243. Hydraulics in Palestine
Hydraulics in Palestine
Ecc_2:4-6 : ’93I made me great works, I builded me houses, I planted me vineyards, I made me gardens and orchards, and I planted trees in them of all kinds of fruits; I made me pools of water to water therewith the wood that bringeth forth trees.’94
A spring morning and before breakfast at Jerusalem: A king with robes snowy white in chariot decked with gold, drawn by eight horses, high-mettled, and housings as brilliant as if scalloped out of that very sunrise, and like the winds for speed; followed by a regiment of archers on horseback, with hand on gilded bow, and arrows with steel points flashing in the sunlight, clad from head to foot in Tyrian purple, and black hair sprinkled with gold-dust; all dashing down the road, the horses at full run, the reins loose on their necks, and the crack of whips and the halloo of the reckless cavalcade putting the miles at defiance. Who is it, and what is it? King Solomon taking an outing before breakfast, from Jerusalem, to his gardens, and parks, and orchards, and reservoirs, six miles down the road toward Hebron. What a contrast between that and myself on that very road one December morning in 1889, going afoot, for our plain vehicle turned back for photographic apparatus forgotten; we on the way to find what is called Solomon’92s pools, the ancient waterworks of Jerusalem, and the gardens of a king nearly three thousand years ago. We cross the aqueduct again and again, and here we are at the three great reservoirs, not ruins of reservoirs, but the reservoirs themselves, that Solomon built three millenniums ago for the purpose of catching the mountain streams, and passing them to Jerusalem to slake the thirst of the city, and also to irrigate the most glorious range of gardens that ever bloomed with all colors, or breathed with all redolence; for Solomon was the greatest horticulturist, the greatest botanist, the greatest ornithologist, the greatest capitalist, and the greatest scientist of his century.
Come over the piles of gray rock, and here we are at the first of the three reservoirs, which are on three great levels; the base of the top reservoir higher than the top of the second, the base of the second reservoir higher than the top of the third; so arranged that the waters gathered from several sources above shall descend from basin to basin, the sediment of the water deposited in each of the three; so that by the time it gets down to the aqueduct which is to take it to Jerusalem, it has had three filterings, and is pure as when the clouds rained it. Wonderful specimens of masonry are the reservoirs. The white cement fastening the blocks of stone together is now just as when the trowels three thousand years ago smoothed the layers. The highest reservoir three hundred and eighty feet by two hundred and twenty-nine; the second, four hundred and twenty-three feet by one hundred and sixty; and the lowest reservoir, five hundred and eighty-nine feet by one hundred and sixty-nine, and deep enough and wide enough and mighty enough to float an ocean steamer.
On that December morning we saw the waters rolling down from reservoir to reservoir, and can well understand how in this neighborhood the imperial gardens were one great blossom, and the orchard one great basket of fruit, and that Solomon in his palace, writing the Song of Songs and Ecclesiastes, may have been drawing illustrations from what he had seen that very morning in the royal gardens when he alluded to melons, and mandrakes, and apricots, and grapes, and pomegranates, and figs, and spikenard, and cinnamon, and calamus, and camphire, and ’93apple trees among the trees of the wood,’94 and the almond tree as flourishing, and to myrrh and frankincense, and represented Christ as ’93gone down into his gardens, and the beds of spices to feed in the gardens, and to gather lilies,’94 and to ’93eyes like fish-pools,’94 and to the voice of the turtle dove as heard in the land. I think it was when Solomon was showing the Queen of Sheba through these gardens, that the Bible says of her: ’93There remained no more spirit in her.’94 She gave it up.
