time. Among a multitude
of similar things, he believed that he saw the stones on which the
disciples were sleeping during the prayer of Christ; the stone on which
the Lord sat when he raised Lazarus from the dead; the Lord's footprints
on the stone from which he ascended into heaven; and, most curious of
all, "the stone which the builders rejected." Yet he makes some advance
on his predecessors, since he shows in one passage that he had thought
out the process by which the simpler myths of Palestine were made. For,
between Bethlehem and Jerusalem, he sees a field covered with small
pebbles, and of these he says: "The common people tell you that a man
was once sowing peas there, when Our Lady passed that way and asked
him what he was doing; the man answered 'I am sowing pebbles' and
straightway all the peas were changed into these little stones."

His ascribing belief in this explanatory transformation myth to the
"common people" marks the faint dawn of a new epoch.

Typical also of this new class is the German botanist Leonhard Rauwolf.
He travels through Palestine in 1575, and, though devout and at times
credulous, notes comparatively few of the old wonders, while he makes
thoughtful and careful mention of things in nature that he really saw;
he declines to use the eyes of the monks, and steadily uses his own to
good purpose.

As we go on in the seventeenth century, this current of new thought is
yet more evident; a habit of observing more carefully and of comparing
observations had set in; the great voyages of discovery by Columbus,
Vasco da Gama, Magellan, and others were producing their effect; and
this effect was increased by the inductive philosophy of Bacon, the
reasonings of Descartes, and the suggestions of Montaigne.

So evident was this current that, as far back as the early days of the
century, a great theologian, Quaresmio of Lodi, had made up his mind
to stop it forever. In 1616, therefore, he began his ponderous work
entitled The Historical, Theological, and Moral Explanation of the
Holy Land. He laboured upon it for nine years, gave nine years more to
perfecting it, and then put it into the hands of the great publishing
house of Plantin at Antwerp: they were four years in printing and
correcting it, and when it at last appeared it seemed certain to
establish the theological view of the Holy Land for all time. While
taking abundant care of other myths which he believed sanctified by Holy
Scripture, Qu