055. The Christ-Land

The Christ-Land

Deu_8:7 : ’93The Lord thy God bringeth thee into a good land.’94

Out of the sixty-four millions of our present American population and the millions of our past, only about five thousand have ever visited the Holy Land. Of all those who cross to Europe, less than five per cent. ever get as far as Rome, and less than two per cent. ever get to Athens, and less than a quarter of one per cent. ever get to Palestine. Of the less than a quarter of one per cent. who do go to the Holy Land, some see nothing but the venomous insects and the filth of the Oriental cities and come back wishing they had never gone. Of those who see much of interest and come home, only a small portion can tell what they have seen, the tongue unable to report the eye. The rarity of a successful, intelligent and happy journey through the Holy Land is very marked. But the time approaches when a journey to Palestine will be much more common. Thousands will go where now there are scores. Two locomotives were recently sent up from Joppa to Jerusalem, and railroads are about to be laid in Palestine, and the day will come when the cry will be: ’93All out for Jerusalem!’94 ’93Twenty minutes for breakfast at Tiberias!’94 ’93Change cars for Tyre!’94 ’93Grand Trunk Junction for Nineveh!’94 ’93All out for Damascus!’94 Meanwhile the wet locks of the Atlantic Ocean and Adriatic and Mediterranean seas are being shorn, and not only is the voyage shortened, but, after a while, without crossing the ocean, you or your children will visit the Holy Land. A company of capitalists have gone up to Behring Straits, where the American and Asiatic continents come within thirty-six miles of meeting. These capitalists or others will build a bridge across those straits, for midway are three islands called ’93The Diomedes,’94 and the water is not deep and is never disturbed with icebergs. Trains of cars will run from America across that bridge and on down through Siberia, bringing under more immediate observation that country hitherto traduced and misrepresented, and there are persons here today who, without one qualm of sea-sickness, will visit that wonderful land where the Christic, Abrahamic, Mosaic, Davidic, Solomonic and Herodic histories overlap each other with such power that by the time I took my feet out of the stirrups at the close of the journey I felt so thrilled with emotion that it seemed nothing else could ever stir my feelings again.

The chief hindrance to going to Palestine with many is the dreadful sea; and, though I have crossed it ten times, it is more dreadful every time, and I fully sympathize with what was said one night when Mr. Beecher and I went over to speak in New York at the anniversary of the Seamen’92s Friend Society, and the clergyman making the opening prayer quoted from St. John: ’93There shall be no more sea,’94 and Mr. Beecher, seated beside me, in memory of a recent ocean voyage, said: ’93Amen! I am glad of that.’94 By the partial abolition of the Atlantic Ocean and the putting down of rail-tracks across every country in all the world, the most sacred land on earth will come under the observation of so many people, who will be ready to tell what they saw, that infidelity will be pronounced only another form of insanity; for no honest man can visit the Holy Land and remain an infidel.

This Bible from which I preach has almost fallen apart, for I read from it the most of the events in it recorded on the very places where they occurred. Some of the leaves got wet as the waves dashed over our boat on Lake Galilee, and the book was jostled in the saddlebags for many weeks; but it is a new book to me, newer than any book that yesterday came out of any of our great printing-houses. All my life I had heard of Palestine, and I had read about it and talked about it and preached about it and sung about it and prayed about it and dreamed about it, until my anticipations were piled up into something like Himalayan proportions, and yet I have to cry out, as did the Queen of Sheba when she first visited the Holy Land, ’93The half was not told me.’94

In order to make more accurate and vivid a book I have been writing’97a life of Christ, entitled, ’93From Manger to Throne’94’97I left home last October, and on the last night of November we were walking the decks of the Senegal,a Mediterranean steamer. It was a ship of immense proportions. There were but few passengers, for it is generally rough at that time of year, and pleasure-seekers are not apt to be voyaging there and then. The stars were all shining that night. Those armies of light seemed to have had their shields newly burnished. We walked the polished deck. Not much was said, for in all our hearts was the dominant word, ’93to-morrow.’94 Somehow the Acropolis, which a few days before had thrilled us at Athens, now in our minds lessened in the height of its columns and the glory of its temples. And the Egyptian pyramids in our memory lessened their wonders of obsolete masonry, and the Coliseum of Rome was not so vast a ruin as it a few weeks before had seemed to be. And all that we had seen and heard dwindled in importance, for to-morrow, to-morrow we shall see the Holy Land. ’93Captain, what time will we come in sight of Palestine?’94 ’93Well,’94 he said, courteously, ’93if the wind and sea remain as they are, about daybreak.’94 Never was I so impatient for a night to pass. I could not see much use for that night, anyhow. I pulled aside the curtain from the port-hole of my stateroom, so that the first hint of dawn would waken me. But it was a useless precaution. Sleep was among the impossibilities. Who could be so stupid as to slumber when any moment there might start out within sight of the ship the land where the most stupendous scenes of all time and all eternity were enacted, land of ruin and redemption, land where was fought the battle that made our heaven possible, land of Godfrey and Saladin, of Joshua and Jesus?