But all this splendor did not make Solomon happy. One day, after getting back from his morning ride, and before the horses had yet been cooled off and rubbed down by the royal equerry, Solomon wrote the memorable words, following my text, like a dirge played after a grand march, ’93Behold all was vanity and vexation of spirit, and there was no profit under the sun.’94 In other words, ’93It does not pay!’94 Would God that we might all learn the lesson that this world cannot produce happiness! At Marseilles there is a castellated house on high ground crowned with all that grove and garden can do, and the whole place looks out upon as enchanting a landscape as the world holds, water and hill clasping hands in a perfect bewitchment of scenery; but the owner of that place is totally blind, and to him all this goes for nothing, illustrating the truth, that, whether one be physically or morally blind, brilliancy of surrounding cannot give satisfaction. But tradition says that when the ’93wise men of the East’94 were being guided by the star on the way to Bethlehem, they for a little while lost sight of that star, and in despair and exhaustion came to a well to drink, when, looking down into the well, they saw the star reflected in the water, and that cheered them, and they resumed their journey; and I have the notion that, though grandeur and pomp of surroundings may not afford peace, at the well of God’92s consolation, close by, you may find happiness; and the plainest cup at the well of salvation may hold the brightest star that ever shone from the heavens.
Although these Solomonic gardens are in ruins, there are now growing there flowers that are to be found nowhere else in the Holy Land. How do I account for that? Solomon sent out his ships and robbed the gardens of the whole earth for flowers and planted these exotics here, and these particular flowers are direct descendants of the foreign plants he imported. Mr. Meshullam, a Christian Israelite, on the very site of these royal gardens, has in our day, by putting in his own spade, demonstrated that the ground is only waiting for the right call to yield just as much luxuriance and splendor nineteen hundred years after Christ, as it yielded Solomon one thousand years before Christ. So all Palestine is waiting to become the richest scene of horticulture, arboriculture, and agriculture. Recent travelers in the Holy Land speak of the rocky and stony surface of nearly all Palestine, as an impassable barrier to the future cultivation of the soil. But if they had examined minutely the rocks and stones of the Holy Land, they would find that they are being skeletonized, and are being melted into the soil; and, being for the most part limestone, they are doing for that land what the American or English farmer does when, at great expense and fatigue, he draws his wagon-load of lime and scatters it on the fields for their enrichment. The storms, the winters, the great midsummer heats of Palestine, by crumbling up and dissolving the rocks are gradually preparing Palestine and Syria to yield a product like the luxuriant Westchester farms of New York, and the Lancaster County farms of Pennsylvania, and Somerset County farms of New Jersey, and the other magnificent farm fields of Minnesota and Wisconsin, and the opulent orchards of Maryland and California. Let the Turk be driven out and the American or Englishman or Scotchman go in and Mohammedanism withdraw its idolatries, and pure Christianity build its altars, and the irrigation of which Solomon’92s pools was only a suggestion will make all that land from Dan to Beersheba as fertile, and aromatic and resplendent as on the morning when the king rode out to his pleasure grounds in chariot so swift, and followed by mounted riders so brilliant that it was for speed like a hurricane followed by a cyclone.
As I look upon this great aqueduct of Palestine’97a wondrous specimen of ancient masonry, about seven feet high, two feet wide, sometimes tunneling the solid rock and then rolling its waters through stoneware pipes, an aqueduct doing its work ten miles before it gets to those three reservoirs, and then gathering their wealth of refreshment and pouring it on to the mighty city of Jerusalem and filling the brazen sea of her temple, and the bathrooms of her palaces, and the great pools of Siloam and Hezekiah and Bethesda I find that our century has no monopoly of the world’92s wonders, and that the conceited age in which we live had better take in some of the sails of its pride when it remembers that it is hard work in later ages to get masonry that will last fifty years, to say nothing of three thousand; and no modern machinery could lift blocks of stone like some of those standing high up in the walls of Baalbek, and that the art of printing, claimed for recent ages, was practised by the Chinese fourteen hundred years ago, and that our midnight lightning express rail-train was forseen by the prophet Nahum, when, in the Bible, he wrote: ’93The chariots shall rage in the streets, they shall jostle one against another in the broadways, they shall seem like torches, they shall run like lightning;’94 and our electric telegraph was foreseen by the Psalmist, who wrote: ’93Their line is gone out through all the earth and their words to the end of the world,’94 and by Job when, in the Bible, he wrote, ’93Canst thou send lightnings that they may go and say unto thee, ’91Here we are?’92’93 What is that talking by the lightnings, but the electric telegraph? I do not know but that the electric forces now being year by year more thoroughly harnessed may have been employed in ages extinct, and that the lightnings all up and down the sky have been running around like lost hounds to find their former master.
