that the Christians at Jerusalem, Bethlehem, St. John's, and Nazareth, were worse than any other Christians. "I was informed," says he," that the women of Bethlehen are very good, whereas those at Jerusalem are worse than the men, who are generally better there than at the other places. This may be occasioned by the great converse which the women have there with those of their own sex, who go thither as pilgrims; and I will not venture to say whether too great a familiarity with those places in which the sacred mysteries of our redemption were acted, may not be a cause to take off from the reverence and awe which they should have for them, and lessen the influence they ought to have on their conduct."' pp. 221-3.

Our Author's account of his own feelings at visiting what he terms the venerated tomb of the Living God,' is couched in so equivocal a phraseology, as to be adapted to awake some perhaps uncharitable surmises as to the character of his real sentiments.

To enter here, and kneel before the shrine, and kiss the marble that encases it, with absolute indifference, I should hold to be impossible; but if I were asked what were the sentiments that possessed me at the moment of bowing before the altar, I should say with Chateaubriand, that it would be impossible for me to describe them, and that such a train of ideas presented themselves at once to my mind, that none remained for a moment fixed there. My feelings, however, though equally indescribable as his own, were, I believe, of a very different kind.'

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We should not have imagined that there was any impossibility in defining the emotion which the scene subsequently described, must have called up in a pious and rational mind. And as to the holy sepulchre itself, although Mr. Buckingham combats with some earnestness the arguments adduced by Dr. Clarke to shew that the whole is a monkish juggle,' he is obliged at last to content himself with the lame conclusion, that the sepulchre may have contained' the Saviour's body. He is guilty of a most unwarrantable insinuation, when he accuses Dr. Clarke of talking of the naïveté of the tradition,' and of a farrago of 'absurdities,' and all this trumpery,' in a way that would almost lead one to infer that he doubted the facts of the story altogether.' There is, assuredly, nothing in the expressions he cites, to afford the least colour to so grossly calumnious an imputation. 'Surely,' adds our Author, it is not the calling this tomb of the Living God, "a dusty fabric standing like a huge pepper-box in the midst of the church," that can disprove its having contained the lifeless corpse of the Great Creator of the Universe. Nor does Dr. Clarke rest his arguments on so slender a basis, but on facts at absolute variance with the legend; and to us, his reasoning appears decisive, notwithstanding the feeble may-be's by which it is attempted to controvert it. The

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expressions, the tomb of God," and the corpse of the Great Creator and Director of the Universe,' are not such as we should think the more highly of a writer's orthodoxy for employing. Such over bold' affirmations, Hooker justly condemns as a 'confounding in the person of Christ those natures which they should distinguish; the heresy charged on the followers of Eutyches. Nor is it by any means consistent with our Author's indescribable feelings, and his captiousness towards Dr. Clarke, to speak of the supposed conduct of Helena in cutting away the sepulchre, in order to turn an excavation into a grotto above ground, as quite as much in consonance with common reason as any other part of this old lady's conduct, in perform⚫ing a pilgrimage at eighty, or, indeed, perhaps, as reasonable as performing one at all.' If Mr. Buckingham thinks so, what are we to think of all his affected reverence for the sepulchre itself which the old lady' is said to have discovered and enshrined?

But some of our Author's emotions on this occasion, it is easy to divine. Their stay in the sepulchre itself was very short. The scene of confusion and the suffocating closeness of the atmosphere within, soon drove them into purer air.

In reviewing again the different chapels in which the various worship of the Latins, Greeks, Armenians, Copts, and Abyssinians was all going on at once, and that too in every diversity of manner, nothing was more striking than the religious pride of the worshippers of each sect, which made them cast down a look of contempt on those of the others, as men irretrievably lost in error, though we ourselves, who belonged professedly to none, were for that reason treated with respect by all. From a number of lesser incidents which passed under our own eyes, we could perfectly believe and understand what Maundrell had said of the church here, in his day, and which remains unaltered to the present. The same Traveller's description of the ceremony of the holy fire, of which he was himself an eyewitness, is a faithful but disgraceful picture of the scenes transacted here from one end of the year to the other, and inclines one to call the church of the holy sepulchre at Jerusalem, a temple combining the most surprising mixture of credulity and imposition, devotion and wickedness, that has ever issued from any one source since the world began. That which I myself witnessed, confirmed to me all that I had heard and seen of the vile appropriation of religion here to the worst of purposes, and induced me to believe what I had at first thought at least a highly coloured picture, though painted by the chaste, the accurate, and the pious Maundrell.' p. 252.

In our review of Mr. Jolliffe's Letters from Palestine,† we ventured some remarks on the site of the Crucifixion, which

* Eccl. Polity. B. v. § 54. † Ecl. Rev. N. S. Vol. XIII. p. 170.

that gentleman has done us the honour to insert in the second edition of that work. Mr. Buckingham's retrospective view of Jerusalem amply justifies the suspicions we expressed as to the authenticity of the tradition which makes the place called Golgotha or Calvary, amount' in the centre of the present city. He admits that there are well founded objections to the hypothesis on which all the plans of the ancient city have been constructed, by which Mount Calvary is placed without the walls. Instead of the present city having gained in a northern direction, so as to admit the hill Calvary, (a supposition made necessary by that hypothesis,) he conceives it to have lost the whole intervening space between the present walls and the Tomb of Helena, where the old walls passed on the North. But unwilling to concede that Dr. Clarke is right in disputing the identity of Calvary, he attempts to get rid of this objection, by denying that the place of crucifixion must necessarily have been without the ancient walls. It is strange enough, that while examining, as he appears to have done with some attention, the statements of the Evangelists, he should have overlooked the express remark of St. John, that "the place where Jesus was crucified was nigh to the city," as well as the declaration of the Author of the Epistle to the Hebrews, that our Lord" suffered without the gate." Mr. Buckingham labours to set aside the objection, that the sepulchre, as a place of burial, must have been without the walls. He takes no notice of the still stronger fact, that Calvary was a place, not simply of burial, but of public execution. Dr. Lightfoot, however, has collected a variety of passages from Jewish writers, to shew that no sepulchres, except those of the family of David, were permitted to be within the city, and that a dead body was not allowed to remain within the walls even for a night.

