General Naaman had great and patriotic pride in these two rivers of his own country; and when Elisha the prophet told him that if he wanted to get rid of his leprosy, he must go and wash in the Jordan, he felt as we who live on the magnificent Hudson would feel if told that we must go and wash in the muddy Thames; or as if those who live on the transparent Rhine were told that they must go and wash in the muddy Tiber. So General Naaman cried out with a voice as loud as ever he had used in commanding his troops, uttering those memorable words, which every minister of the Gospel sooner or later takes for his text: ’93Are not Abana and Pharpar, rivers of Damascus, better than all the waters of Israel? May I not wash in them and be clean?’94

Thank God we live in a land with plenty of rivers, and that they bless all our Atlantic coast and all our Pacific coast, and reticulate all the continent between the coasts. Only those who have traveled in the deserts of Syria or Egypt, or have in the Oriental cities heard the tinkling of the bell of those who sell water, can realize what it is to have this divine beverage in abundance. Water rumbling over the rocks, turning the mill-wheel, saturating the roots of the corn, dripping from the buckets, filling the pitchers of the household, rolling through the fonts or baptistries of holy ordinance, filling the reservoirs of cities, inviting the cattle to come down and slake their thirst and the birds of heaven to dip their wing, ascending in robe of mist and falling again in benediction of shower’97water, living water, God-given water!

We are awakened in the morning in Damascus by the song of those who have different styles of food to sell. It is not a street-cry as in London or New York, but a weird and long drawn-out solo, compared with which a buzz-saw is musical. It makes you waken inopportunely, and will not let you sleep again. But to those who understand the exact meaning of the song, it becomes quite tolerable for they sing: ’93God is the nourisher, buy my bread,’94 ’93God is the nourisher, buy my milk,’94 ’93God is the nourisher, buy my fruit.’94 As you look out of the window, you see the Mohammedans, who are in large majority in the city, at prayer. And if it were put to vote who should be king of all the earth, fifteen thousand in that city would say Christ, but one hundred and thirty thousand would say Mohammed. Looking from the window, you see on the house-tops, and on the streets, Mohammedans at worship. The muezzins, or the officers of religion, who announce the time of worship, appear high up on the different minarets, or tall towers, and walk around the minaret, enclosed by a railing, and cry in a sad and mumbling way: ’93God is great. I bear witness that there is no God but God. I bear witness that Mohammed is the apostle of God. Come to prayers! Come to salvation! God is great There is no other but God. Prayers are better than sleep.’94 Five times a day must the Mohammedan engage in worship. As he begins, he turns his face toward the city of Mecca, and unrolls upon the ground a rug which he almost always carries. With his thumbs touching the lobes of his ears, and holding his face between his hands, he cries: ’93God is great.’94 Then folding his hands across his girdle, he looks down and says: ’93Holiness to thee, O God, and praise be to thee. Great is thy name. Great is thy greatness. There is no deity but thee.’94 Then the worshiper sits upon his heels, then he touches his nose to the rug, and then his forehead, these genuflections accompanied with the cry, ’93Great is God.’94 Then, raising the forefinger of his right hand toward heaven, he says: ’93I testify there is no deity but God, and I testify that Mohammed is the servant of God, and the messenger of God.’94 The prayers close by the worshiper holding his hands opened upward as if to take the divine blessing, and then his hands are rubbed over his face as if to convey the blessing to his entire body.

There are two or three commendable things about Mohammedanism. One is that its disciples wash before every act of prayer, and that is five times a day, and there is a Gospel in cleanliness. Another commendable thing is, they do not care who is looking, and nothing can stop them in their prayer. Another thing is that, by the order of Mohammed, an order obeyed for thirteen hundred years, no Mohammedan touches strong drink. But the polygamy, the many wifehood of Mohammedanism, has made that religion the unutterable and everlasting curse of woman, and when woman sinks the race sinks. The proposition recently made in high ecclesiastical places for the reformation of Mohammedanism instead of its obliteration is like an attempt to improve a plague or educate a leprosy. There is only one thing that will ever reform Mohammedanism, and that is its extirpation from the face of the earth by the power of the Gospel of the Son of God, which makes not only man, but woman, free for this life and free for the life to come. The spirit of the horrible religion which pervades the city of Damascus, along whose streets we walk and out of whose bazaars we make purchases and in whose mosques we study the wood-carvings and bedizenments, was demonstrated as late as 1860, when in this city it put to death six thousand Christians in forty-eight hours, and put to the torch three thousand Christian homes, and those streets we walk today were red with the carnage, and the shrieks and groans of the dying and dishonored men and women made this place a hell on earth. This went on until a Mohammedan, better than his religion, Abd-el-Kader by name, a great soldier who in one war had, with twenty-five thousand troops, beaten sixty thousand of the enemy, now protested against this massacre and gathered the Christians of Damascus into castles and private houses and filled his own home with the affrighted sufferers. After a while the mob came to his door and demanded the ’93Christian dogs’94 whom he was sheltering. And Abd-el-Kader mounted a horse and drew his sword and with a few of his old soldiers around him, charged on the mob and cried: ’93Wretches! Is this the way you honor the prophet? May his curses be upon you! Shame on you! Shame! You will yet live to repent. You think you may do as you please with the Christians, but the day of retribution will come. The Franks will yet turn your mosques into churches. Not a Christian will I give up. They are my brothers. Stand back, or I will give my men the order to fire.’94 Then by the might of one great soul under God the wave of assassination rolled back. Huzza for Abd-el-Kader!