Embalmment was a more thorough art three thousand years ago than today. Dentistry that we suppose one of the important arts discovered in recent centuries, is proved to be four thousand years old by the filled teeth of the mummies in the museums at Cairo, Egypt, and artificial teeth on gold plates found by Belzoni in the tombs of departed nations. We have been taught that Harvey discovered the circulation of the blood so late as the seventeenth century. Oh, no! Solomon announces it in Ecclesiastes, where first having shown that he understood the spinal cord, silver-colored as it is, and that it relaxes in old age, ’93the silver cord be loosed,’94 goes on to compare the heart to a pitcher at a well’97for the three canals of the heart do receive the blood like a pitcher’97’94or the pitcher be broken at the fountain.’94 What is that but the circulation of the blood, found out twenty-six hundred years before Harvey was born? After many centuries of exploration and calculation, astronomy finds out that the world is round. Why, Isaiah knew it was round thousands of years before when in the Bible he said: ’93The Lord sitteth upon the circle of the earth.’94 Scientists toiled on for centuries and found out refraction, or that the rays of light when touching the earth were not straight, but bent or curved. Why, Job knew that when ages before in the Bible he wrote of the light: ’93It is turned as clay to the seal.’94
In the old cathedrals of England, modern painters, in the repair of windows, are trying to make something as good as the window painting of four hundred years ago, and always failing by the unanimous verdict of all who examine and compare. The color of modern painting fades in fifty years, while the color of the old masters is as well preserved after five hundred years as after one year. I saw one winter on the walls of exhumed Pompeii paintings with color as fresh as though made the day before, though they were buried eighteen hundred years ago. The making of Tyrian purple is an impossibility now. In our modern potteries we are trying hard to make cups and pitchers and bowls as exquisite as those exhumed from Herculaneum, and our artificers are attempting to make jewelry for ear and neck and finger equal to that of two thousand years before Christ. We have in our time glass in all shapes and all colors, but Pliny, more than eighteen hundred years ago, described a malleable glass which, if thrown upon the ground and dented, could be pounded straight again by the hammer, or could be twisted around the wrists, and that confounds all the glass manufactories of our own time. I tried in Damascus, Syria, to buy a Damascus blade; one of those swords that could be bent double or tied into a knot without breaking. I could not get one. Why? The nineteenth century cannot make a Damascus blade. If we go on enlarging our cities we may after a while get a city as large as Babylon, which was five times the size of London.
These aqueducts of Solomon that I visit today, finding them in good condition three thousand years after construction, make me think that the world may have forgotten more than it now knows. The great honor of our age is not machinery, for the ancients had some styles of it more wonderful; nor art, for the ancients had art more exquisite and durable; nor architecture, for Roman Coliseum and Grecian Acropolis surpass all modern architecture; nor cities, for some of the ancient cities were larger than ours in the sweep of their pomp. But our attempts must be in moral achievement and Gospel victory. In that we have already surpassed them, and in that direction let the ages push on. Let us brag less of worldly achievement, and thank God for moral opportunity. More good men and good women are what the world wants. Toward moral elevation and spiritual attainment, let the chief struggle be.
The source of all that, I will show you, on the day on which we have visited the pools of Solomon and the gardens of the king. We are on this December afternoon on the way to the cradle of him who called himself greater than Solomon. We are coming upon the chief cradle of all the world, not lined with satin, but strewn with straw; not sheltered by a palace, but covered by a barn; not presided over by a princess, but hovered over by a peasant girl; yet a cradle, the canopy of which is angelic wings, and the lullaby of which is the first Christmas carol ever sung, and from which all the events of the past, and all the events of the future, have and must take date as being B. C. or A. D.’97before Christ or after Christ. All eternity past occupied in getting ready for this cradle, and all eternity to come to be employed in celebrating its consequences.
