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.
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