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lchre, that centre of enslaving superstition, whose annual triumphs cast a ray of hope adown the narrow halls of the Vatican. Through a hole in the wall of the Chapel of Angelo, a torch is annually passed out, supposedly lighted by fire from heaven. The pilgrims wait in the darkness with wax tapers, to be lighted from celestial fire. The devotees bathe their hands in the flame, to secure a special blessing; and the extinguished tapers are carried to 20,000 distant homes, to be as devoutly reverenced as the pilgrims who carry them.
"There is nothing in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre that is not saddening to the heart of the enlightened. Through our visit to this building we had the honor of making the acquaintance of the Bishop of Jerusalem, and receiving from him diplomas testifying to our Oriental travel. I fear I should forfeit mine could he know my unorthodox opinions of the 'sacred spots' of the Church.
"I loved to walk along the Via Dolorosa, to visit the home of Mary and Martha. I wept under the shade of Gethsemane's gnarled olive trees; I climbed to the summit of Olivet, and listened to the French prattle of the Countess de Bouillon; I took a donkey ride over the hills of Judea; I lunched in the shadow of the rock where the man who went down from Jerusalem to Jericho, fell among thieves; I tented in the valley of the Jordan with the Stars and Stripes and the Crescent and the Star waving above; I stood on the whitened shores of the Salt Sea, and gathered dead sea apples along the shady banks of the Sacred River; I had a cooling draught from Elisha's Fountain at the foot of the Mount of Temptation; and in the shadow of Mount Tabor, I thought I heard the angel of death calling me to another Canaan. The flowered slopes of cedared Lebanon, the snowy top of Hermon, the clear waters of Abana, the ivy of old Damascus, Tyre and Sidon, Mt. Carmel and Nazareth--in short, from Dan to Beersheba, we saw all.
"And for all the Holy Land, the most accurate guide-book the traveler can have, even to this day, is the Old Testament. So perfect is the agreement of the land and the Book, that frequently when standing upon some elevated spot in Palestine one could read the story of Joshua, Judges and Samuel, and follow accurately with the eye the movements from place to place, as readily as on a modern map.
"Since the first siege of Jerusalem by Joshua thirty-three centuries ago, it has undergone twenty-six sieges, and in almost one-third of these, the city was utterly devastated. The great explorer, Captain Warren, has sunk shafts through the immense mass of debris accumulated at the wall penetrating stratum after stratum of debris of successive devastations.
"Descending eighty feet, he found the road that used to lead from the gate, in the time of Herod. Sixty feet farther down, was discovered the road of the time of Solomon. In the foundation-stones were found the marks of the quarries of Tyre. They came upon the arches of the viaduct, that, in the days of Solomon, connected the palace with the temple.
"There is no discord between the voice of the ruins, and the voice of inspiration. These wonderful voices of the dead, coming not alone from Egypt and Palestine, but from the exhumed capitals of Assyria and Babylonia, awakened after a score and a quarter centuries of silence, bear testimony in unmistakable tones that 'Jehovah is God, Jehovah is God alone.'"
The five years following the return to America were years of transition, of experiment. Mrs. Carr was, as always, bent upon devoting her energies to educational work, and Mr. Carr was content to preach in whatever surroundings might be best adapted to her talents.
Fortunate is he who discovers anywhere in the world, a situation which calls for the exercise of all his highest faculties; usually such a setting must be made, fashioned from a part of that energy which, might, if not thus deflected from creative work, have wrought the more.
It was so with Mrs. Carr. Endowed with gifts of high order, gifts that the world always needs, she had not, as yet, found the vantage ground for their full exercise; nor was she ever to find that highest development, until she had fashioned from her own heart and brain, the battle-ground of service.
As yet, she did not know this, but sought in various fields for a ready-prepared equipment, a sword sharpened, and a breast plate polished by other hands, with which she might fight for the truth. Returning from Australia she naturally looked about in Kentucky for the background of her ideals. It was not to be found there, and she came presently to Missouri; first to Fulton, then to Columbia.
She entered into various school relationships, but we find her restless in association with presidents whose ideas of school-government were different from her own. We trust the following extracts from letters will prove of interest in themselves, and at the same time tell the story of these years in the words of those who were chief actors.
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