win32/trojandownload

that this had become precious truth to them, both in theology and geography. Even as late as 1664 the eminent French priest Eugene Roger, in his published travels in Palestine, dwelt upon the thirty-eighth chapter of Ezekiel, coupled with a text from Isaiah, to prove that the exact centre of the earth is a spot marked on the pavement of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and that on this spot once stood the tree which bore the forbidden fruit and the cross of Christ.(31) (31) For the site of the cross on Calvary, as the point where stood "the tree of the knowledge of good and evil" in Eden, at the centre of the earth, see various Eastern travellers cited in Tobler; but especially the travels of Bishop Arculf in the Holy Land, in Wright's Early Travels in Palestine, p. 8; also Travels of Saewulf, ibid, p. 38; also Sir John Mandeville, ibid., pp. 166, 167. For Roger, see his La Terre Saincte, Paris, 1664, pp. 89-217, etc.; see also Quaresmio, Terrae Sanctae Elucidatio, 1639, for similar view; and, for one narrative in which the idea was developed into an amazing mass of pious myths, see Pilgrimage of the Russian Abbot Daniel, edited by Sir C. W. Wilson, London, 1885, p. 14. (The passage deserves to be quoted as an example of myth-making; it is as follows: "At the time of our Lord's crucifixion, when he gave up the ghost on the cross, the veil of the temple was rent, and the rock above Adam's skull opened, and the blood and water which flowed from Christ's side ran down through the fissure upon the skull, thus washing away the sins of men.") Nor was this the only misconception which forced its way from our sacred writings into medieval map-making: two others were almost as marked. First of these was the vague terror inspired by Gog and Magog. Few passages in the Old Testament are more sublime than the denunciation