NAZARETH.

New Zealand Times, Volume XXX, Issue 4553, 23 October 1875, Page 1 (Supplement)

NAZARETH.

(From Qolden Hours.) Two hours more brought us within sight of the home of the Son of Mary. In the centre of a not very lofty table-land we beheld a kind of basin, surrounded . on every side by gentlysloping hills ; and there was the spot once glorified by the thirty years’ lowly residence of the Carpenter of Nazareth. The village, we found by and by, occupied a somewhat elevated position on the western side of the basin ; and it was not difficult to identify the "brow of the hill” from which the infatuated villagers must have purposed to oast down Him whom a few moments before they had been ready to adore, “wondering at the gracious things which proceeded out of His mouth.” It contained a population of some six or seven hundred, who seemed to live chiefly on the product of the superstition of the benighted monies. Nothing could be more painful than the details of that superstition. There was the spot where Gabriel stood when he made the annunciation to the “ highly favored among women.” It was in a low subterranean chapel in the tawdry church, and we were shown a broken pillar, the upper part of which was miraculously suspended from the roof. Then, of course there was the holy cottage, where Joseph and his reputed Sou worked from week to _ week, and from year to year, “with chisel, saw, and plane.” This was pointed out to us as identical with a certain ancient tenement of one apartment in another part of the town, although, oddly enough, the same cottage is stoutly maintained by the infallible showmen and their infallible confreres at Rome to have been miraculously transported one line morning across the sea and located bodily at Doretto, in Italy, and to question the literal truth of either assertion would he to incur the penalty of mortal siu. And in another place we saw the veritable table at which Jesus used to sit at His meals iu His mechanic life, and afterwards, even subsequent to His resurrection !_ There happened just then to be an aristocratic pilgrim on a visit to Nazareth, a cauoness of Munich, as I was told, the dowager countess of Talbot ; aud we were both amused and grieved to see the wretched trade which the monks were driving with the belated old lady, who, by mass after mass at the successive shrines iu Palestine, was evidently purchasing for herae’f no small “degree” in the world to come. That one afternoon I saw two special acts of grace celebrated in her behalf ; and how many more there were during her protracted stay I know not. It was affecting to witness all this laborious effort in search of “ the living among the dead,” whilst Jeans Himself, the gracious Saviour, was the while waiting to welcome to the fulness of His unbought love over needy sinner who would come to Him. But all the superstition of the place could not rob it of its charm as the undoubted liucal descendant o£

the lowly Galilean village, ’ where the holy Child, the bright, inquiring, obedient Boy, the calm, self-contained adult Operative, passed through these successive stages of His mysterious thirty years. These very slopes His feet trod, that very air His lungs breathed, that very sunrise and sunset registered His lonely days. To think of Him at His meals morning by morning, noon by noon, evening by evening! to think of Him at His first effort to drive his His plane, then earning His earliest return of the sweat of His brow, then standing in sympathetic love at the sickbed and deathbed of Mary’s husband, and following his corpse as chief mourner to the grave, laboring with a fresh zest and diligence at His humble trade, now that his widowed mother was dependant on His daily work for her daily bread!