Volume - The Clarence Darrow Collection

262 DEAD SEA LEGENDS TO COMPARATIVE MYTHOLOGY.
South Carolina, but most clearly in a book published in
1886 by Monseigneur Haussmann de VVandelburg. Among
other things, the author was Prelate of the Pope's House-
hold, a Mitred Abbot, Canon of the Holy Sepulchre, and a
Doctor of Theology of the Pontifical University at Rome,
and his work is introduced by approving letters from Pope
Leo XIII and the Patriarch of Jerusalem. Monseigneur de
Wandelburg scorns the idea that the salt column at Usdum]
is not the statue of Lot's wife ; he points out not only the
danger of yielding this evidence of miracle to rationalism,]
but the fact that the divinely inspired authority of the Book]
of Wisdom, written, at the latest, two hundred and fifty years*
before Christ, distinctly refers to it. He summons Josephus
as a witness. He dwells on the fact that St. Clement of
Rome, Irehaeus, Hegesippus, and St. Cyril, " who as Bishopl
of Jerusalem must have known better than any other person]
what existed in Palestine," with St. Jerome, St. ChrysostomJ
and a multitude of others, attest, as a matter of their own*
knowledge or of popular notoriety, that the remains of
Lot's wife really existed in their time in the form of a column
of salt; and he points triumphantly to the fact that*
Lieutenant Lynch found this very column.
In the presence of such a continuous line of witnesses,
some of them considered as divinely inspired, and all of
them greatly revered a line extending through thirty-seven
hundred years he condemns most vigorously all those who
do not believe that the pillar of salt now at Usdum is identical
with the wife of Lot, and stigmatizes them as people who
" do not wish to believe the truth of the Word of God." His
ignorance of many of the simplest facts bearing upon the
legend is very striking, yet he does not hesitate to speak of
men who know far more and have thought far more upon|"
the subject as " grossly ignorant." The most curious fea.
ture in his ignorance is the fact that he is utterly unaware of
the annual changes in the salt statue. He is entirely ignorant
of such facts as that the priest Gabriel Giraudet in the
sixteenth century found the statue lying down ; that the
monk Zwinner found it in the seventeenth century standing,
and accompanied by a dog also transformed into salt ; that
Prince Radziwill found no statue at all ; that the pious Vin-