The Song of our Syrian Guest | Page 2

temple not
made with hands.
And now the lights are out in the village, the shepherds are asleep by
the side of their flocks, the tinkling bell from the fold falls faintly on
the still night air, and the watch-dog bays drowsily from his kennel at
the gate. Good night, fair world; 'tis time to seek repose. Let us first
read and meditate upon that delightful chapter, the tenth of St. John,
where our blessed Saviour appropriates all these characters of a good
shepherd to himself.
"The Land and the Book."

"Faduel Moghabghab," said our guest, laughing as he leaned over the
tea-table toward two little maids, vainly trying to beguile their willing
and sweetly puckered lips into pronouncing his name. "Faduel
Moghabghab," he repeated in syllables, pointing to the card he had
passed to them. "Accent the u and drop those g's which your little
throats cannot manage," he went on kindly, while the merriment
sparkled in his dark eyes, and his milk-white teeth, seen through his
black moustache as he laughed, added beauty to his delicate and
vivacious face.
He was a man of winsome mind, this Syrian guest of ours, and the
spirituality of his culture was as marked as the refinement of his

manners. We shall long remember him for the tales told that evening of
his home in Ainzehalta on the slope of the Syrian mountains, but
longest of all for what he said out of the memories of his youth about a
shepherd song.
"It was out of the shepherd life of my country," he remarked, "that
there came long ago that sweetest religious song ever written--the
Twenty-third Psalm."
After the ripple of his merriment with the children had passed he turned
to me with a face now serious and pensive, and said: "Ah, so many
things familiar to us are strange to you of America."
"Yes," I answered, "and no doubt because of this we often make
mistakes which are more serious than mispronunciation of your modern
names."
He smiled pleasantly, then with earnestness said: "So many things in
the life of my people, the same now as in the days of old, have been
woven into the words of the Bible and into the conceptions of religious
ideas as expressed there; you of the Western world, not knowing these
things as they are, often misunderstand what is written, or at least fail
to get a correct impression from it."
"Tell us about some of these," I ventured, with a parental glance at two
listening little faces.
After mentioning several instances, he went on: "And there is the
shepherd psalm: I find that it is taken among you as having two parts,
the first under the figure of shepherd life, the second turning to the
figure of a banquet with the host and the guest."
"Oh, we have talked about that," said my lady of the teacups as she
dangled the tea-ball with a connoisseur's fondness, "and we have even
said that we wished the wonderful little psalm could have been finished
in the one figure of shepherd life."
"It seems to us," I added, wishing to give suitable support to my lady's
rather brave declaration of our sense of a literary flaw in the matchless
psalm, "it seems to us to lose the sweet, simple melody and to close
with strange, heavy chords when it changes to a scene of banquet
hospitality. Do you mean that it actually keeps the shepherd figure to
the end?"
"Certainly, good friends."
With keen personal interest I asked him to tell us how we might see it

as a shepherd psalm throughout. So we listened and he talked, over the
cooling teacups.
"It is all, all a simple shepherd psalm," he began. "See how it runs
through the round of shepherd life from first word to last."
"With softly modulated voice that had the rhythm of music and the
hush of veneration in it, he quoted: "'_The Lord is my shepherd; I shall
not want_.'"
"There is the opening strain of its music; in that chord is sounded the
keynote which is never lost till the plaintive melody dies away at the
song's end. All that follows is that thought put in varying light."
I wish it were possible to reproduce here the light in his face and the
interchange of tones in his mellow voice as he went on. He talked of
how the varied needs of the sheep and the many-sided care of the
shepherd are pictured with masterly touch in the short sentences of the
psalm.
"Each is distinct and adds something too precious to be merged and
lost," he said.
"'He maketh me to lie down in green pastures,'--nourishment, rest. 'He
leadeth me beside the still waters,'--the scene changes and so does the