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because he is very sleepy, the man 'within' runs counter to the best Syrian traditions in his answer. His excuse that because the door is shut he cannot open it and accommodate his friend has been a puzzle to a host of Western readers of the Bible. Could he not have opened the door? Or, as a certain preacher asked in my hearing, 'Could it be possible that the man, because of fear of robbers in that country, had a sort of combination lock on his door which could not be easily opened?' The simple fact is that in Syria as a rule the door of a house is never shut, summer or winter, until bedtime. The words of my father and mother to me whenever they thought that I had 'remained wakeful' - that is, 'stayed up' - longer than I should after they had gone to bed, 'Shut the door and go to sleep,' - still ring in my hearing. What the man 'within' meant was, not that he could not open the door, but that at such a late hour, after the door had been shut, it was no time to call for such favors as the neighbor asked for.

'And my children are with me in bed.' From this it may be inferred easily that individual beds and individual rooms are well-nigh unknown to the common people of Syria. The cushion-mattresses are spread side by side in the living-room, in a line as long as the members of the family, sleeping close together, require. The father sleeps at one end of the line, and the mother at the other end, 'to keep the children from rolling from under the cover.' So the man was absolutely truthful when he said by way of an excuse, 'My children are with me in bed.'

In the remaining portion of this parable, as in that of the unrighteous judge, Jesus emphasizes, by commending to his disciples, the Syrian habit of importuning. I say unto you, though he will not rise and give him, because

he is his friend, yet because of his importunity he will rise and give him as many as he needeth.' Again, the Master gives dignity and elevation to the common customs of his people by using them as means of approach to high spiritual ideals, when he says, ‘And I say unto you, ask and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you.'

III

The best rules of Syrian hospitality require that when a guest from a distant town makes it known what day he expects to take his leave, the host should do his best to trick his visitor into forgetfulness of the time set, or devise some other means to delay his departure as much as possible. On the day he wishes to depart, the wayfarer says to his host, 'Your exceeding bounty has covered me, far above my head; may God perpetuate your house and prolong the lives of your dear ones. May He enable me some day to reward you for your boundless generosity. And now I who have been so immersed in the sea of your hospitality [baher karamek] beg you to permit me to depart.' Then the host, confessing his unworthiness of such praise and manifesting great surprise at the sudden announcement, begs his guest to 'take no thought of departing.' The guest insists that he 'must go,' even though he could stay. The host says, 'Stay, I pray you [betrajjak], until you partake of our noon meal; then you may depart.' After the noon meal the host says, 'I beg you to consider that the day is already far spent, and your journey is long, and the road is dangerous for night travel. Tarry until the morrow, and then go.' The same performance takes place on the morrow, and perhaps another morrow, until the guest prevails.

In the nineteenth chapter of the book of Judges, in the story of the Levite mentioned above, we have a fine example of a generous Syrian host. His words are so much like those I often heard spoken in Syria on such occasions that it makes me feel homesick to read them. The ancient Bethlehemite was entertaining his son-inlaw, who had stayed with him three days, the traditional length of such a visit in the East. So the record says: 'And it came to pass on the fourth day, when they arose early in the morning, that he rose up to depart; and the damsel's father said unto his son-in-law, Comfort thine heart with a morsel of bread, and afterward go your way. And they sat down, and did eat and drink, both of them together; for the damsel's father had said unto the man, Be content, I pray thee, and tarry all night, and let thine heart be merry. And when the man rose up to depart, his father-in-law urged him; therefore he lodged there again. And he arose early in the morning on the fifth day to depart; and the damsel's father said, Comfort thine heart, I pray thee. And they tarried until after noon,1 and they did eat, both of them. And when the man rose up to depart... his father-in-law, the damsel's father, said unto him, Behold, now the day draweth toward evening, I pray you tarry all night... lodge here that thy heart may be merry; and to-morrow get you early on your way, that thou mayest go home. But the man would not tarry that night, but he rose up and departed.' When an honored guest takes his departure, as a mark of high regard his host walks with him out of town a dis

1 The more accurate rendering of this sentence in the Revised version is, ‘And tarry ye until the day declineth.' In the hot season a good excuse to delay a departing guest is to beg him to wait until the cool late afternoon, 'The decline of the day [assar].'-THE AUTHOR.

tance the length of which is determined by the affectionate esteem in which the host holds his visitor. At times we walked for a whole hour with our departed guest, and desisted from going farther only at his most urgent request. So in the eighteenth chapter of the book of Genesis we are told that Abraham's guests 'rose up from thence and looked toward Sodom: and Abraham went with them to bring them on the way.' The English phrase, however, 'to bring them on the way,' falls far short of expressing the full meaning of the term shy-ya'.

