Evening Post. SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 28, 1918. ESDRAELON AND ARMAGEDDON

Evening Post, Volume XCVI, Issue 78, 28 September 1918, Page 4

Evening Post. SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 28, 1918. ESDRAELON AND ARMAGEDDON

Stretching right across Palestine from Mount Carmel to the Jordan, separating its great central plateau 'from the northern highlands as definitely though not as impassably as the Jordan valley separates its eastern and western portions, connecting the desert and the sea~ by the easiest possible access, and supplying a gateway and a halting-place on the great road connecting the Empires of the Euphrates and the Nile, the plain of Esdraelon is famous as the classic battle-field of Scripture, and has even supplied a proverbial name for the bat-tle-field of the world. From generation to generation the tide of conquest has ebbed and flowed through this great plain, and often has been determined by the strategical conditions of its- broad surface and its five obvious and easily guarded gates. But a glance at the map shows that the associations and surroundings of this famous plain are not confined to a military significance. The names of Carmel and Megiddo, of Gilboa and Tabor, of Endor and Jezreel, of Nain and Cana, are names which speak to the imagination and heart of the world and touch for the most part deeper and nobler issues than those of military glory. Yet our list has omitted the two greatest- names of all. Confronting one another on the map. from opposite sides of the great plain and separated by a distance of less than twenty miles are the names of-Nazareth on the north and Armageddon on the south. Both these places have during the past week been brought by the magnificent sweep of General Allenby's armies within the sphere of British control. It is to be hoped that we all appreciate the responsibility which, this victory . symbolises, that our natural pride in the glorious achievement of our soldiers is tempered by a humility which will repudiate every "frantic boast and foolish word" and steel ourselves against the temptations of power, and that to render us worthy as a nation of the position which our soldiers' valour has won for us it is the spirit not of Armageddon, but of the Nazarene, that must be our guide. Referring to the passage in the Apocalypse to which we owe our application of the term "Armageddon" to the present battle of the nations, Dean Stanley says :— If that mysterious book proceeded from the'hand of a Galilean fisherman, it ia.the. more easy to understand why, with' the scene of those many battles constantly before him, ho should have drawn the figurative name of tho final conflict between the hosts of good and evil from " the place which is called in the Hebrew tongue Armaggedon," that is, " the city or mountain of Mogiddo." Dean Stanley adds that "it is remsxkable that none of the battles which secured the conquest of Palestine to the Israelites were fought in this field," and he ascribes the fact to their inferiority in cavalry. This deficiency was frankly acknowledged by the naivete of the ancient theologian:— And the Lord was with Judah; and he drove out of tho inhabitants of the mountain; but could not drive out the inhabitants of the valley because they had j chariots of iron.

Yet Sisera's nine hundred chariots of iron did not save him from a crushing defeat at the hands of the chosen people in the first battle -which history records on the plain of Esdraelon. "The Lord," according to one of the chroniclers, "delivered Sisera^into the hands of Barak," but the instrument of the Lord to whom the credit was in larger measure due was Deborah^—the Joan of Arc of Jewish history—who propped the weak-kneed general up and supplied him with both courage and strategy. The victory assured the security and the unity of the Israelites in thir now possessions, and the land had rest for forty years. Gideon's brilliant victory over the Midianites and "the children of the East"—the Bedouins of to-3ay—was gained a generation later on the same plain, and we may be sure that the ford of Bethabarah, at which he completed their discomfiture, is one of the points which General Allenby's dispositions did not overlook. Against these two happy memories the plain of Esdraelon was afterwards to provide Israel with two of the saddest. "The beauty of Israel" was slain upon the high places, and "the shield of the mighty was vilely cast away" when Saul fell before, the Philistines at Gilboa, and Josiah afterwards suffered the. same fate at the hands of Pharaoh-Necoh's army at Megiddo, and was lamented as bitterly.

Coming down to comparatively recent times, we may find in Saladin's victory over the Crusaders at Hattin in 1187 a rough counterpart to Allenby's present achievement. 1 It was this victory which destroyed the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, hoisted the Crescent once more in place of the Cross over the Holy City, and left it flying there continuously except for the brief interval secured by tho brilliant diplomacy of Frederick ll.'s bloodless crusade (1229-44), until General Allenby came along in December last. Saladin began his conquest of Palestine for the Crescent by his victory near the Sea of Galileo; Allenby has completed its re-conquest for the Cross by a victory close by in Esdraelon. But, as Sir George Adam Smith has said, the present clash of conflicting ideals of civilisation and empire are really fraught "with Ususs mor» *»Mm>Btette for humanity tbag weve ever fought out'on these

same fields between Semite and Greek, Rome and the East, or Frank and Saracen." Of the special part played by the plain of Esdraelon in past centuries the same authority had written as follows before the war:—

What a. plain it is! Upon which not only the greatest empires, races, and faiths, East and West, have contended with each other, but each has como to judgment; ... on which false faiths, equally with false defenders of the true faith, have been exposed and scattered—on which since the time of Saul wilfulness and superstition, though aided by every human excellence, have como to naught; and since Josinh's time the purest piety has not atoned for rash and- mistaken zeal. Tiio Crusaders repeat the splendid folly of tho Kings of Israel;.and, alike under the old and the new covenants, a degenerate Church suffers here judgment at the hands of the infidel. --

If the British people's can avoid the blunders of the Church in past ages and not shrink from the virtues of the infidel, if they can remain true to the spirit which inspired General Allenby's entry into Jerusalem, the unique trust imposed upon them by the conquest of Palestine will prove a privilege and not a snare, a blessing to men of every nation, creed, and colour all the world over.