Christianity was from the first universal in its character and design, the religious

institutions and the worship of the Pentateuch, and even the prospects opened by the

prophets were, so far as they concerned Israel, strictly of Palestine and for Palestine.

They are wholly incompatible with the permanent loss of the land. An extra -Palestinian

Judaism, without priesthood, altar, temple, sacrifices, tithes, first-fruits, Sabbatical and

Jubilee years, must first set aside the Pentateuch, unless, as in Christianity, all these be

regarded as blossoms designed to ripen into fruit, as types pointing to, and fulfilled in

higher realities.1 Outside the land even the people are no longer Israel: in view of the

Gentiles they are Jews; in their own view, "the dispersed abroad."

All this the Rabbis could not fail to perceive. Accordingly when, immediately after the

destruction of Jerusalem by Titus, they set themselves to reconstruct their broken

commonwealth, it was on a new basis indeed, but still within Palestine. Palestine was the

Mount Sinai of Rabbinism. Here rose the spring of the Halachah, or traditional law,

whence it flowed in ever-widening streams; here, for the first centuries, the learning, the

influence, and the rule of Judaism centered; and there they would fain have perpetuated

it. The first attempts at rivalry by the Babylonian schools of Jewish learning were keenly

resented and sharply put down. Only the force of circumstances drove the Rabbis

afterwards voluntarily to seek safety and freedom in the ancient seats of their captivity,

where, politically unmolested, they could give the final development to their system. It

was this desire to preserve the nation and its learning in Palestine which inspired such

sentiments as we are about to quote. "The very air of Palestine makes one wise," said

the Rabbis. The Scriptural account of the borderland of Paradise, watered by the river

Havilah, of which it is said that "the gold of that land is good," was applied to their

earthly Eden, and paraphrased to mean, "there is no learning like that of Palestine." It

was a saying, that "to live in Palestine was equal to the observance of all the

commandments." "He that hath his permanent abode in Palestine," so taught the

Talmud, "is sure of the life to come." "Three things," we read in another authority, "are

Israel's through suffering: Palestine, traditional lore, and the world to come." Nor did this

feeling abate with the desolation of their country. In the third and fourth centuries of our

era they still taught, "He that dwelleth in Palestine is without sin."

Centuries of wandering and of changes have not torn the passionate love of this land

from the heart of the people. Even superstition becomes here pathetic. If the Talmud

(Cheth. iii. a.) had already expressed the principle, "Whoever is buried in the land of

Israel, is as if he were buried under the altar," one of the most ancient Hebrew

commentaries (Ber. Rabba) goes much farther. From the injunction of Jacob and Joseph,

and the desire of the fathers to be buried within the sacred soil, it is argued that those

who lay there were to be the first "to walk before the Lord in the land of the living" (Psa

116:9), the first to rise from the dead and to enjoy the days of the Messiah. Not to

deprive of their reward the pious, who had not the privilege of residing in Palestine, it

was added, that God would make subterranean roads and passages into the Holy Land,

and that, when their dust reached it, the Spirit of the Lord would raise them to new life,

as it is written (Eze 37:12-14): "O My people, I will open your graves, and cause you to

come up out of your graves, and bring you into the land of Israel...and shall put My

Spirit in you, and ye shall live; and I shall place you in your own land." Almost every

prayer and hymn breathes the same love of Palestine. Indeed, it were impossible, by any

extracts, to convey the pathos of some of those elegies in which the Synagogue still

bewails the loss of Zion, or expresses the pent-up longing for its restoration. Desolate,

they cling to its ruins, and believe, hope, and pray--oh, how ardently! in almost every

prayer--for the time that shall come, when the land, like Sarah of old, will, at the bidding

of the Lord, have youth, beauty, and fruitfulness restored, and in Messiah the King "a

horn of salvation shall be raised up"2 to the house of David.

Yet it is most true, as noticed by a recent writer, that no place could have been more

completely swept of relics than is Palestine. Where the most solemn transactions have

taken place; where, if we only knew it, every footstep might be consecrated, and rocks,

and caves, and mountain -tops be devoted to the holiest remembrances --we are almost