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Tracks of a Rolling Stone-Part52_Henry J.Coke(1827-1916)_English Literature(文学名著)-第2页

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opinion and good wishes.'

After my General's departure, and a month up the Nile, I -



already disillusioned, alas! - rode through Syria, following

the beaten track from Jerusalem to Damascus. On my way from



Alexandria to Jaffa I had the good fortune to make the

acquaintance of an agreeable fellow-traveller, Mr. Henry



Lopes, afterwards member for Northampton, also bound for

Palestine. We went to Constantinople and to the Crimea



together, then through Greece, and only parted at Charing

Cross.



It was easy to understand Sir Frederick Stephenson's

(supposed) unwillingness to visit Jerusalem. It was probably



far from being what it is now, or even what it was when

Pierre Loti saw it, for there was no railway from Jaffa in



our time. Still, what Loti pathetically describes as 'une

banalite de banlieue parisienne,' was even then too painfully



casting its vulgar shadows before it. And it was rather with

the forlorn eyes of the sentimental Frenchman than with the



veneration of Dean Stanley, that we wandered about the ever-

sacred Aceldama of mortally wounded and dying Christianity.



One dares not, one could never, speak irreverently of

Jerusalem. One cannot think heartlessly of a disappointed



love. One cannot tear out creeds interwoven with the

tenderest fibres of one's heart. It is better to be silent.



Yet is it a place for unwept tears, for the deep sadness and

hard resignation borne in upon us by the eternal loss of



something dearer once than life. All we who are weary and

heavy laden, in whom now shall we seek the rest which is not



nothingness?

My story is told, but I fain would take my leave with words



less sorrowful. If a man has no better legacy to bequeath

than bid his fellow-beings despair, he had better take it



with him to his grave.

We know all this, we know!



But it is in what we do not know that our hope and our

religion lies. Thrice blessed are we in the certainty that



here our range is infinite. This infinite that makes our

brains reel, that begets the feeling that makes us 'shrink,'



is perhaps the most portentous argument in the logic of the

sceptic. Since the days of Laplace, we have been haunted in



some form or other with the ghost of the MECANIQUE CELESTE.

Take one or two commonplaces from the text-books of



astronomy:

Every half-hour we are about ten thousand miles nearer to the



constellation of Lyra. 'The sun and his system must travel

at his present rate for far more than a million years (divide



this into half-hours) before we have crossed the abyss

between our present position and the frontiers of Lyra'



(Ball's 'Story of the Heavens').

'Sirius is about one million times as far from us as the sun.



If we take the distance of Sirius from the earth and

subdivide it into one million equal parts, each of these



parts would be long enough to span the great distance of

92,700,000 miles from the earth to the sun,' yet Sirius is



one of the NEAREST of the stars to us.

The velocity with which light traverses space is 186,300



miles a second, at which rate it has taken the rays from

Sirius which we may see to-night, nine years to reach us.



The proper motion of Sirius through space is about one

thousand miles a minute. Yet 'careful alignment of the eye



would hardly detect that Sirius was moving, in . . . even

three or four centuries.'



'There may be, and probably are, stars from which Noah might

be seen stepping into the Ark, Eve listening to the



temptation of the serpent, or that older race, eating the

oysters and leaving the shell-heaps behind them, when the



Baltic was an open sea' (Froude's 'Science of History').

Facts and figures such as these simply stupefy us. They



vaguely convey the idea of something immeasurably great, but

nothing further. They have no more effect upon us than words



addressed to some poor 'bewildered creature, stunned and

paralysed by awe; no more than the sentence of death to the



terror-stricken wretch at the bar. Indeed, it is in this




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