Pilgrimages to holy places and fraternal feasts such as are enjoyed on betrothal occasions, weddings, baptisms of children, and great holidaysare practically the only occasions the common people of Syria have to bring them together. On such occasions the guests are invited in families; therefore the number of those who come to the feast is never exactly known in advance. The food is served in large quantities, but not in such great variety as in the West. The table appointments are very simple. There are no flowers, no lace doilies, nor the brilliant and sometimes bewildering array of knives, forks, and spoons which grace an American host's table on such festive occasions. The guests sit close together on the floor, about low tables, or trays, and eat in a somewhat communistic fashion from comparatively few large dishes. If twenty guests are expected, and thirty come, they simply enlarge the circle, or squeeze closer together. Their sitting so close to one another makes the 'breaking of bread together' for these friends more truly fraternal.

Of the feasts which are considered more strictly family affairs, I will speak of two which live in my memory clothed with romantic charms. The one is that which we enjoyed at the 'killing of the sheep.' As a rule every Syrian family

fattens a sheep during the summer season. The housewife feeds the gentle animal by hand so many times during the day and so many during the night, until he is so fat that he 'cannot rise from the ground.' No person is expected to speak of this sheep or touch him without saying, "The blessing from God' (be upon the lamb). Oh, if I could but feel again the thrilling joy which was always mine when, as a small boy, I sat beside my mother and rolled the small 'morsels' of mulberry and grape-leaves, dipped them in salted bran water, and handed them to my mother to feed the 'blessed sheep'!

Early in the autumn came the time for 'killing.' Wherever my father was, he came home, for the father of the household must kill the sheep. As a rule the blood of the animal was shed upon the threshold a custom which echoes the ancient Semitic practice of thus honoring the household god. Now, however, perhaps for sanitary reasons, the sheep is killed a short distance from the door. The solemnity of the act robbed it for us of its cruelty. On the day of 'killing' we sharpened the knives, crushed the salt in the stone mortar, and fed the sheep only sparingly. As the day began to decline the animal was 'led to the slaughter,' and laid gently on the ground, as the ancient sacrifice was laid before the Lord. My father, holding with his left hand the animal's head, made the sign of the cross with the knife on the innocent throat, and, in the name of God, slew the sheep.

The fact that many householders in a community 'kill the sheep' on the same day makes the occasion a reproduction of the night of the exodus from Egypt. In the twelfth chapter of the book of Exodus, Jehovah speaks to Moses concerning Israel, saying, 'In the tenth day of this month they shall take to them every man a lamb, ac

cording to the house of their fathers, a lamb for an house. . . . And ye shall keep it up until the fourteenth day of the same month: and the whole assembly of the congregation of Israel shall kill it in the evening."

With a few intimate friends we feasted at the killing of the sheep, and then cut the red meat in small pieces 'the size of a fledgeling's head,' fried it in the fat, and sealed it in glazed earthen jars for our winter use.

The other most joyous feast was that of the Marafeh of the Marafeh the carnivals which precede the Great Lent. For about two weeks before Lent begins, the Christians of the East give themselves over to feasting. The dish which is a great favorite on this occasion is called kibbey. It is made of meat and crushed wheat. The meat is 'beaten' in a stone mortar, with a large wooden masher, until it is reduced to a very fine pulp. Then the crushed wheat, soaked in cold water, is mixed with the meat, together with a generous supply of spices and salt. The whole mixture is then 'beaten' together so thoroughly that when rightly done it resembles a lump of dough.

The writer of the book of Proverbs, with characteristic Syrian intensity, alludes to the process of kibbey-making in one of his assaults upon 'the fool.' In the twenty-second verse of the twenty-seventh chapter he says, "Though thou shouldest bray a fool in a mortar among wheat with a pestle, yet will not his foolishness depart from him.'

Be that as it may, the craving of a Syrian for kibbey (and I fully know whereof I speak) makes the craving of a Bostonian for baked beans and fishballs for a Sunday breakfast pale into insignificance.

During Marafeh friends and neighbors feast together until the last night that precedes the beginning of Lent.

The feast of that night is one of family solemnity, upon which no outsiders may intrude. The members of the family come together to eat the last feast and drink their cup of wine before entering upon the solemn period of self-denial, fasting, and prayer. As at the ancient sacrificial feasts, all the members of the family must be present. It was this very custom which afforded Jonathan the excuse to send his beloved friend David away from King Saul's court, and thus save him from the murderous design which that monarch had against the son of Jesse. So it was when the suspicious Saul asked his son, 'Wherefore cometh not the son of Jesse to meat either yesterday or to-day?' Jonathan answered Saul, 'David earnestly asked leave of me to go to Bethlehem: and he said, Let me go, I pray thee; for our family hath a sacrifice in the city; and my brother, he hath commanded me to be there.'

