Mount of Olives, and gone down to the Pool of Siloam, and tarried in
Bethany; we know that here, within the circuit of our vision, He has
suffered agony and death, and that from this little point went out all the
light that has made the world greater and happier and better in its later
than in its earlier days.

Yet, I must frankly confess, in wandering through this city--revered
alike by Christians, Jews and Turks as one of the holiest in the world--I
have been reminded of Christ, the Man, rather, than of Christ, the God. In
the glory which overhangs Palestine afar off, we imagine emotions which
never come, when we tread the soil and walk over the hallowed sites. As I
toiled up the Mount of Olives, in the very footsteps of Christ, panting
with the heat and the difficult ascent, I found it utterly impossible to
conceive that the Deity, in human form, had walked there before me. And
even at night, as I walk on the terraced roof, while the moon, "the balmy
moon of blessed Israel," restores the Jerusalem of olden days to my
imagination, the Saviour who then 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 intercession we
pray, while we trample His teachings under our feet. It would be well for
many Christian sects, did they keep more constantly before their eyes the
sublime humanity of Christ. How much bitter intolerance and persecution
might be spared the world, if, instead of simply adoring Him as a Divine
Mediator, they would strive to walk the ways He trod on earth. But
Christianity is still undeveloped, and there is yet no sect which