by the sentiment or at least the conscience of sym- pathy between man and man as such. The East, whose religion is fundamentally a matter of saving one's own soul, or at widest a matter of tribal loyalties, will find that a hard saying, and indeed has always so found it. Again, everyone must have noticed that in the battles of Jesus against the unintelligent and conventional doctrines of the Pharisees, His constant appeal was to common- sense and the facts of the case obvious to every unprejudiced observer. But that in itself was an instance of the Western type of intellect pitted against the Oriental.
Yet, at tlie depths, Christianity rests upon dis- tinctively Oriental foundations. The very publicity of Eastern life has had its eft'ect upon tlie Gospels. The whole ministry of Jesus was performed among crowds, in public places of assembly and on thronged highways. His thoughts were fiung at once into the arena of public discussion, and even His protests and His disregard of ritual in such matters as hand-washing, fasts, etc., were made under the scrutiny of innumerable eyes. The whole Gospel shows traces of this lack of privacy, and the emjjhasis of its teacliings is often fixed by the angle at which its detail was seen by the on- lookers. Again, the great Christian doctrine of renunciation is essentially an Oriental doctrine, typical of Hebraism as contrasted with Hellenism ; so much so, that it is to the surprise with which that doctrine broke upon the West that its con- quest was in part due. The Oriental has been kept from perceiving how Divine self-sacrifice is, by his familiarity with it as a commonplace of human life. ' The qualities which seemed to the warriors of Clovis .so magnificently Divine, the self-sacrifice, the self-denial, the resignation, the sweet humility, are precisely the qualities the germs of which exist in the Hindu ' {Asia and Europe, 69). Consequently, ' the character of Christ is not ... as acceptable to Indians as to Northern races,' the former seeking in the Divine a contrast rather than a complement to their human thoughts. Again, that free play of imagination touching even the most everyday subjects, that direct statement of truth, unguarded by qualifi- cations and unbuttressed by proofs, are Eastern rather than Western characteristics. These are but random instances, a few out of very many, and varying in importance from the most casual to the most fundamental, yet they are enough to prove that the thought of Jesus was cast in an essentially Oriental mould.
The geographical features of Palestine are strongly marked ; and they include, in a very small field, mountains, rivers, plains, lakes and sea-coast. The story of Jesus brings Him in contact with each of these ; but the only ones which can be said to have left very distinct traces are the mountains. The Bible is full of mountain scenery, and it owes much to that. The religious thought of the great plains of the world is one thing, that of sea-girt islands is another, and that of mountain-land is a third. The long ranges of Lebanon throw off their southern spurs in Galilee, and the range ends suddenly in the line of steep mountain-side which runs along the northern edge of the Plain of Esdraelon. Not far from this edge, nestling in hollows or crowning heights, lay the towns and villages among which Jesus spent His early years. Hermon is the one great mountain which Anti-Lebanon rises to, standing off to the south, and detached from the continuous range by the deep-cut gorge of the Abana, but sending on the ridge again unbroken, though rugged in out- line, past the Sea of Merom on the eastern side, to the shores of the Sea of Galilee. Samaria lies to the south of Esdraelon, a region of finely sweeping valleys and hills of soft and rounded outline. But these hills grow less distinct as the road strikes southward through Judaea. The general level rises to a bare and lofty table-land, from which, near Bethel, rounded heights rise like huge breasts of grey stone from the upheaved bosom of the land. South of that, sheer gorges (geological faults, or the work of flooded winter-torrents) slash across the land from east to west, and open grim and sombre through precipices upon the sunken valley of the Jordan, where Jericho lies steaming in the heat, 6 miles west of the Jordan's channel-groove, chiselled deep below the level of the valley. Soon .Jerusalem is seen, like a round nest among low mountains — a city thrust up from the summit of the land, and moated by deep valleys on two sides.
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South of that, through the pasture-lands about Bethlehem and the wilderness of Judita to the east of them, the land slopes down the rolling 'South Country' to the Arabian desert.