In the first and second parts of this book we have been collecting impressions of the Land and its Invaders. It remains for us in the third part to gather these together into something which may enable us to realise more clearly the general meaning and quality of the spirit of Syria. In the main two things must be noted, and the first of them is religious. Whatever else Palestine may be, she is certainly a land with a God. The meaning of Syria is disclosed in her Israelite and Christian periods, whose great fact and characteristic process is the revelation of God to men on earth. All her other invasions have to reckon with that fact. Some of them were bitterly hostile to it, but they were powerless to efface it. Others were indifferent, entering Syria for ends of their own; but history shews them bent over to God’s purposes and unconsciously made the instruments of working out His will. That will brought Israel to her land, isolated her there, hemmed her in, bore her and carried her in everlasting arms on through her centuries, finally was incarnate in her life. For Jesus Christ was a Syrian, and we must orientalise our thoughts of Him before we can rightly understand the Christian revelation.{174}

Not less clear is the second impression, which is that of the unfinishedness and imperfection of all things Syrian. It is a place of wreckage, new and old. But the peculiarity of that wreckage is that it was always there, more or less. None of the ideals of the land were ever quite realised. It was never completely conquered by the Israelites, their ambition stopping short and their energy flagging before their task was done. It was never completely cultivated, or made to yield its full harvest of natural wealth. In countless small things this incompleteness is evident. The contrast between the beauty of the distant view and the disorder and slovenliness of the near has been already noted. The post-office in Damascus is a quite good post-office, so far as letters and telegrams go. But you inquire for these in a hall which looks like a very dirty stable-yard with a very dirty fountain in the middle of it, furnished with little rough-sawn wooden boxes for private letters, such as no self-respecting grocer would pack with oranges. Even the tombs, about which so much sacredness is supposed to gather, are the untidiest of sepulchres. You may see a large and expensive tombstone, shining white in the distance, with all the air of aristocratic self-importance which man’s pride can lend to death; but when you approach, it is railed off with bamboo and barbed wire which might have been picked off a rubbish-heap. There are good roads in plac............