On the Way to Bethlehem Author:William Allen Knight Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Ill HOW WE CAME TO GALILEE HEY who enter Palestine at Jaffa, plunging at once by the short railway into the solemnities of the Holy Land at Jerusalem, ofte... more »n experience disappointment; they sometimes undergo reaction distressing and even damaging. For this usual way of entry is psychologically wrong. In Jerusalem, amid a hodgepodge of hoary incongruities and modern nuisances, one straightway comes face to face with the earthly setting of the supreme sanctities in Christian belief. The mind can hardly overcome such a jumble of ruins, sites and spots, alien life and tawdry show; neither can it adjust its vision to receive all at once the climax of Palestine's mystic verities. Bethlehem, which is but a littleway off among the hills, sounds music all too sweet and tender, a message too rapt and not of earth, to be heard if the heart be unquiet. Jerusalem, like her Herod of old, is still such as to slay the Babe of Bethlehem. As the Wise Men were warned to depart from Bethlehem "another way," we were led to come to its waiting charms by another way. I shall always recall gratefully the relentless, snow-driving, sea-lashing storm which would not let the wretched little Italian steamer that bore us thither so much as near the shore of harborless Jaffa. True, it kept us rolling in the offing until we seemed to be sharing the plight of Jonah in those same waters, and finally forced us to Beyrout harbor, whence we had journeyed inland to Damascus two weeks before. But so it was that there came to me the most rewarding experience ever found in travel. There was nothing to be done, such was the persistence ofthat gale, but to take the rack-and- pinion railway over the Lebanon ranges to Damascus once more, and enter Palestine from the north. But " Blest be the tempest, kind the stor...« less