es Scribner's Sons
Published November, 1908

To

HOWARD CROSBY BUTLER

MASTER OF MERWICK

PROFESSOR OF ART AND ARCHAEOLOGY

WHO WAS A FRIEND TO THIS JOURNEY

THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED

BY HIS FRIEND

THE AUTHOR

PREFACE

For a long time, in the hopefulness and confidence of youth, I dreamed
of going to Palestine. But that dream was denied, for want of money and
leisure.

Then, for a long time, in the hardening strain of early manhood, I was
afraid to go to Palestine, lest the journey should prove a
disenchantment, and some of my religious beliefs be rudely shaken,
perhaps destroyed. But that fear was removed by a little voyage to the
gates of death, where it was made clear to me that no belief is worth
keeping unless it can bear the touch of reality.

In that year of pain and sorrow, through a full surrender to the Divine
Will, the hopefulness and confidence of youth came back to me. Since
then it has been possible once more to wake in the morning with the
feeling that the day might bring something new and wonderful and
welcome, and to travel into the future with a whole and happy heart.

This is what I call growing younger; though the years increase, yet the
burden of them is lessened, and the fear that life will some day lead
into an empty prison-house has been cast out by the incoming of the
Perfect Love.

So it came to pass that when a friend offered me, at last, the
opportunity of going to Palestine if I would give him my impressions of
travel for his magazine, I was glad to go. Partly because there was a
piece of work,--a drama whose scene lies in Damascus and among the
mountains of Samaria,--that I wanted to finish there; partly because of
the expectancy that on such a journey any of the days might indeed bring
something new and wonderful and welcome; but most of all because I
greatly desired to live for a little while in the country of Jesus,
hoping to learn more of the meaning of His life in the land where it was
spent, and lost, and forever saved.

Here, then, you have the history of this little book, reader: and if it
pleases you to look further into its pages, you can see for yourself how
far my dreams and hopes were realised.

It is the record of a long journey in