Will the night ever be gone? Yes, it is growing lighter, and along the horizon there is something like a bank of clouds, and as a watchman paces the deck I say to him, ’93What is that out yonder?’94 ’93That is land, sir,’94 said the sailor. ’93The land!’94 I cried. Soon all our friends were aroused from sleep and the shore began more clearly to reveal itself. With roar and rattle and bang the anchor dropped in the roadstead a half-mile from land, for though Joppa is the only harbor of Palestine, it is the worst harbor on all the coasts. Sometimes for weeks no ship stops there. Between rocks about seventy-five feet apart a small boat must take the passengers ashore. The depths are strewn with the skeletons of those who have attempted to land or attempted to embark. Twenty-seven pilgrims perished with one crash of a boat against the rocks. Whole fleets of crusaders, of Romans, of Syrians, of Egyptians, have gone to splinters there. A writer eight hundred years ago said he stood on the beach in a storm at Joppa, and out of thirty ships, all but seven went to pieces on the rocks and a thousand of the dead were washed ashore.

Strange that with a few blasts of powder like that which shattered our American Hell Gate, those rocks have not been uprooted and the way cleared, so that great ships, instead of anchoring far out from land, might sweep up to the wharf for passengers and freight. But you must remember that that land is under the Turk, and what the Turk touches he never improves. Mohammedanism is against easy wharves, against steamers, against rail-trains, against printing-presses, against civilization. Darkness is always opposed to light. The owl hates the morn. ’93Leave those rocks where they are,’94 practically cries the Turkish Government; ’93we want no people of other religions and other habits to land there; if the salt seas wash over them, let it be a warning to other intruders; away with your nineteenth century, with its free thought and its modern inventions.’94 That Turkish Government ought to be blotted from the face of the earth, and it will be. Of many of the inhabitants of Palestine I asked the question, ’93Has the Sultan of Turkey ever been here?’94 ’93No.’94 ’93Why don’92t he come, when it belongs to his dominion?’94 And, after the man interrogated looked this way and that, so as to know he would not be reported, the answer would invariably be, ’93He dare not come.’94 I believed it. If the Sultan of Turkey attempted to visit Jerusalem, he would never get back again. All Palestine hates him. I saw him go to the mosque for prayers in his own city of Constantinople, and saw seven thousand armed men riding out to protect him. Expensive prayers! Of course that government wants no better harbor at Joppa. May God remove that curse of nations, that old hag of the centuries, the Turkish Government! For its everlasting insult to God and woman, let it perish! And so, until it does perish those rocks at the harbor will remain the jaws of repeated destruction.

As we descended the narrow steps at the side of the ship, we heard the clamor and quarrel and swearing of fifteen or sixteen different races of men of all features and all colors and all vernaculars; all different in appearance, but all alike in desire to get our baggage and ourselves at exorbitant prices. Twenty-boats and only ten passengers to go ashore! The man having charge of us pushes aside some, and strikes with a heavy stick others, and by violences that would not be tolerated in our country, but which seem to be the only manner of making any impression there, clears our way into one of the boats, which heads for the shore. We are within fifteen minutes of the Christ-land. Now we hear shouting from the beach and in five minutes we will be landed. The prow of the boat is caught by men who wade out to help us in. We are tremulous with suppressed excitement, our breath is quick, and from the side of the boat we spring to the shore, and Sunday morning, December 1, 1889, about eight o’92clock, our feet touch Palestine.

Forever to me and all our party will that day and hour be commemorated for that pre-eminent mercy. Let it be mentioned in prayer by my children and children’92s children after we are gone that that morning we were permitted to enter that land, and gaze upon those holy hills, and feel the emotions that rise and fall, and weep and laugh and sing and triumph at such a disembarkation.

