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XXIII. ACRE-EL MUGHAR.

Monday, March 19th. How delightful to be again in the open country! Acre is a positive prison to both soul and body. It seems to me that to read the Bible to best advantage one must be in the fields. When God would talk with Abraham, He brought him forth abroad, and abroad we must go to meet and "hold converse" with the Lord our Maker.

There is more in your thought than would be likely to strike the careless ear. The Bible is not a city book; its scenes are mostly laid in the country-its themes suggested by, and its illustrations drawn from the same source; there most of it was thought, felt, spoken, acted, and even written. We are scarcely introduced to city life at all for the first three thousand years of Bible chronology. The Pentateuch was composed in tents during Israel's long sojourn in the wilderness, and ever after, the reader of the Holy Book is led forth to dwell in tabernacles with patriarchs, or in deserts with prophets and apostles. The poets also, and sweet singers of Israel, commune almost exclusively with Nature, her scenes, and her scenery; from thence they draw their imagery, if not their inspirations. The same is eminently true of our blessed Saviour; and he who would bring his spirit most happily into communion with this divine teacher, must follow Him afield, must sit on the mountain side and hear Him preach, must stand on the shore of Gennesaret and listen to the gracious words which proceed out of His mouth, must walk with Him from village to village, and witness His miracles of healing mercy, and His tears of divine compassion. To reproduce and vitalize all this, we need the country, and best of all, this country; and if our Biblical studies "smell of the dew of herbs and of the breath of morning" rather than of the midnight lamp, I would have it so. They will be in closer correspondence thereby with the original masters, and more true also to the actual circumstances under which they have been prose

1 Gen. xv. 5.

cuted. We do, in fact, read, and study, and worship in Nature's holy temple, where God hath set a tabernacle for the sun, and made a way for the moon, with her starry train to walk by night. In this many-aisled temple, eye, and ear, and heart, and every spirit avenue and sense of body share in the solemn worship. Oh! I do ever delight to linger there, and listen to hear the "piping wind" wake up the echoes that sleep in the wadies, and the softer melodies of brooks which run among the hills; and I do so love the flock-clad fields, and woods with singing birds, and vales full to the brim and running over with golden light from the setting sun, streaming down aslope through groves of steadfast oak and peaceful olive; and at early morn to breathe the air with odors loaded, and perfumes from countless flowers, sweet with the dewy baptism of the night. A thousand voices call to prayer, and praise ascends like clouds of incense to the throne eternal.

Thus let it be to-day. We are going up to Galilee, where Immanuel, the God-man, lived and toiled for thirty years. It were no idle superstition to take off the shoe of worldliness and sin as we enter this sacred temple where he so often sat, and taught those lessons of divine wisdom which we seek to study and explain.

Do you think it safe or even Christian to surrender one's mind to that reverential mood which men call hero-worship for want of a more appropriate name?

It

A very difficult and comprehensive question. The prompting principle of hero-worship is far too closely intertwined with the inner sanctities of man's moral nature ever to be eradicated. There are spiritual "high places" where men will ever continue to rear altars and burn incense. is absurd to ignore their existence-might possibly be sacrilegious utterly to overthrow them. We may moralize, philosophize, and even theologize as we please, and still men will go on all the same to erect monuments, and build temples, and make pilgrimages to the birth-place, the home, and the tomb of prophet, poet, and hero. And if kings, nobles, and ministers of the Gospel crowd to the place where Shak

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speare was born, or died, or lies buried, and there weep and pray, and tremble and faint in seraphic ecstasy, should we wonder that the less cultivated and less sophisticated will do the same thing for the sacred prophet and the holy seer of antiquity? It is absurd to tolerate, admire, and even participate in the one, and yet condemn the other. Can we surround Plymouth Rock with reverential sanctities, because our forefathers landed there some two hundred years ago, and at the same time ridicule the Oriental who approaches Sinai with awe, or makes long pilgrimages to Mecca, or to Jerusalem, Hebron, Bethlehem, Nazareth, Tiberias, and a score of other places where holy men lived, wrought mighty miracles, and revealed to man the mysteries of God and eternity, and where they often sealed their testimony with their blood? I, at least, can not be so unjust and ridiculously partial. Still, the entire tendency should be closely watched. There is no end to the absurdities into which it will beguile the credulous or the imaginative. A candid and close comparison of ancient Bible customs with those things in our day which we call superstitions, will disclose the rather startling fact that the latter have their counterpart in the former. Thus Jacob had a remarkable vision; the place was ever afterward holy, and was consecrated by religious rites. Moses put off his shoes before the burning bush, and so does the Oriental wherever the presence of God has been manifested, or is supposed still to be in any special manner. The chapel of the "burning bush" is never visited with sandaled foot. The Jews were forbidden to enter certain sacred places, to touch certain holy articles, or even to look upon certain things invested with peculiar sanctity. And thus, at this day, every sect and religion has the counterparts of all these things. The external instruments connected with working miracles had, in ancient times, transferred to them, in imagination, a portion of the sanctity and reverence due to him who used them, or to that divine power which was transmitted through them. This applied not only to the staves, robes, and mantles of prophets while living, but to the same things, to their bones also, and even to

