[Gutenberg 29314] • Out-of-Doors in the Holy Land: Impressions of Travel in Body and Spirit

"If what you read here makes you wish to go to the Holy Land, I shall be glad; and if you go in the right way, you surely will not be disappointed. "But there are two things in this book which I would not have you miss. "The first is the new conviction - new at least to me - that Christianity is an out-of-doors religion. From the birth in the grotto at Bethlehem (where Joseph and Mary took refuge because there was no room for them in the inn) to the crowning death on the hill of Calvary outside the city wall, all of its important events took place out-of-doors. Except the discourse in the upper chamber at Jerusalem, all of its great words, from the sermon on the mount to the last commission to the disciples, were spoken in open air. How shall we understand it unless we carry it under the free sky and interpret it in the companionship of nature? "The second thing that I would have you find here is the deepened sense that Jesus Himself is the great, the imperishable miracle. His words are spirit and life. His character is the revelation of the Perfect Love. This was something new and wonderful and welcome that came to me in Palestine: a simpler, clearer, surer view of the human life of God." Henry van Dyke (1852-1933) was an American clergyman, educator, and author. He graduated from Princeton in 1873, and from Princeton Theological Seminary in 1874. He was pastor of the Brick Presbyterian Church, New York City (1883-99), professor of English literature at Princeton (1899-1923), and U.S. minister to the Netherlands (1913-16). Among his popular inspirational writings is the Christmas story The Other Wise Man (1896). As President Wilson's ambassador to the Netherlands from 1913, Van Dyke was a first-hand witness to the outbreak of World War I and its progress, and was a key player in the President's diplomatic efforts to keep the U.S. out of the conflict.