DOI Page / Citation link:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.12665#0313
296
INCIDENTS OF TRAVEL.
be denied the rites of burial, I pitied, I grieved for,
but I could not blame him. But when suspicion
was roused by the manner of the monk, I resolved
to inquire further ; and if his tale should prove un-
true, to tear with my own hands the libellous stone
from my friend's grave, and hurl it down Mount
Zion. I afterward saw the monk who had shrived
him, and was told that the young man with whom
I had conversed was a prater and a fool; that he
himself had never heard B--speak of religion
until after his return from the Dead Sea with the
hand of death upon him ; that he had administered
the sacrament to him but three days before his
death, when all hope of life was past, and that even
yet it might he a question whether he did really
renounce his faith, for the solemn abjuration was
made in a language he but imperfectly under-
stood ; and he never spoke afterward, except in the
wildness of delirium, to murmur the name of
" Mother."
I have said that, in his dying moments, his feel-
ings were harrowed by the thought that his body
would be denied a Christian burial. Mr. Whiting,
who accompanied me on'my first visit to his grave,
told me that the Catholics would not have allowed
him a resting-place in consecrated ground ; and,
leading me a short distance, to the grave of a
friend and fellow-missionary who had died since
he had been at Jerusalem, described to me what he
had seen of the unchristian spirit of the Chris-
tians of the holy city. Refused by the Latins, the
INCIDENTS OF TRAVEL.
be denied the rites of burial, I pitied, I grieved for,
but I could not blame him. But when suspicion
was roused by the manner of the monk, I resolved
to inquire further ; and if his tale should prove un-
true, to tear with my own hands the libellous stone
from my friend's grave, and hurl it down Mount
Zion. I afterward saw the monk who had shrived
him, and was told that the young man with whom
I had conversed was a prater and a fool; that he
himself had never heard B--speak of religion
until after his return from the Dead Sea with the
hand of death upon him ; that he had administered
the sacrament to him but three days before his
death, when all hope of life was past, and that even
yet it might he a question whether he did really
renounce his faith, for the solemn abjuration was
made in a language he but imperfectly under-
stood ; and he never spoke afterward, except in the
wildness of delirium, to murmur the name of
" Mother."
I have said that, in his dying moments, his feel-
ings were harrowed by the thought that his body
would be denied a Christian burial. Mr. Whiting,
who accompanied me on'my first visit to his grave,
told me that the Catholics would not have allowed
him a resting-place in consecrated ground ; and,
leading me a short distance, to the grave of a
friend and fellow-missionary who had died since
he had been at Jerusalem, described to me what he
had seen of the unchristian spirit of the Chris-
tians of the holy city. Refused by the Latins, the