Rensselaer Union, Volume 5, Number 37, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 5 June 1873 — Solomon’s Temple. [ARTICLE]

Solomon’s Temple.

The skill, the art, the mighty toil, that have been devoted to the adornment, and to the desecration, of this most ancient place of worship, have been of extraordinary magnitude. The grandest legacy of Egyptian antiquity, the Great Pyramid, demanded, indeed, a larger amount of naked human labor; but in Moriah there is a compulsion of the features of Nature herself to the service of the builder. In aetual bulk, the Great Pyramid is to the Temple rock as five to nine, if we descend but us far as the sills of the five double gates of the mountain of the house. If we carry the comparison down to the level at which the lowest foundation of the walls is inlaid in the rock at the angles of the enclosure, the bulk is three times that of the Geat Pyramid. The cubic contents of the mason’s work may not amount to a tenth part of that piled up by Souphis. But the hill has been honey combed with chambers and galleries; and the declining part to the south covered with vaults and arches, to which Gheczeh can show no parallel. No merely artificial structure eould have so successfully resisted the resolute efforts of the. two greatest military nations of the ancient world to destroy its existence and obliterate its memory. No other monument, long surviving the era of Asiatic and Italian power, can ever, like the noble Sanctuary, mark by its very ruins, the successive periods of its glory and its fall! If we regard not so much the evidence of the labor devoted to the work of the Temple as the effect produced on the mind by ite apparent magnitude, we may suggest the following comparisons: the length of the et&tern wall of the Sanctuary is rather more than double that of one side of the great Pyramid. Its height, from the foundation on the rock at the south, and near the northern angles, was nearly a third of that of the Egyptian structure. If to this great height of one hundred and fifty-two feet of solid wall be added the descent of one hundred and fourteen feet to the -bed of the Kedron,— and the further elevation of one hundred and sixty feet attained by the pinnacle of the Temple porch, wc have a total height of four hundred and twenty-six feet, which is only fifty-nine feet less than that of the Great Pyramid. The area of the face of the eastern wall is more than doable that of one side of the pyramid. Thus the magnitude of the noble Sanctuary of Jerusalem far exceeded that of any other temple in the, world. Two amphitheatres of the size of the Coliseum would have stood within its colossal girdle, and left room to spare. Tlve Coliseum is said to have seated eighty-seven thousand spectators, and accommodated twenty-two thousand more in its arena and passages. For such a number to have been crammed within its circle, the space for each person must have been limited to seventeen inches by twenty inches. Allowing two cubits each Way, or four square cubits for each worshiper in the temple, the Sanctuary would have contained thirty thousand ; the Chel, excluding the Priests l Court, twenty thousand more, and there i would yet have been room in the Great Court, and the cloisters to make the total 1 reach to more then two hundred and ten i-thousand. —Edinburgh Iteciew. ... —_——

—A correspondent writes to the Bowling Green (Ky.) Democrat: “Mr. John B. Lewis, one of the most reliable citizens of Allehsville, and proprietor of the hotel at that place, witnessed a few days ago the following case of snake charming. He heard a squirrel chattering in an unusual nrianner, and crept stealthily to the place, where he saw a squirrel running up and •down a tree. A large black snake was lying at tire root of the tree with its mourn open, but perfectly motionless. The squirrel would run to the top of the tree each time, and each time Jin coming down would come nearer the snake, until d deliberately put its head in the snake’s mouth, and the snake commenced swallowing it. At this juncture Mr. Lewis killed the snake and set the squirrel at liberty. ,