Evening Republican, Volume 20, Number 190, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 9 August 1916 — WHEN SUN WAS WORSHIPED [ARTICLE]

WHEN SUN WAS WORSHIPED

Baalbec, Now in Ruins, Was the Center of Religion That Once Had Many Adherents. Baalbec Is the city of the sun. Here the sun god was worshiped thousands of years ago, here the ruins of his great temple still stand, monstrous and majestic, a wonder and a mystery to another age and another race. Here, too, the sun today still seems to smile with particular warmth and fervor, as though regarding his faithful capital now that his place In the hierarchy of deities is gone. In the ruins of Baalbec you can trace the rise and fall of almost every creed that the near East, rich in creeds, has known. The very stones still lie about that were raised by the worshipers of Baal, whom the Israelites overthrew. Then came the Greeks and the Romans, with temples to Apollo and Jupiter, Bacchus and Venus. The warlike Arabs left their mark in a circle of fortifications, temples to a religion of the sword. Today the Turk holds dominion, and his modern mosques raise their frail domed heads, like the transient structures of children, beside the mighty monuments of the past.’ ’ In plain terms of the guidebooks, Baalbec is a little Turkish village of 5,000 people situated near some of the most remarkable ruins on earth. So there are two Baalbecs —the city of yesterday and the city of today. Modern Baalbec has .its mosques and Its churches and Its schools, sends its re-

cruits to the sultan’s armies, and makes picnics to the temple of Bacchus, where its young men and maidens hold hands in the twilight. Ancient Baalbec is a confused colossus, a heap of mighty blocks of cunningly carved stone, earthquake tossed and time eaten, piled haphazard and buried in sand, with here and there some frieze, some wall, some shrine or altar still raising its head through the tide of destruction to hold aloft the symbol of the sun or the Roman eagle. The old stones have taken on a peculiarly rich and golden color with the years. Fragments that archeologists unearth from underground are pale and colorless, but the sunlight of centuries has touched what it could reach with its own sunset hues. Few sights are so beautiful as Baalbec on a clear spring evening. The live great columns of the sun rear their slender height heavenward like the trunks of giant palms. The tumbled temple stones glow golden In the level rays, while below stretches the tender green of young grain, the delicate bloom of wide orchards. The rock of the columns crumbles with the passing of ages, but the bloom of growing life that blights at a frosty breath returns ever fresh and new, spring after spring, eternally.