JERUSALEM, FROM THE MOUNT OF OLIVES. 
Olivet is a name connected with the most solemn remembrances of religion. The 
credulity of pilgrims or the artifices of monks may have done dishonour to the sanctity 
of Jerusalem; fiction has too often found sites for miracles, and legend has largely usurped 
the place of history; hut nature remains: all the great features of the scene are unchange¬ 
able ; and he who now explores the valleys or climbs the hills of this illustrious region, is 
secure that there, at least, he cannot be deceived. Every outline of those hills, every 
undulation of those valleys, has the matchless influence of reality. He feels, that he is 
traversing the very ground which was traversed by those great agents of Providence, 
whose memory has given a character and an impulse to every succeeding period of man¬ 
kind ; that he stands where they taught, and suffered, and triumphed; that he looks on the 
landscape on which they so often gazed; and that he sees the same grandeur and beauty, 
the same wild majesty or cultured loveliness, which so often lifted their hearts in strains of 
holy exultation to the God and Father of nature and man. 
Olivet is memorable in the national annals as the first resting-place of David, when he 
fled from the rebellion of Absalom. 
“ And David went up by the ascent of Mount Olivet, and wept as he went up, and had 
his head covered, and he went barefoot; and all the people that was with him covered 
every man his head, and they went up, weeping as they went up.” 1 
But, to us, it has still more solemn recollections. No portion of Palestine was more 
hallowed by the frequency of our Lord’s presence, and the events of his closing life, than 
the region of Olivet. To meditate, to pray, and to prophesy. He “ went, as he was wont, 
to the Mount of Olives.” From its slope He uttered the great prediction of the calamities 
of the siege, and the fall of the people; there He imderwent that most fearful and profound 
sorrow which commenced his sufferings; there, finally, He met his disciples before He 
ascended to heaven; and there, if the prophecy is to be literally interpreted, the world shall 
yet see a still more awful and astonishing scene. 
“ His feet shall stand in that day upon the Mount of Olives, which is before Jerusalem 
on the east; and the Mount of Olives shall cleave in the midst thereof toward the east and 
toward the west, and there shall be a very great valley: and half of the mountain shall 
remove toward the north, and half of it toward the south. And ye shall flee to the valley 
of the mountains; . . . and the Lord my God shall come, and all the saints with thee.” 2 
At the foot of the Mount, and between it and the brook Ivedron, is the “ Garden of 
Getlisemane.” General consent adopts this as the scene of the “ Agony.” It is still an 
olive-ground, with many neglected trees widely scattered over the slope of the hill; but the 
spot especially sacred in the estimation of the pilgrims, is a space of fifty-seven yards 
2 Samuel, xv. 30. 
2 Zechariah, xiv. 4, 5. 