On that solemnly joyous evening my mother spreads the feast, and with most tender and pious affections my parents call their sons and daughters to surround the low table. My father pours the wine. To us all the cup is symbolic of sacred joy. Holding the cup in his hand, my father leans forward and says to my mother, 'May God prolong your life and grant you the joy of many returns of this feast.' And to us, 'May your lives be long; may we be granted to drink the cup at your weddings; may God grant you health and happiness and many future feasts.' We all answer, 'May your drinking be health and happiness and length of days!' My mother, after wishing my father the blessings he wished for her, and imploring the Most High to bless and keep him 'over our

heads,' drinks next. Then the wine is passed to every one of us. 'Drink ye all of it' is my father's command; for who can tell whether the family circle shall remain unbroken until the Easter festival? Not a trace of the feast is kept in the house until the morrow. What is not eaten is burned or thrown away, for on the next day no meat, eggs, or milk is permitted to the faithful. Wine also is not supposed to be indulged in during Lent, until the Easter bell heralds the tidings of the Resurrection.

So did the Master speak to his disciples on the eve of his suffering. In the twenty-sixth chapter of St. Matthew's gospel we read, ‘And he took the cup, and gave thanks, and gave it to them, saying, Drink ye all of it.... But I say unto you, I will not drink henceforth of this fruit of the vine, until that day when I drink it anew with you in my Father's kingdom.'

Thus from the simplest conception of bread as a means to satisfy physical hunger to the loftiest mystic contemplation of it as a sacramental element, the Orientals have always eaten bread with a sense of sacredness. 'Bread and salt,' 'bread and wine,' 'Christ the bread of life,' 'For we, being many, are one bread,' 'Give us this day our daily bread,' these and other sayings current in the Bible and in Oriental speech all spring from the deepest life of the ancient East.

And the sacredness of this common article of food has been of most inestimable value to Oriental peoples. In the absence of other means of social cohesion, and the higher civil interests which bind men together, it has been a great blessing indeed to those muchdivided Orientals to find peace and security in the simple saying, 'There is bread and salt between us.'

I

WHY has no psychologist taken more serious note of the 'will to romance'? It is one of the most interesting phenomena of the spirit because one of the most creative in regions where other influences hardly penetrate. As a man thinketh in his heart, so he becomes, and the further his thought is from the sheer fact of himself and his surroundings, the more likely it is to transform both of these. This statement needs no proof. Our wills

are the very, the only, The solemn event of things;

and of all springs to release the will, none is so potent as some half-disregarded romantic statement or consideration in the back of his mind, which appeals to a man because it does, and by virtue of that appeal re-creates him and all his circumstance. Something seems beautiful to him, in other words, and toward that beauty his whole nature sets with all its force.

The mechanistic scientist would doubtless like to explain this deep turning of the will as some yet-imperfectlyvisualized form of heliotropism-for the mechanistic scientist is a greedy gentleman who is not going to be satisfied unless he can cover the phenomena of consciousness as well as grosser biological facts by his formula. Dr. Loeb, writing in the Yale Review, has recently denounced the pernicious effects of romanticism in philosophy and politics on the present world-conflict. Romanticism in philosophy just now means Bergson's doctrine of the intuition, and he finds it not accidental that the

'noisy and reactionary' element among the younger French patriots are Bergsonians, or that the German militarists have read and digested Nietzsche. All nations, he concludes, should turn to their scientific men for political leadership! That scientific men usually abound neither in general views nor in human sympathies is something he overlooks here, as well as their undeniable deficiency in the powers that charm and coerce their fellows. These are the necessary defects of their otherwise useful qualities. It is doubtless true that no men would sacrifice their lives for ideas in an era of entirely triumphant mechanistic science. There would be, indeed, no ideas in such an age, and one doubts if there would be anything to call men. If life is stripped of all its alleged 'romantic' elements and faiths, the sooner we return to dust, the happier we. The race would die out almost as quickly as if you cut off its supply of oxygen.

Dr. Loeb gravely suggests that if the intuition is really a good guide, its disciples be invited to solve by its aid some of the minor problems in physics

which seems to indicate a careless examination of his Bergson, since the very basis of Bergson's implied doctrine of the intuition in man is that it applies to those super-physical problems which the intellect, shaped by matter for skilled reaction upon matter, is unable to handle. If one is unconscious of the existence of super-physical problems, there is nothing more to be said.

Of course, there are good romanticists and bad romanticists. Nietzsche was as certainly a bad romanticist as he