ee or four hundred
feet deep.

Imagine the knuckles of a clenched fist, extended toward the south: that
is the site of Jerusalem, impregnable, (at least in ancient warfare),
from all sides except the north, where the wrist joins it to the higher
tableland. This northern approach, open to Assyria, and Babylon, and
Damascus, and Persia, and Greece, and Rome, has always been the weak
point of Jerusalem. She was no unassailable fortress of natural
strength, but a city lifted up, a lofty shrine, whose refuge and
salvation were in Jehovah,--in the faith, the loyalty, the courage which
flowed into the heart of her people from their religion. When these
failed, she fell.

Jerusalem is no longer, and never again will be, the capital of an
earthly kingdom. But she is still one of the high places of the world,
exalted in the imagination and the memory of Jews and Christians and
Mohammedans, a metropolis of infinite human hopes and longings and
devotions. Hither come the innumerable companies of foot-weary pilgrims,
climbing the steep roads from the sea-coast, from the Jordan, from
Bethlehem,--pilgrims who seek the place of the Crucifixion, pilgrims who
would weep beside the walls of their vanished Temple, pilgrims who
desire to pray where Mohammed prayed. Century after century these human
throngs have assembled from far countries and toiled upward to this
open, lofty plateau, where the ancient city rests upon the top of the
closed hand, and where the ever-changing winds from the desert and the
sea sweep and shift over the rocky hilltops, the mute, gray battlements,
and the domes crowned with the cross, the crescent, and the star.

"The wind bloweth where it will, and thou hearest the voice thereof, but
knowest not whence it cometh, nor whither it goeth; so is every one that
is born of the Spirit."

The mystery of the heart of mankind, the spiritual airs that breathe
through it, the desires and aspirations that impel men in their
journeyings, the common hopes that bind them together in companies, the
fears and hatreds that array them in warring hosts,--there is no place
in the world to-day where you can feel all this so deeply, so
inevitably, so overwhelmingly, as at the Gates of Zion.

It is a feeling of confusion, at first: a bewildering sense of something
vast and old and secret, speaking many tongues, taking many forms, yet
never fully revealing its source and its meaning. The Jews, Mohammedans,
and Christians who flock t