Democratic Sentinel, Volume 19, Number 17, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 3 May 1895 — The Kissing of Stones. [ARTICLE]

The Kissing of Stones.

Around the center of Jerusalem where the religious growths of centuries gather like crystals around a rod, a half-sedentary, half-floating population is to be found, whose chief object is the pursuit of piety and the veneration of the traces of Jesus, the Nazarene. Here is a world within a world—a Christian picture in a. Moslem frame. In this city, where the religion of Mohammed, thirteen cepturies ago, overcame that of Christ, and where, at present, its followers prevent the rival Christians from fighting for the possession of the venerated spots, we have a little area of ground which has been arranged by the sects of Christianity to suit the brief descriptions of the Testament, but in which no single place exists that can be proved to have been the scene of the events ascribed to it. All things which are offered for veneration are venerated In this place of faith, where both native and European Christians become seized with what I am constrained to term a lithophilematic mania, since they are seen to be constantly engaged in kissing enshrined stones of the most doubtful authenticity.—The Fortnightly Review.