Excursions to Cairo, Jerusalem, Damascus, and Balbec From the United States Ship Delaware, During Her Recent Cruise by George Jones

Author:George Jones [Jones, George]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9789355340658
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Alpha Edition
Published: 2021-10-08T00:00:00+00:00

The account of the father guardian has the appearance of probability, but the reader is left to take it for what he may consider it worth. I tried to get sight of the book; but as the convent was in quarantine on account of the plague, could not succeed; and I regret to say that I have forgotten its title.

The light which we can gain from the Scriptures on this subject, joined with the uniform tradition, lead me to suppose that this is the spot; whatever may be the fact with regard to the sepulchre itself, whether it be now beneath the structure going by its name, or whether it has been cut away to make room for a heathen temple erected by Hadrian, or for the present church.

The little chapel of the Sepulchre stands in the centre of the great church, facing the east. Directly in front of it is a large opening into a church owned by the Greeks, and no wise remarkable, except for a ball suspended from the ceiling, and a plate beneath it, on which is an inscription, telling that this is the centre of the world.

The authority for this is in Ps. lxxiv. 12. “For God is my King of old, working salvation in the midst of the earth;” and here I must warn the reader that his feelings will sometimes be shocked in the course of these visits, and I must be allowed to warn him also against allowing his disgust to operate so as to make him reject the truth with the error. This is not consistent with the principles of sound judgment, but the contrary. Where truth is, error will generally come; and error, as I have already remarked, is to a certain degree a proof that there is truth somewhere; for man could not hang up such a mass of fictions if there was not something real to hang it upon; and generally, the more important the truth, the more earnest is error to draw advantage therefrom.

I cannot, however, join in the frequent outcry of imposition, craft and falsehood against the sects who hold these places, and recite these traditions to the visitor. That such things as these are to be found in high and sacred seats, is doubtless true, and that they are sometimes practised here is also very probable; but I can find, for a great many of these traditions, an origin of a more charitable nature, and I believe one more consonant with the real state of the case. We live now in an age of light and knowledge, and find it hard even to imagine the darkness that once covered Europe and all these lands. We can form only some idea of it from the books of the middle ages—books full of fable and false philosophy on every subject. These fables on medicine, on alchemy, on astrology, and on a multitude of other topics, grew up, we are willing to believe, from men’s ignorance; in some

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