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This work begins: THIRTY-SEVEN years after the Passion of Christ, the Jerusalem which He had known was wiped out of existence by the legionaries of Titus; in the next century Adrian had the ruins cleared, and buried what remained of the Holy Places beneath the foundations of a new city, to which he gave the name of .Aelia Capitolina; Constantine's misdirected piety pushed even further the work of destruction, for after having brought to light Calvary and the Holy Sepulchre, he had the ground levelled, so that there relnained above the surface only the tomb of Christ and the block of granite which once had borne the Cross. Since the tinle of Constantine matters have gone steadily from bad to worse; the Persians under Chosroas, the workmen of the monk Modestus, Omar's Arabs, and Hakem's incendiaries, Constantine Monomachus, later on the Crusaders, and lastly the Turks, have all done their share towards obliterating the relnaining traces of antiquity. There are the places which have been sanctified by the blood of Christ and the tears of the Blessed Virgin and of the Holy Women? There is the stone on which the angel sat? Where was that last scene enacted which re-opened to sinful humanity the gates of the heaven it had lost? To reconstruct the scene, to find the position of Golgotha and of the garden belonging to Joseph of Arimathea, to put together, in a word, the local framework of the greatest event in history, the Christian is reduced to groping among the works of Josephus and the few faint vestiges of the past which casual excavations bring to light; the most he can do is to dream of things which he can no longer see. This archreological raising up of that which is now no more would require a lengthier consideration and discussion than we can well afford to give now, hence our readers must pardon us if our description of the Holy Places is very summary.

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9781541237643

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