46)

(446) For these most recent explanations, see Rev. Cunningham Geikie, D.
D., in work cited; also Sir J. W. Dawson, Egypt and Syria, published
by the Religious Tract Society, 1887, pp. 125, 126; see also Dawson's
article in The Expositor for January, 1886.

How unsatisfactory all such rationalism must be to a truly theological
mind is seen not only in the dealings with Prof. Robertson Smith in
Scotland and Prof. Woodrow in South Carolina, but most clearly in a book
published in 1886 by Monseigneur Haussmann de Wandelburg. Among other
things, the author was Prelate of the Pope's House-hold, a Mitred Abbot,
Canon of the Holy Sepulchre, and a Doctor of Theology of the Pontifical
University at Rome, and his work is introduced by approving letters from
Pope Leo XIII and the Patriarch of Jerusalem. Monseigneur de Wandelburg
scorns the idea that the salt column at Usdum is not the statue of Lot's
wife; he points out not only the danger of yielding this evidence
of miracle to rationalism, but the fact that the divinely inspired
authority of the Book of Wisdom, written, at the latest, two hundred and
fifty years before Christ, distinctly refers to it. He summons Josephus
as a witness. He dwells on the fact that St. Clement of Rome, Irenaeus,
Hegesippus, and St. Cyril, "who as Bishop of Jerusalem must have known
better than any other person what existed in Palestine," with St.
Jerome, St. Chrysostom, and a multitude of others, attest, as a matter
of their own knowledge or of popular notoriety, that the remains of
Lot's wife really existed in their time in the form of a column of salt;
and he points triumphantly to the fact that Lieutenant Lynch found this
very column. In the presence of such a continuous line of witnesses,
some of them considered as divinely inspired, and all of them greatly
revered--a line extending through thirty-seven hundred years--he
condemns most vigorously all those who do not believe that the pillar
of salt now at Usdum is identical with the wife of Lot, and stigmatizes
them as people who "do not wish to believe the truth of the Word of
God."

His ignorance of many of the simplest facts bearing upon the legend is
very striking, yet he does not hesitate to speak of men who know far
more and have thought far more upon the subject as "grossly ignorant."
The most curious feature in his ignorance is the fact that he is
utterly unaware of the annual changes in the salt statue. He is entirely
ign