their very grave-stones, when dead. The same thing exists to this day, and even in an exaggerated form. Elisha took up Elijah's mantle and smote Jordan, saying, "Where is the God of Elijah?" He afterward sent Gehazi to lay his staff on the dead son of the Shunamite. It is now very common to bind on, or wrap round the sick, some part of the robes of reputed saints, in the belief that healing virtue will be communicated from it. The same faith, or rather feeling, led the people to bring out their sick into the streets, that even the shadow of Peter might overshadow some of them.1 And so from the body of Paul were brought unto the sick handkerchiefs or aprons, and the diseases departed from them, and the evil spirits went out of them.2 Even that wonderful superstition about relics, and the miraculous powers of dead saints' bones, is not without an antecedent reality in Bible history upon which to hang its stupendous absurdities. We read in 2 Kings xiii. 21, That people carrying a dead man to his grave, being frightened by a company of Moabites, threw the body hastily into the sepulchre of Elisha, and when the man was let down and touched the bones of Elisha, he revived and stood up on his feet. This train of comparison might be indefinitely extended, and the remark abundantly substantiated by facts, that there is scarcely a superstition among this people around us but what may have its origin traced far back to Bible times. And, moreover, when met with in those oldest records, it is frequently not at its birth, or first institution that we see it, but as a custom whose origin is concealed in the twilight of remote antiquity. Now, up to a certain point, the feeling out of which this grows is natural, irresistible, and therefore innocent, if not even commendable. To one who really believes the evangelical narratives, for example-to whom the records are facts and not fables, the region we are about to enter will inevitably be invested with a sacredness which applies to no other on earth. It must be so. If any one visits these localities without being conscious of such reverence, it is simply, only, and in every case, because a latent un

1 Acts v. 15.

2 Acts xix. 12.

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belief has transferred the stupendous facts into the category of dreamy myths. No man can believe that here the Creator of the universe, his Lord and his Redeemer, really lived, and taught, and wrought miracles, and yet experience no other feelings than such as ordinary places awaken. Least of all can they do so, to whom that man of sorrows and acquainted with grief is the one altogether lovely, the chief among ten thousand. Love, pure, warm, absorbing love, will invest these things with a sacredness, a preciousness beyond expression. It would argue a strange stupidity indeed if we could walk over those acres once pressed by his sacred feet, and climb the mountains where he so often retired to meditate and pray, without emotion. We are in no danger of enacting such a piece of irreverence.

We study to-day no common lesson of earth's geography. Every thing is interesting, and may be important. Let us, therefore, suffer nothing to pass unquestioned. You may begin with this large tell on our right. It stands at the very threshold of that country from which our Lord was called a Galilean. The modern name is Birweh, from this village above it. It is one hundred and twelve feet high, and eight hundred and eighty-eight paces round the base, and one hundred and eighty-six paces across at the top. It was once walled and entirely covered with buildings, and was probably designed to command the entrance into Galilee through this fine valley. The village shows signs of Phoenician or Jewish origin. It may have been a frontier castle, held by the latter to prevent the Canaanites of Acre from penetrating into the interior. That large village in the centre of Wady es Sh'ab is Damûn, and farther south, toward Abellîn, is er Ruaise; above it is Tumra, and higher still is Cabûl, the same name as that which Hiram gave to the cities which Solomon presented to him. The whole twenty cities, I suppose, were in this neighborhood. If this is the Cabûl on the border of Asher, then this Wady es Sh'ab may be the Jipthah-el mentioned in immediate connection with it.2 It is impossible, however, now to draw any geographical 1 1 Kings ix. 13.

2 Josh. xix. 27.