Travels in The Orient...

       Others might write a Life of Christ without seeing the Holy Land, but I could not. So in October, 1889, I embarked for that sacred country, accompanied by my wife, daughter and my friends Mr. and Mrs. Louis Klopsch, determined to see with my own eyes, and press with my own feet many of the memorable places connected with the life of the patriarchs and the ministrations of our Lord.

       We were told that as we proposed crossing the Atlantic at that season we should have a very rough passage and that as we were to cross the Mediterranean in winter we should suffer from appalling marine treatment, and that we would freeze in the Holy Land. Just the opposite has been our experience. We had crossed the Atlantic eight times before, but this was the smoothest of all our voyages - sunshine from New York to Liverpool, sunshine from Liverpool to Rome, sunshine from Rome to Athens, sunshine from Athens to Egypt.

       In a small boat, pitching till it threatened to capsize us, we come ashore at Patras, Greece, and take rail-train for Corinth and Athens, the skies blue as the bluest, and the sea a deep green, save where it is white-crested. We enter now the realm of the classics. What an opportunity, if at the close of college course and before entering a profession every young man could take a journey to see the places vividly associated with the birth, the life and the writings of the ancient poets, essayists and orators. May some philanthropist with large means see the opportunity and embrace it for hundreds and thousands of young students!

       But now we rush along on a rail-train in regions where Paul went afoot. What a contrast between the fatigues and slowness of ancient travel and the comforts and velocities of the modern journey; the difference between weary limbs and ptarmigan's pinion. But why tarry at all on my way to Palestine amid these Pauline scenes? I want gradually to come upon the Christly places. Beside that, Paul was only a sublime echo of Christ. Nothing but the divine occurrences of Palestine could make the Apostle's life possible. There would have been no epistle to the Corinthians if there had been no sermon on the Mount. Mars' Hill was blood relation to Calvary. The spear that pierced the sacred side had answering flash in the beheading sword on the road to Ostia. The foot that died on the hill hack of Jerusalem was followed by the bleeding foot of the Pauline pilgrimage through this Grecian peninsula.

       The scenery through which we are now riding is for grandeur absolutely appalling. No sooner does the Mediterranean subside at the beach, than the knoll-- become hills, and the hills mountains, and the mountains a volcanic bombardment of the heavens. Surely the stage on which martyrdoms were enacted was grand enough for the mighty tragedies! We come to Corinth. What a solemn place it is to me! All the ancient city gone, but the Acro-Corinthus, tin.- fortress two thousand feet high, still standing. It not only looks down upon a vast realm of scenery but looks down upon the ages. Paul's eyes were lifted toward that proud eminence as he came from the mobocracy of Athens. The fortress is a great heap of black basalt. O thou doomed and dead and buried Corinth! Thy splendor was overpowered by thy dissoluteness. Yet all is quiet now. and, but for the clouds built like another Acro-Corinthus above the fortress, it is a rather peaceful scene, birds flying, sheep pasturing, peasant women sewing. It was the same landscape on which Paul looked on his gradual progress to martyrdom for Christ's sake.

       One o'clock a. m., at Athens. - Cannot sleep; and I might as well be writing. Who could sleep amid such circumstances? Yesterday I saw the Acropolis, and preached on Mars' Hill, and after dark went out and wandered among the fifteen immense pillars which are the survivors of the one hundred and twenty that surrounded the temple of Jupiter Olympus. From the Acropolis I saw the same scene where the great sea-fight of Salamis occurred, saw the Pentelicon mines, the birthplace of temples; saw nearly to the battlefield of Marathon, saw the Parthenon, saw the two miles of circle which swept around a greater congregation of temples and architectural wonders and sculptured exquisiteness than were ever crowded into the same space. Saw twenty centuries of columns, columns standing, columns fallen, columns beginning to fall, the ages piled up in Pentelicon marble, everything old, terrifically old, overwhelmingly old. It looks like a wrecked eternity. Have read about the Acropolis all my life and have seen pictures of it, but find it a surprise unspeakable. Doxologies in stone. The eloquence and poetry and art of two millenniums frozen into marble. All honor to the memory of Ibituos and Killikrates, the architects who planned it, and Phidias who chiseled it, and Pericles, under whose patronage it was lifted.

       But this secular classic of the Acropolis did not move me like the Gospel of Mars' Hill. What a bold man was Paul to stand there on those tumbled rocks and say what he did! I suppose he could be heard across to the Acropolis, which was covered with temples to heathen gods and goddesses. An Englishman standing there said he heard distinctly what I said while I was preaching on Mars' Hill.

       As Paul's voice rang out over the valley, between Mars' Hill and the Acropolis, he swung his hand toward that pile of heathen divinities and announced his belief in only one divinity, saying: "God that made the world and all things therein, seeing He is Lord of heaven and earth, dwelleth not in temples made with hands." And then looking up at the glittering idols on the higher hill he continues: "We ought not to think that the Godhead is like unto gold or silver or stone, graven by art and man's device; and the times of this ignorance God winked at, but now commandeth all men everywhere to repent." No wonder that meeting broke up in a riot, and that Paul had to clear out and go to Corinth, from which we came day before yesterday. It was not yesterday afternoon so much that the wind fluttered the leaves of my Bible as I was speaking about that  address of Paul on Mars' Hill, as it was emotion that shook the book when that Apostolic scene rose before my imagination. I obtained a block of stone from Mars' Hill to be sent to Brooklyn for the pulpit table in our new church, now building. But has this Paul nothing to do with the blessed One whose life I am trying to write? Yes. Paul was Jesus Christ's man. Mars' Hill shall be to us only a stepping-stone to Golgotha.

       We were presented by Mr. Tricoupi, Prime Minister of Greece and the chief statesman of that kingdom, to the Queen of Greece, who gave us a most cordial grasp of the hand and welcomed us to Greece. The Queen is a very beautiful and gracious woman, and we talked together as though we were old friends. We met also the ex-Empress of Germany, Fredericka. I was never so favorably impressed with any distinguished woman as with her. She had on not a single jewel, was in plain black, dignified, but not coldly so, with a countenance that indicated good sense and kindness, but it was a somewhat tearful face. This may have been partly due to the fact that she was leaving her newly-married daughter in Athens. But I think the sadness of the face was consequent upon the multitude of troubles through which she had passed, the long and terrible sickness and death of Frederick, and many other griefs, domestic and political. ( 1897)

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