with the supposition that they were made as a means of raising the stones to their place, or of fastening clamps in them when raised. Yet these can scarcely be the objects, as the smaller stones are frequently marked in this way while the large ones are free, and there are sometimes four or five such holes in one stone. I saw them in the old part of the buildings of Baalbec, in the Tower of Hippicus, in numberless ruins about Jerusalem, and in the old part of the wall near the Jews' place of wailing.

On a Friday afternoon this place is an interesting resort. Thither, to what they look upon as the sole remnant of their once glorious temple, do many of the Jews of Jerusalem resort, and stand and sit and bend in prayers and tears against this massive relic. The women are loudest in their cries, and mingle their mournful lamentations for past glory with fervent prayers for Messiah's advent; prayers addressed not to Jehovah's ear, but to the safe conduct of those Jewish mediators, Sarah, Rebecca, Leah, and Rachael. Close to the wall, and whispering and murmuring their prayers into the very chinks and holes of it, are knots of Jewish matrons, fixed in the creed that underneath those mighty blocks is buried "Shechinah," to be unearthed when He, the looked and longed-for King, shall

come to wreak his awful vengeance on the uncircumcised, and raise his scattered people from the dust to wealth, and thrones, and happiness, and Heaven, Himself at once their worldly and their Heavenly everlasting King, Messiah. And crouching on the ground, their bowing heads half hid by a flowing shawl thrown over them, you see old men, with beards which touch their waist, reading in silent mournfulness the lamentations of their prophet Jeremiah, or the sad poetry of those psalms penned by the captive exiles of Babylon, glancing ever and anon their eyes upwards; and though through all their days this prayer has seemed to be unheeded, yet faithful still in olden promises, they ask their God yet. yet to see Messiah. These men are a fine lesson of faith and trust in God, which we, under a clearer dispensation, and with more knowledge of Messiah's character and love, would do well to imitate. In all his tribulations and misery, amid the insults and scorn of men, the pious Jew can think upon Messiah, can contemplate in spirit his enemies overthrown, and proudly smile in thinking of the certain triumph of his nation. But alas! there are too few of this kind of men in Zion; many have ceased to think upon the King's approach, and all deny that ever He came among them and was murdered.

CHAP. X.

HOLY SEPULCHRE.

I HAVE hitherto abstained from describing the church of the Holy Sepulchre, and the sites said to be connected with it, further than was needful to illustrate the account of the ceremonies I saw there at Easter. The subject has been so much discussed, and is one which every visitor to Jerusalem, if he stay there at all, must hear so constantly spoken of, that it might be supposed to be worn threadbare in every point of view; but though I would willingly have passed over these sites without affirming or disputing their authority, yet the dreadful truth that the Church of the Sepulchre and its chapels are the sepulchre of the Christian religion of the East, wherein all vitality is swallowed up, wherein the very stones receive the homage which belongs to the Redeemer alone, impels me to note one or two reasons which convince me of the high improbability (to say the very least) that the sites adopted are the real ones.

If we take a map of Jerusalem, and suppose a

line of wall commencing at the Tower of Hippicus and running to the angle of the Temple wall against the site of Antonia, we should probably conclude that the site of the Church of the Sepulchre is within such a boundary of the city; but if we include within this boundary the Pool of Hezekiah (as already mentioned), we shall find, that to exclude the church a very sudden turn must be made, possible certainly, but highly improbable; and such a turn running round three sides of the pool would most likely have caused Josephus to mention this pool as a means of ascertaining the course of the wall.

The importance of this observation consists, of course, in the necessity which there is to prove that the now called sites of Golgotha and the Sepulchre were without the ancient second wall mentioned by Josephus; for if they are within this wall, they cannot, consistently with Scripture, be the real places. Lord Nugent has recently endeavoured to set up as conclusive the traces of an ancient wall in Jerusalem, and has strung together some ingenious arguments and curious facts; but a personal examination of the details of the streets of Jerusalem shows, not only in the lines he mentions, but almost everywhere, evidences of masonry as ancient and massive as that which he selects. Moreover, one fact appears

to have been too much forgotten, the immense pile of rubbish which (as I have before observed) covers the site of ancient Jerusalem. Forty feet of this accumulation of the dust and ruin of centuries was displaced by the builders of the English church ere the rock of Zion was found, and often, in planting in the gardens which occupy much of the present space within the walls, the digger strikes his iron against the fragments of marble columns deep sunk into the ground. And I saw an excavation for a sewer while in Jerusalem, of about fifteen feet in depth, near the Damascus Gate, where the soil, finely pulverised and filled with broken pottery and bones, was still the substratum. Under these circumstances, the discovery of any particular cave seems to me a matter of great improbability.

An ingenious attempt has been recently made by Mr. Finlay to substantiate the evidence in favour of the modern sites, by considering the information in the possession of Constantine at the time of the erection of the first Church of the Sepulchre at Jerusalem. He concludes, from the well known excellencies of Roman statistics, that the Emperor must have searched public documents, and proved the site of Joseph of Arimathaa's tomb without difficulty. Now Eusebius, a contemporary, who would not certainly have