On the back of hills one hundred and fifty feet high Joppa is lifted toward the skies. It is. as picturesque as it is quaint, and as much unlike any city we have ever seen, as though it were built in that star Mars, where a few nights ago this very September astronomers, through unparalleled telescopes, saw a snow-storm raging. How glad we were to be in Joppa! Why, this is the city where Dorcas, that queen of the needle, lived and died and was resurrected. You remember that the poor people came around the dead body of this benefactress and brought specimens of her kind of needlework, and said: ’93Dorcas made this,’94 ’93Dorcas sewed that,’94 ’93Dorcas cut and fitted this,’94 ’93Dorcas hemmed that.’94 According to Lightfoot, the commentator, they laid her out in state in a public room, and the poor wrung their hands and cried, and sent for Peter, who performed a miracle by which the good woman came back to life and resumed her benefactions. An especial resurrection day for one woman! She was the model by which many women of our day have fashioned their lives, and at the first blast of the horn of the wintry tempest there appear ten thousand Dorcases’97Dorcases of Brooklyn, Dorcases of New York, Dorcases of London, Dorcases of all the neighborhoods and towns and cities of Christendom, just as good as the Dorcas of the Joppa which I visited. Thank God for the ever-increasing skill and sharpness and speed and generosity of Dorcas’92s needle!

’93What is this man doing?’94 I said to the dragoman in the streets of Joppa. ’93Oh, he is carrying his bed.’94 Multitudes of the Eastern people sleep out-of-doors, and that is the way so many in those lands become blind. It is from the dew of the night falling on the eyelids. As a result of this, in Egypt every twentieth person is totally blind. In Oriental lands the bed is made of a thin small mattress, a blanket and a pillow, and when the man rises in the morning he just ties up the three into a bundle and shoulders it and takes it away. It was to that the Saviour referred when he said to the sick man, ’93Take up thy bed and walk.’94 An American couch or an English couch would require at least four men to carry it, but one Oriental can easily manage his slumber equipment.

But I inhale some of the odors of the large tanneries around Joppa. It is there, to this day, a prosperous business, this tanning of hides. And that reminds me of Simon, the tanner, who lived at Joppa, and was the host of Peter the Apostle. I suppose the olfactories of Peter were as easily insulted by the odors of a tannery as others. But the Bible says, ’93He lodged with one Simon, the tanner.’94 People who go out to do reformatory and missionary and Christian work must not be too sensitive. Simon, no doubt, brought to his homestead every night the malodors of the calf-skins and ox-hides in his tannery, but Peter lodged in that home, not only because he may not have been invited to the houses of merchant princes, surrounded by redolent gardens, but to teach all men and women engaged in trying to make the world better they must not be squeamish and fastidious and finical and over-particular in doing the work of the world. The Church of God is dying of fastidiousness. We cry over the sufferings of the world in hundred-dollar pocket handkerchiefs, and then put a cent in the poor-box. There are many willing to do Christian work among the cleanly and the refined and the elegant and the educated; but excuse them from taking a loaf of bread down a dirty alley, excuse them from teaching a mission-school among the uncombed and the unwashed, excuse them from touching the hand of one whose finger-nails are in mourning for departed soap. Such religious precisionists can toil in atmospheres laden with honeysuckle and rosemary, but not in air floating up from the malodorous vats. No, no! excuse them from lodging with Simon, the tanner.

During the last war, there were in Virginia some sixty or seventy wounded soldiers in a barn on the second floor, so near the roof that the heat of the August sun was almost insupportable. The men were dying from sheer exhaustion and suffocation. A distinguished member of the Christian Commission said to the nurse who stood there, ’93Wash the faces and feet of these men, and it will revive them.’94 ’93No,’94 said the nurse, ’93I didn’92t come into the army to wash anybody’92s feet.’94 ’93Well,’94 said the distinguished member of the Commission, ’93bring me water and a towel; I will be very glad to wash their feet.’94 One had the spirit of the devil, the other the spirit of Christ.

But reference to Peter reminds me that we must go to the housetop in Joppa where he was taught the democracy of religion. That was the queerest thing that ever happened. On our way up to that housetop we passed an old well where the great stones were worn deep with the ropes of the buckets, and it must be a well many centuries old, and, I think, Peter drank out of it. Four or five goat or calf skins filled with water lay about the yard. We soon got up the steps and on the housetop. It was in such a place in Joppa that Peter, one noon while he was waiting for dinner, had a hungry fit and fainted away and had a vision or dream or trance. I said to my family and friends on that housetop, ’93Listen while I read about what happened here.’94 And, opening the Bible, we had the whole story. It seems that Peter on the housetop dreamed that a great blanket was let down out of heaven, and in it were sheep and goats and cattle and mules and pigeons and buzzards and snakes and all manner of creatures that fly the air or walk the fields or crawl the earth; and in the dream a voice told him, as he was hungry, to eat, and he said, ’93I cannot eat things unclean.’94 Three times he dreamed it. There was then heard a knocking at the gate of the house on the top of which Peter lay in a trance, and three men asked, ’93Is Peter here?’94 Peter, while yet wondering what his dream meant, descends the stairs and meets these strangers at the gate. They fell him that a good man by the name of Cornelius, in the city of C’e6sarea, has also had a dream and has sent them for Peter and to ask him to come and preach. At that call Peter left Joppa for C’e6sarea. The dream he had just had prepared him to preach, for Peter learned by it to reject no people as unclean; and whereas he previously thought he must preach only to the Jews, now he goes to preach to the Gentiles, who were considered unclean.