Although now we Americans and foreigners pass through the streets of Damascus unhindered, there is in many parts of the city a subdued hissing of a hatred for Christianity that if it dared would put to death every man, woman and child in Damascus who does not declare allegiance to Mohammed. But I am glad to say that a wide, hard, splendid turnpike road has within a few years been constructed from Beyrout, on the shore of the Mediterranean, to this city of Damascus, and, if ever again that wholesale assassination is attempted, French troops and English troops would, with jingling bits and lightning hoofs, dash up the hills and down on this Damascus plain and leave the Mohammedan murderers dead on the floors of their mosques and seraglios. It is too late in the history of the world for governments to allow such things as the modern massacre at Damascus. For such murderous attacks on Christian missionaries and Christian disciples, we are tempted to think the Gospel is not so appropriate as bullets and sabres sharp and heavy enough to cut through with one stroke from crown of head to saddle.

But I must say that this city of Damascus as I see it now is not so absorbing as the Damascus of olden times. I turn my back upon the bazaars, with rugs fascinating the merchants from Bagdad, and Indian textiles of incomparable make, and manufactured saddles and bridles gay enough for princes of the Orient to ride and pull; upon baths where ablution becomes inspiration, and homes marbled and divaned, fountained, upholstered, mosaicked, arabesqued and colonnaded until nothing can be added; upon the splendid remains of the great mosque of John, originally built with gates so heavy that it required five men to turn them, with columns of porphyry, and kneeling-places framed in diamond, and seventy-four stained-glass windows, and six hundred lamps of pure gold, a single prayer offered in this mosque said to be worth thirty thousand prayers offered in any other place. I turn my back on all these and see Damascus as it was when this narrow street, which the Bible calls Straight, was a great wide street, a New York Broadway or a Parisian Champs Elysees,a great thoroughfare crossing the city from gate to gate, along which tramped and rolled the pomp of all nations.

There is Abraham, the father of all the faithful. He has in this city been purchasing a celebrated slave. There goes Ben-Hadad of Bible times, leading thirty-two conquered monarchs. There goes David, king, warrior, and sacred poet. There goes Tamerlane the conqueror. There goes Haroun al Raschid, once the commander of an army of ninety-five thousand Persians and Arabs. There comes a warrior on his way to the barracks, carrying that kind of sword which the world has forgotten how to make, a Damascus blade, with the interfacings of color changing at every new turn in the light, many colors coming and going and interjoining; the blade so keen it could cut in twain an object without making the lower part of the object tremble; with an elasticity that could not be broken though you brought the point of the sword clear back to the hilt; and having a watered appearance which made the blade seem as though just dipped in a clear fountain’97a triumph of cutlery which a thousand modern foundrymen and chemists have attempted in vain to imitate. On the side of this street, damasks, named after the city; figures of animals and fruits and landscapes here being first wrought into silk damasks; and specimens of damaskeening by which steel and iron were first graved and then the grooves filled with wire of gold damaskeening. Here at the gates of the city are laden caravans from Aleppo in one direction and from Jerusalem in another direction, and caravans of all nations paying toll to this supremacy. Great is Damascus!