I said to the tourist companies planning our Oriental journey: ’93Put us in Bethlehem in December, the place and the month of our Lord’92s birth,’94 and we had our wish. I am the only man who has ever attempted to tell how Bethlehem looked at the season Jesus was born. Tourists and writers are there in February or March, or April, when the valleys are an embroidered sheet of wild flowers, and anemones and ranunculus are flushed as though from attempting to climb the steeps, and lark and bullfinch are flooding the air with bird-orchestra. But I was there in December, a winter month, the barren beach between the two oceans of redolence. I was told I must not go there at that season’97told so before I started, told so in Egypt; the books told me so; all travelers that I consulted about it told me so. But I was determined to see Bethlehem, the same month in which Jesus arrived, and nothing could dissuade me. Was I not right in wanting to know how the Holy Land looked when Jesus came to it? He did not land amid flowers and song. When the angels chanted on the famous birth-night all the fields of Palestine were silent. The glowing skies were answered by gray rocks. As Bethlehem stood against a bleak and wintry sky, I climbed up to it, as through a bleak wintry sky Jesus descended upon it. His way down was from warmth to chill, from bloom to barrenness, from everlasting June to a sterile December. If I were going to Palestine as a botanist, and to study the flora of the land, I would go in March; but I went as a minister of Christ to study Jesus, and so I went in December. I wanted to see how the world’92s front door looked when the heavenly Stranger entered it.
The town of Bethlehem, to my surprise, is in the shape of a horseshoe, the houses extending clear on to the prongs of the horseshoe, the whole scene more rough and rude than can be imagined. Verily, Christ did not choose a soft, genial place in which to be born. The gate through which our Lord entered this world was a gate of rock, a hard, cold gate; and the gate through which he departed was a swing-gate of sharpened spears. We enter a gloomy church built by Constantine over the place in which Jesus was born. Fifteen lamps burning day and night, and from century to century, light our way to the spot which all authorities’97Christian and Jew and Mohammedan’97agree upon as being the place of our Saviour’92s birth, and covered by a marble slab, marked by a silver star sent from Vienna, and the words: ’93Here Jesus Christ was born of the Virgin Mary.’94 But standing there, I thought, though this is the place of the nativity, how different the surroundings of the wintry night in which Jesus came! At that time it was a khan or a cattle-pen. I visited one of these khans now standing and looking just as in Christ’92s time. We rode in under the arched entrance and dismounted. We found the building of stone and around an open square without roof. The building is more than two thousand years old. It is two stories high. In the center are camels, horses and mules. Caravans halt here for the night, or during a long storm. The open square is large enough to accommodate a whole herd of cattle, a flock of sheep, or caravan of camels. The neighboring Bedouins here find market for their hay, straw and meats. Off from this center there are twelve rooms for human habitation. The only light is from the door. I went into one of these rooms and found a woman cooking the evening meal. There were six cows in the same room. On a little elevation there was some straw, where the people sat and slept when they wished to rest. It was in a room similar to that our Lord was born.
This was the cradle of a king, and yet what cradle ever held so much? Civilization! Liberty! Redemption! Your pardon and mine! Your peace and mine! Your heaven and mine! Cradle of a universe! Cradle of a God! The gardens of Solomon we had visited were a type of what all the world will be when this illustrious Personage now born shall have completed his mission. The horses of finest limb and gayest champ of bit and sublimest arch of neck that ever brought Solomon down to these adjoining gardens, were but a poor type of the horse upon which this Conqueror, born in the barn, shall ride, when, according to apocalyptic vision, all the ’93armies of heaven shall follow him on white horses.’94 The waters that rush down these hills into yonder three great reservoirs of rock, and then pour in marvelous aqueduct into Jerusalem till the brazen sea is full, and the baths are full, and Siloam is full, are only an imperfect type of the rivers of delight which, as the result of this great One’92s coming, shall roll on for the slaking of the thirst of all nations. The palace of Lebanon cedar, from which the imperial cavalcade passed out in the early morning, and to which it returned with glowing cheek and jingling harness and lathered sides, is feeble of architecture compared with the House of Many Mansions into which this One born this winter month on these bleak heights shall conduct us when our sins are all pardoned, our battles all fought, our tears all wept, our work all done.
