Sensations of a Modern Traveler as He Traversed Jerusalem and the Holy Land.
Was this indeed the soil hallowed by the feet of Christ and the apostles? I must believe it. Yet it seemed once, that if I ever trod the earth then beneath my feet, there would be thenceforth a consecration in my life, a holy essence, a purer inspiration on the lips, a surer faith in the heart. And yet I must confess in wandering through the Holy City, I have been reminded of Christ the man, rather than Christ the God. As I toiled up the Mount of Olives in the very footsteps of Jesus, I found it utterly impossible to conceive that the Deity, in human form, had walked there before me. And even among those scenes which most restores to my imagination, the Jerusalem of olden days, the Saviour who thus haunts my thoughts is the man—Jesus, in those moments of trial when he felt the weaknesses of our common humanity; in that agony of struggle in the garden of Gethsemane, in that still more bitter cry of human doubt and human appeal from the cross: "My God! my God! why hast thou forsaken me!" Yet there is no reproach for this conception of the character of Christ. Better the divinely-inspired man, the purest and most perfect of his race, the pattern and type of all that is good and holy in humanity, than the Deity for whose intercessions we pray, while we trample his teachings under our feet. It would be well if many professedly Christians would more constantly keep before their eyes the sublime humanity of Jesus, instead of simply adoring him as a divine mediator; for then they would strive to walk the ways he trod on earth, and oh! how much of bitter intolerance and persecution might thus be spared our world.—Sel.