The Bossier banner. [volume] (Bellevue, Bossier Parish, La.) 1859-1952, 1890-12-18


There are women almost dead with
grief among the crowd, His mother and
His aunt, and some whose sorrows He
had comforted and whose guilt He had
pardoned. Here man dips a sponge
into sour wine, and by stick lifts it to
the hot and cracked lips. The hemor-
rhage of tho five wounds has doneits
work.
The atmospheric conditions arc such
as the world saw never before or since.
IL was not a solar eclipse, suca as as
tronomers record or we ourselves have
seen. 1t was a bereavement of the
heavens! Darker! Until the towers of
tho temple we're no longer visible.
Darker! Until the surrounding hills dis
appeared. Darker! Until the inscrip-
ton above the middle cross becomes IL
legible. Darker! Until the chin of the
dying Lard falls upon the breast, and
He sighed with His last sigh the words:
1t is fnished''
Unable longer to endure the pressure
of this scene, we moved on, and into a
garden of olives, a garden which in the
right season is full of flowers, and hero
is the reputed tomb of Christ. You
know the Book says: in the midst
of the garden was a sepulchre. think
this was the garden, and this the
sepulchre. 1t is shattered, of course.
About four steps down we went into
this, which seemed family tomb
There is room in it for five bodies. We
measured it, and found it about
eight feet high. and nine feet
wide, and fourteen feet long. The
crypt where think our Lord slept was
seven feet long. think that there
once lay the King, wrapped in His last
slumber. On some of these rocks the
Roman Government set it's seal At
the gate of this mausoleum, on the first
Easter morning, the angels rolled the
stone laundering down the hill.
Up these steps walked the lacerated
feet of the Conqueror. and from these
heights He looked off upon the city that
had cast Him out, and upon the world
He had come to redeem, and at the
heavens through which He would soon
ascend.
Bet we must hasten back to tho city.
There are stones in the wall which
Solomon had lifted. Stop here and see
a startling proof of the truth of proph-
ecy. In Jeremiah, thirty-frst chapter
and foftieth verse, it is said that Jeru-
salem shall be built through the
ashes. What ashes? people have been
asking Were those ashes just put into
the prophecy to fill up? No, the
meaning has been recently dis
covered Jerusalem is now being built
out in certain direction where
tho ground has been submitted
to chemical analysis, and it has
been found to be the ashes cast out
from the sacrifices of the ancient tenn
pie, ashes Of the wood and ashes of
bones of animals There are great
mounds of ashes, accumulation of cent
uries of sacrifices. 1t has taken all
these thousands of years to discover
what jeremiah meant when he said:
behold, tho days shall come, saith the
Lord, that the city shall be built to the
Lord from the tower of Hanaueel unto
the gate of the corner, and the whole
valley of the dead bodies and of
the ashes" The people of Je-
rusalem are at this very time
fulfilling the prophecy. One handful
of that ashes on which they are build
ing is enough to prove the divinity of
the Scriptures! Pass by the place where
The cornerstone of the ancient temple
was laid three thousand years ago by
Solomon. Explore IS have been digging
and they found thai cornerstone seven.
ty-five feet beneath the surface. It is
fourteen feet long ard three feet eight
inches high, and beautifully cut and
shaped, and near it was an earthen lar
that was supposed to have contained
the oil of conservation used at the cere-
mony of laying the cornerstone. Yon-
der, from depth OF forty feet a signet
ring has been brought up, inscribed
with the wards "Haggai, the Son of
Shebaniah," showing It belonged to the
prophet Haggai, and to that seal ring he
refers in his prophecy, saying: 81 will
mako thee signet." l walk further
on, far underground, and I find myself
in Solomon's stables, and see the places
worn in the stone pillars by the halters
of some of his twelve thousand horses.
Further on, look at the pillars on which
Mount Moriah was built You know
that the mountain was too small for the
temple, and SO they built the mountain
out on pillars, and / saw eight of those
pillars, each one strong enough to hold
mountain.
Here we enter the mosque of Omar, a
throne of Mohammedanism where we
are met at the door by officials who
bring slippers that we must put on be-
fore we take a step further. lest our
feet pollute the sacred places A man
attempting to go in without these slim
pers would be struck dead on the snot
These awkward sandals adjusted az
we'll as we could, we are led to where
we see rock with an opening in If
through which, no doubt, the blood of
sacrifice in the ancient tomple rolled
down and away. At vast expense the
mosque had been built, but so sober ia
the place am glad to get through it
and take off the cumbrous slippers, and
step into the clear air.
But must get back to the bouse-ton
where | stood early this morning, and