Notice how the two dreams meet’97Peter’92s dream on the housetop, Cornelius’92 dream at C’e6sarea. So I have noticed providences meet, distant events meet, dreams meet. Every dream is hunting up some other dream, and every event in searching for some other event. In the fifteenth century (1492) the great event was the discovery of America. The art of printing, born in the same century, goes out to meet that discovery and make the new world an intelligent world. The Declaration of Independence announcing equal rights meets Robert Burns’92s

A Man’92s a Man for A’92 That.

The United States was getting too large to be managed by one government, and telegraphy was invented to compress within an hour the whole continent. Armies in the Civil War were to be fitted out with clothing, and the sewing-machine invention came out to make it possible. Immense farming acreage is presented in this country, enough to support millions of our native-born and millions of foreigners; but the old style of plow and scythe and reaper and thresher cannot do the work, and there came steam plows, steam harrows, steam reapers, steam rakes, steam threshers, and the work is accomplished. The forests of the earth fail to afford sufficient fuel, and so the coal mines surrender a sufficiency. The cotton crops were luxuriant, but of comparatively little value; for they could not be managed, and so at just the right time Hargreaves came along with his invention of the spinning-jenny, and Arkwright with his roller, and Whitney with his cotton-gin. The world, after pottering along with tallow candles and whale oil, was crying for better light and more of it; and the hills of Pennsylvania poured out rivers of oil, and kerosene illumined the nations. But the oil-wells began to fail, and then the electric light comes forth to turn night into day. So all events are woven together, and the world is magnificently governed, because it is divinely governed. We criticise things and think the divine machinery is going wrong, and put our fingers amid the wheels only to get them crushed. But, I say, hands off! Things are coming out gloriously. Cornelius may be in C’e6sarea, and Peter in Joppa, but their dreams meet. It is one hand that is managing the world, and that is God’92s hand; and one mind that is planning all things for good, and that is God’92s mind; and one heart that is filled with love and pardon, and sympathy, and that is God’92s heart. Have faith in him. Fret about nothing. Things are not at loose ends. There are no accidents. All will come out right in your history and in the world. As you are waking from one dream upstairs, an explanatory dream will be knocking at the gate downstairs.

Standing here in Joppa, I remember that where we this morning disembarked the prophet Jonah embarked. For the first time in my life I fully understand that story. God told Jonah to go to Nineveh, but the prophet declined that call and came here to Joppa. I was for weeks, while in the Holy Land, consulting with tourist companies as to how I could take Nineveh in my journey. They did not encourage the undertaking. It is a most tedious ride to Nineveh across a desert. Now I see an additional reason why Jonah did not want to go to Nineveh. He not only revolted because of the disagreeable message he was called to deliver at Nineveh, but because it was a long way and rough and bandit-infested, so he came here to Joppa and took ship to go in another direction. But, alas, for the disastrous voyage! He paid his full fare for the whole voyage, but the ship company did not fill their part of the contract. To this day they have not paid back that passage money. Why people should doubt the story of Jonah and the whale is more of a mystery than the Bible event itself. I do not need the fact that Pliny, the historian, records that the skeleton of a whale forty feet long, and with hide a foot and a half thick, was brought from Joppa to Rome. The event recorded in the book of Jonah has occurred a thousand times. The Lord always has a whale outside the harbor for a man who starts in the wrong direction. Recreant Jonah! I do not wonder that even the whale was sick of him. This prophet was put in the Bible not as an example, but as a warning, because the world not only needs lighthouses, but buoys, to show where the rocks are. The Bible story of him ends by showing the prophet in a fit of the sulks. He was chagrined because Nineveh was not destroyed, and then he went out to pout, and sat under a big leaf, using it for a shade from the tropical sun; and when a worm disturbed that leaf and withered it, and the sun smote Jonah, he flew into a great rage and said: ’93It is better for me to die than to live.’94 A prophet in a rage because he had lost his umbrella! Beware of petulance!