But what most stirs my soul is neither chariot, nor bazaar, nor caravan, nor palace, but a blind man passing along the streets, small of stature and insignificant in personal appearance. Oh, yes; we have seen him before. He was one of that cavalcade coming from Jerusalem to Damascus to kill Christians, and we saw him and his horse tumble up there on the road some distance from the city, and he got up blind. Yes, it is Saul of Tarsus now going along this street called Straight. He is led by his friends, for he cannot see his hand before his face, unto the house of Judas’97not Judas the bad, but Judas the good. In another part of this city one Ananias’97not Ananias the liar, but Ananias the Christian’97is told by the Lord to go to this house of Judas on Straight Street, and put his hand on the blind eyes of Saul, that his sight might return. ’93Oh,’94 said Ananias, ’93I dare not go; that Saul is a terrible fellow. He kills Christians, and he will kill me.’94 ’93Go,’94 said the Lord, and Ananias went. There sits in blindness that tremendous persecutor. He was a great nature crushed. He had started for the city of Damascus for the one purpose of assassinating Christ’92s followers, but since that fall from his horse he has entirely changed. Ananias steps up to the sightless man, puts his right thumb on one eye and his left thumb on the other eye, and in an outburst of sympathy and love and faith, says: ’93Brother Saul! Brother Saul! The Lord, even Jesus that appeared unto thee in the way as thou camest, has sent me that thou mayst receive thy sight and be filled with the Holy Ghost.’94 Instantly something like scales fell from the blind man’92s eyes, and he arose from that seat the mightiest evangel of all the ages, a Sir William Hamilton for metaphysical analysis, a John Milton for sublimity of thought, a Whitefield for popular eloquence, a John Howard for widespread philanthropy; yea, more than all of them put together, inspired, thunderbolted, multipotent, apostolic. Did Judas, the kind host of this blind man, or Ananias, the visitor, see scales drop from the sightless eyes? I think not. But Paul knew that they had fallen, and that is all that happens to any of us when we are converted. The blinding scales drop from our eyes and we see things differently. A Christian woman, missionary among a most degraded tribe, whose religion was never to wash or improve the personal appearance, was trying to persuade one of those heathen women not only of need of change of heart, but change of habits which would result in change of appearance. The effort failed until the missionary had placed in her own hallway a looking-glass, and when the barbaric woman, passing through the hall, saw herself in the mirror for the first time, she exclaimed, ’93Can it be possible I look like that?’94 Appalled at her own appearance, she renounced her old religion and asked to be instructed in the Christian faith. And so we feel that we are all right in our sinful and unchanged condition until the scales fall from our eyes, and in the looking-glass of God’92s Word we see ourselves as we really are, until Divine grace transforms us.

There are many people today as blind as Paul was before Ananias touched his eyes. There are many also from whose eyes the scales have already fallen. You see all subjects and all things differently’97God and Christ and eternity and your own immortal spirit. Sometimes the scales do not all fall at once. When I was a boy, at Mount Pleasant one Sunday afternoon, reading Dodridge’92s ’93Rise and Progress of Religion in the Soul,’94 some of the scales fell from my eyes, and I saw a little. After I had been in the ministry about a year, one Sunday afternoon in the village parsonage, reading the Bible story of the Syro-Ph’9cnician’92s faith, other scales fell from my eyes and I saw better. Two Sunday evenings ago, while preparing for the evening service in New York, I picked up a book that I did not remember to have seen before, and after I had read a page about reconsecration of God I think the remaining scales fell from my eyes. Shall not our visit to Damascus result, like Paul’92s visit, in vision to the blind, and increased vision for those who saw somewhat before? I was reading of a painter’92s child who became blind in infancy. But after the child was nearly grown, a surgeon removed the blindness. When told that this could be done, the child’92s chief thought, her mother being dead, was that she would be able to see her father, who had watched over her with great tenderness. When sight came she was in raptures, and ran her hands over her father’92s face, and shut her eyes as if to assure herself that this was really the father whom she had only known by touch, and now looking upon him, noble man as he was in appearance as well as in reality, she cried out, ’93Just to think that I had this father so many years and never knew him!’94 As great and greater is the soul’92s joyful surprise when the scales fall from the eyes and the long spiritual darkness is ended, and we look up into our Father’92s face, always radiant and loving, but now for the first revealed, and our blindness forever gone, we cry, ’93Abba, Father!’94 To each one of this vast multitude of auditors I say, as Ananias said to Saul of Tarsus when his sympathetic fingers touched the closed eyelids: ’93Brother Saul! Brother Saul! The Lord, even Jesus that appeared unto thee in the way that thou camest, hath sent me that thou mightest receive thy sight, and be filled with the Holy Ghost!’94

Autor: T. De Witt Talmage