But on what authority,' he exclaims, is Calvary called a 'mount? Upon no Scriptural authority, as we have already remarked, nor, so as far we have been able to discover, for any other solid reason. The expression" without the gate," would seem to point to a place just without one of the gates of the city, in going out of which they met with Simon "coming out of the "country;"-probably by the side of the high road, so that all they that passed by might see the spectacle; and" nigh unto the city,' because there was obviously no motive for going to a great distance. Jerusalem, then, being built upon a hill, the place in question must rather have been on lower ground than the city, which corresponds with the representation that in that place 66 was a garden." Mr. Buckingham's object in questioning whether Calvary was a mount, is, indeed, to shew that the site

Eclectic Review. N. S. Vol. XIII. p. 170.
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VOL. XVII. N. S..

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of the present edifice may be Calvary, although it is not a mount. We believe that the place fixed on was never without the walls, and that it has no pretensions to the name it bears; in which opinion we are strongly confirmed by our Traveller's reasoning. On what does the identity of the sacred places rest? On the general suffrage, it is said, of antiquity. But that suffrage may be adduced in favour of the most absurd and palpable fables. What is the chain of evidence by which it has been attempted to support the received tradition? First, we are to believe, that, either from design or accident, a chapel was dedicated to Ve⚫nus on the spot which had been sanctified by the death and re'surrection of Christ.'* Next, that this design or coincidence was matter of notoriety, and served for ages to identify the spot; and further, that, on the demolition of the pagan structure three hundred years after, 'the removal of the earth and stones re• vealed the holy sepulchre to the eyes of mankind.' Now, if only the last of these positions were well attested by credible witnesses, there would be no difficulty in admitting the former two. But who were present at the alleged excavation which brought the sepulchre to light? The sepulchre is believed to have been itself a lateral excavation in a rock: how came such a spot to have been sunk beneath the foundations of a temple? Who assisted at the process of levelling and cutting away the rock so as to leave it in the shape of a pepper-box? What authority have we for bringing the spot on which our Lord and the two malefactors were crucified, into such close proximity to the garden of Joseph of Arimathea, as is required by the hypothesis that one edifice covered both? When these questions can be resolved, it will be time enough to inquire into the authority for the charge against the Roman Conqueror, of having selected the spot in question, a spot without the walls of the city, and which it might have been supposed he would not easily have identified, for the erection of a temple to Venus. Was it against the followers of Christ, that the arms of Titus and Hadrian were directed? Would the desecration of a place of public execution, have inflicted any insult or mortification on the Jews? Or was it to gratify them, that the Conqueror is supposed to have thus poured contempt on the crucified Nazarene, rather than set up his victorious trophies on the prostrate Temple in which they trusted? In the absence of all credible testimony as to the fact, it may be allowed us to make these inquiries relative to the probable motive which could have led to the alleged transaction.†

• Vide Gibbon, c. 23, who refers to Jerome and Tillemont, the historians of the miraculous discovery of the Cross, &c. &c.; legends attested by the same authorities.

Dio Cassius (as quoted by Dr. Clarke) affirms, that in the

When Jerusalem fell, we have reason to believe that no Christians were among the victims. So complete was the destruction, that a ploughshare was drawn over the site of the Temple. Amid the total desolation, who was to conduct the Imperial Heathen through the labyrinth of ruins, to shew him where the Cross of the Galilean stood? Few of the eye-witnesses of those transactions survived the catastrophe of the city. To the spots in question, the Jew would attach no interest. And with what feelings must they have been regarded by the early Christians? Can we imagine St. Peter, or St. John, or Mary Magdalene and the other Mary, rearing a votive temple over the very site where their Divine Master was publicly executed, or fondly lingering near that accursed spot, and carefully banding down the tradition of its precise locality? Would they have even sanctioned the topographical curiosity which should have led persons to seek out those precise localities, or the superstition which should have annexed the idea of superior efficacy to devotions offered there? We judge not. Attached as the Apostles naturally were as Jews to the holy city, more especially to the Temple, their keen remembrance of the horrors of the past, and their knowledge of the impending vengeance which darkened the future, must effectually have precluded that local attachment from becoming a source of complacent feeling. The instructions of their Master, too, had taught them, that no circumstantial sanctity was henceforth to be attached to any place, however favoured. And when St. Paul says, "Yea, though we have known Christ after the "flesh, yet now henceforth we know him no more," he must, we think, be understood as implying, that all the associations which related to Christ merely as a man, were to be discarded from the mind of the Christian, as having no connexion with that love of the Saviour which is the only effective religious principle. The truth of this sentiment could not be more strikingly. illustrated, than by the total destitution of moral principle which

'place where the temple of God had been, Adrian erected one to Jupiter. May not this have led to the mistake, that an image of Jupiter was erected over the site of the holy sepulchre? Dr. Clarke supposes that the accidental fissure in the rock might lead the Empress Helena to fix on the spot now called Calvary, as the site of the Crucifixion. The mode resorted to for discovering the Cross, by inflicting tortures on the Jews, and the miracle which distinguished the true Cross from the other two, which are parts of the tale, betray the wretched ignorance and superstition of the principal agents in those transactions. Of the transformation of Pagan edifices into Christian temples, later times furnish us with abundant instances. This economical arrangement might have been adopted by Helena, and the legend would be easily adapted to the locality.