Christ, the Out-Door Teacher

       What I saw of the Christly and apostolic regions on this journey to the Orient leads me to say that it was an open-air religion that Jesus founded. Indeed, the religion of the- Old Testament and New was an out-of-door inauguration. Foreseeing that the- whole tendency of the human race would be toward a religion of Tabernacles and Temples and Synagogues and Churches, the two greatest things ever written, namely, the Ten Commandments and the Sermon on the Mount, were delivered in the open air. No depreciation of consecrated edifices, but all places consecrated where a good word is spoken or a merciful deed done. What were Christ's pulpits? Deck of ship, pebbly beach of sea, black basalt of volcanic region, mouth of cavern, where mad man was undeviled; crystallized wave, strong enough to uphold the storm-tamer; split sarcophagus, where death had been undone; the wilderness, where a boy became the commissary or provider for a whole army of improvidents. You see the world needed a portable religion, one that the business man could take along the street, the farmer to the field, and the mechanic to the house-scaffolding, and the soldier in the long march and the sailor in the ratlines; a religion for the sheaf-binding and the corn-husking, for the plow, for the adze, for the pick-axe, for the hammer. What a rebuke to the man who worships in the church and cheats in the store, serving God one day of the week and the devil six. On Sunday night he leaves his religion in the pew and shuts the pew-door, saying: "Good-bye, Religion, I will be back next Sunday." A religion that you do not take with you wherever you go is not the open-air religion of which our Lord was the founder.

       Indeed, I have found a new Bible. I found it in the Holy Land and the Grecian Archipelago. A new Book of Genesis, since I saw where Abraham and Lot separated, and Joseph was buried. A new Book of Exodus, since I saw where the Israelites crossed the desert. A new Book of Revelation, since I read the Divine message to Smyrna at Smyrna, and to Ephesus at Ephesus. A new Book of John, since I saw Jacob's well and Sychar and Samaria. A new Book of Luke, since I read its twenty-third chapter on the bluff of Golgotha, at the place where there is room for but three crosses. The Bible can never be to me what it was. It is fresher, truer, lovelier, grander, mightier!

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