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259 pgs; 8 color plates of paintings; Abingdon Press (1923)
Dedication: "To My Friend, Helen Key Stone" Dust Jacket Blurb: "The author crossed the Judean wilderness at night to the Dead Sea, guided only by the stars. He was arrested in the mountain passes above Jericho by Beduins. He watched the Hebron Arabs advance before the waiting machine guns of the British. Yet the real adventures - of Mischa Yucovitch and Koren, of Andre and Jalila in Bethlehem, of the good brothers at the Monastery, of the new city near Tiberias, of the beautiful girl in Damascus, of his own sincere efforts to see true above Gethsemane - these are even more poignant and shining adventures, for they take place in the realm of the human heart. In this charming book, with its accompanying pictures and verse, the reader will surely find hilltops in Galilee for himself."
Excerpt Page 18:
Mishca Yucovitch, on
the wooden bench beside me, was a dark, rotund little man with a large
mustache and a neat suit of brown, store made clothes. Anyone not knowing
he was a Jew might easily have taken him for a Turk or an Egyptian. I
remember the evening of our first meeting on the City of Bombay a day
or two out from New York. We had run through all the generalities about
accommodations, speed, and the possibility of bad weather. Then the talk
had turned to our respective occupations, and finally to pictures and
painting.
"I was in Paris
once for two weeks," he said. "Do you know a picture in the Louvre by
Raffaello called 'Christ before Pilate?'" (He pronounced it as Peelot.)
"Hours I stood in front of that picture! I never in my life saw such
a face as that one; why, it seemed like I could never get finished looking
at it. I used to come back day after day....."
I was puzzled.
The man was a Jew - and yet here he was admiring "Christ before Pilate"!
By all the tenets of his religion, that picture, I thought, should have
been distasteful.
So I said:
"But you are not
a Christian."
He smiled gravely.
"I was not looking at the soul of Christ," he said. "I was looking
at the soul of Raffaello."
Excerpt
Page 258:
Time after time,
as I have been thinking about the ominous, semi-threatening outlook
of the world to-day, a spirited poem by Gilbert Chesterton has come
to my mind. It is a poem about Alfred, King of England, who, surrounded
by his enemies, goes out into the night and asks the powers of good
what thing the future holds. When the answer slowly comes to him, it
carries the stirring message:
Only that the sky
is growing darker yet, and that the sea is rising higher
That may be our
answer too - a ringing challenge! In spite of the bitter years that
the world has just know, in spite of the probability of bitter years
ahead, it is for that very reason a finer thing ever to be alive. To
work, and love, and worship, and to make mistakes - terrific mistakes
sometimes - and yet to keep on gaining through those mistakes, and not
be swamped by battleships or machines or business but occasionally to
catch a glimpse of the great far advance all along the line - that is
enough for the high courage of any man.
These pages happen
to be about some of the people in a small country this side of the Jordan
River. What I have found among them only strengthens my conclusion about
the rest of us. For whether we live in Vladivostok or Central Park West
or on the Zuyder Zee, we are all of us this side of the Jordan.
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