But standing here on the housetop at Joppa, I look off upon the sands near the beach, and I almost expected to find them crimsoned and incarnadined. But no; the rains long ago washed away the last sign of the Napoleonic massacre. Napoleon was marching his army through the coasts. He had here at Joppa four thousand Arabians, who had been surrendered as prisoners of war and under a promise of protection. What shall he do with them? It will be impossible for him to take them along, and he cannot afford to leave soldiers enough to guard them from escape. It will not be difficult for the man who broke the heart of lovely Josephine and who, when asked if the great losses of life in his battles were not too dear a price to pay for his victories, shrugged his shoulders mirthfully and said: ’93You must break the eggs if you want to make an omelet’94’97I say, it will not be difficult for him to decide. The prisoners of war are, by his order, taken out on the sands and put to death’97one thousand of them, two thousand of them, three thousand of them, four thousand of them, massacred. And the blood pours down into the sea, the red of one mingling with the blue of the other, and making an awful maroon, which neither God nor nations can ever forget. Ye who are fond of vivid contrasts put the two scenes of Joppa side by side’97Dorcas with her needle, and the imperial butcher with his knife.

But standing on this Joppa housetop, I look off on the Mediterranean, and what is that strange sight I see? The waters are black, seemingly for miles. There seems to be a great multitude of logs fastened together. Oh, yes, it is a great raft of timbers. They are cedars of Lebanon which King Hiram is furnishing King Solomon in exchange for twenty thousand measures of wheat, twenty thousand baths of oil, and twenty thousand baths of wine. These cedars have been cut down and trimmed in the mountains of Lebanon by the seventy thousand axmen engaged there, and with great withes and iron bolts are fastened together, and they are floating down to Joppa to be taken across the land for Solomon’92s temple now building at Jerusalem; for we have lost our hold of the nineteenth century and are clear back in the ages. The rafts of cedar are guided into what is called the Moon Pool; an old harbor south of Joppa, now filled with sand, and useless. With long pikes the timber is pushed this way and that in the water; then with levers and many a loud, long ’93Yo, heave,’94 as the carters get their shoulders under the great weight, the timber is fastened to the wagons, and the lowing oxen are yoked to the load, and the procession of teams moves on with crack of whip and drawled-out words, which, translated, I suppose, would correspond with the ’93whoa, haw, gee’94 of modern teamsters, toward Jerusalem, which is forty-one miles away, over mountainous distances, which for hundreds of years defied all engineering. And these rough cedars shall become carved pillars and beautiful altars and rounded banisters and traceried panels and sublime ceilings and exquisite harps and kingly chariots.

As the wagon train moves out from Joppa over the plain of Sharon toward Jerusalem, I say to myself, what vast numbers of people helped build that temple of Solomon, and what vast numbers of people are now engaged in building the wider, higher, grander temple of righteousness rising in the earth. Our Christian ancestry toiled at it, amid sweat and tears, and hundreds of the generations of the good, and the long train of Christian workers, still moves on; and, as in the construction of Solomon’92s temple, some hewed with the ax in the far-away Lebanon, and some drove a wedge and some twisted a withe and some trod the wet and slippery rafts on the sea and some yoked the ox and some pulled at the load and some shoved the plane and some fitted the joints and some heaved up the rafters, but all helped build the temple, though some of these never saw it; so now let us all put our hands and our shoulders and our hearts to the work of building the temple of righteousness, which is to fill the earth; and one will bind a wound and another will wipe away a tear and another will teach a class and another will speak the encouraging word, and all of us will be ready to pull and lift, and in some way help on the work until the millennial morn shall gild the pinnacles of that finished temple, and at its shining gates the world shall put down its last burden, and in its lavers wash off its last stain, and at its altars the last wanderer shall kneel. At the dedication of that temple all the armies of earth and heaven will ’93shoulder arms,’94 and ’93present arms,’94 and ’93ground arms;’94 for ’93behold! a greater than Solomon is here.’94

But my first day in the Holy Land is ended. The sun is already closing his eye for the night. I stand on the balcony of a hotel which was brought to Joppa in pieces from America by some fanatics who came here expecting to see Christ reappear in Palestine. My room here was once occupied by that Christian hero of the centuries’97English, Chinese, Egyptian, world-wide General Gordon, a mighty man of God, as well as for the world’92s pacification. Although the first of December and winter, the air is full of fragrance from gardens all a-bloom, and under my window are acacia and tamarisk and mulberry and century plants and orange groves and oleander. From the drowsiness of the air and the fatigues of the day I feel sleepy. Good-night. To-morrow we start for Jerusalem.

Autor: T. De Witt Talmage