Page:On the Desert - Recent Events in Egypt.djvu/288

274 Presence, before which nature stands still, and which fills the trembling heart with its own fulness of peace. That morning, at our family prayers, we felt a new overflow of gratitude at the thought that we had "moved our tent so many days march nearer" at once to our earthly and our heavenly home.

To give a sacred sweetness to the day, we had for the first time since leaving Cairo, a Christian service. There is no church in Gaza, not even a chapel, however small; but in the early days the disciples, in the land where we now were, assembled in an upper room, as in later times persecuted Christians found sanctuaries in crypts and catacombs; and so in the missionary's house we joined with his family and a few others, and listened to the worship of God in our own tongue wherein we were born. Mr. Schapira, as a missionary of the Church of England, read that service which I have heard on many a shore and sea. He is very liberal in embracing all Christians in his communion of saints, end made no scruple in asking me to conduct the service with him, and it was a sweet and sacred hour when we all knelt together, English and Americans and Syrians, end committed ourselves to Him who is the God and Father of all.

I have become very much interested in the work of this excellent missionary. He is of Jewish descent, and is a native of Russia, having been born at Odessa, on the Black Sea, but has married a German wile, and lived in England, where he learned to speak English perfectly, and labors under the auspices of the Church Missionary Society. Four years ago he came to Gaza — a town inhabited almost exclusively by Moslems of the most bigoted and fanatical kind. It was hardly possible to find a more discouraging and apparently hopeless field. When he passed in the streets, he was hooted at and cursed. But he bore all this silently,