Standing here at Bethlehem, do you not see that the most honored thing in all the earth is the cradle? To what else did loosened star ever point? To what else did heaven lower balconies of light filled with chanting immortals? The way the cradle rocks, the world rocks. God bless the mothers all the world over! The cradles decide the destinies of nations. In ten thousand of them are, this moment, the hands that will yet give benediction of mercy or hurl bolts of doom; the feet that will mount the steeps toward God or descend the blasted way; the lips that will pray or blaspheme. Oh, the cradle! It is more tremendous than the grave! Where are most of the leaders of the twentieth century soon to dawn upon us? Are they on thrones? No. In chariots? No. In pulpits? No. In forums? No. In senatorial halls? No. In counting-houses? No. They are in the cradle. The most tremendous thing in the universe, and next to God, is to be a mother. Lord Shaftesbury said: ’93Give me a generation of Christian mothers and I will change the whole phase of society in twelve months.’94 Oh, the cradle! Forget not the one in which you were rocked. Though old and worn-out, that cradle may be standing in the attic or barn; forget not the foot that swayed it, the lips that sang over it, the tears that dropped upon it, the faith in God that made way for it. The boy, Walter Scott, did well when he spent the first five-guinea piece he ever earned on a present to his mother. Dishonor not your cradle, though it may, like the one my sermon celebrates, have been a cradle in a barn; for I think it was a Christian cradle. That was a great cradle in which Martin Luther lay, for from it came forth the reformation of the sixteenth century. That was a great cradle in which Daniel O’92Connell lay, for from it came forth an eloquence that will be inspiring while men have eyes to read or ears to hear. That was a great cradle in which Washington lay, for from it came forth the happy deliverance of a nation. That was a great cradle in which John Howard lay, for from it came forth a mercy that will not cease until the last dungeon gets the Bible and light and fresh air. Great cradles in which the Chrysostoms and the John Knoxes and the John Masons lay, for from them came forth an all-conquering evangelization. But the greatest cradle in which child ever slept or woke, laughed or cried, was the cradle over which Mary bent, and to which the wise men brought frankincense, and upon which the heavens dropped song. Had there been no manger, there had been no cross; had there been no Bethlehem, there had been no Golgotha; had there been no Incarnation, there had been no Ascension; had there been no start, there had been no close.
Standing in the silent khan of a Saviour’92s humiliation, and seeing what he did for us, I ask what have we done for him. ’93There is nothing I can do,’94 says one. As Christmas was approaching, a good woman in the village church said to a group of girls in lowly and straightened circumstances: ’93Let us all now do something for Christ.’94 After the day was over the good woman asked the group to tell her what they had done. One said: ’93I could not do much, for we are very poor, but I had a beautiful flower I had carefully trained in our home, and I thought much of it, and I put that flower on the church altar.’94 And! another said: ’93I could not do much, for we are very poor, but I can sing a little, and so I went down to a poor, sick woman in the lane, and sang as well as I could, to cheer her up, a Christmas song.’94 ’93Well, Helen, what did you do?’94 She replied: ’93I could not do much, but I wanted to do something for Christ, and so I went into the church, after the people who had been adorning the altar had left, and I scrubbed down the back altar stairs.’94 Beautiful! I warrant that the Christ of that Christmas day gave her as much credit for that earnest act as he may have given to the robed official who, on that day, read for the people the prayers of a resounding service. Something for Christ!
A plain man, passing a fortress, saw a Russian soldier on guard on a terribly cold night, and took off his coat and gave it to the soldier, saying: ’93I will soon be home and warm, and you will be out here all night.’94 So the soldier wrapped himself in the borrowed coat. The plain man who loaned the coat to the soldier soon after was dying, and in his dream saw Christ, and said to him: ’93You have got my coat on.’94 ’93Yes,’94 said Christ, ’93this is the one you lent me on that cold night by the fortress. I was naked and ye clothed me.’94 Something for Christ! By the memories of Bethlehem I adjure you!
In the light of that star
Lie the ages empearled,
That song from afar
Has swept over the world.
Autor: T. De Witt Talmage