Curious Myths of the Middle AgesBaring-Gould, S. (Sabine)
History
Curious Myths of the Middle Ages
Baring-Gould, S. (Sabine)
Folklore; Legends -- History and criticism; Tales, Medieval
Or, is that other illustration more remarkable, where the wanderer is
amongst the Alps, at the brink of a hideous chasm; and seeing in the
contorted pine-branches the ever-haunting scene of the Via Dolorosa,
he is lured to cast himself into that black gulf in quest of
rest,--when an angel flashes out of the gloom with the sword of flame
turning every way, keeping him back from what would be to him a
Paradise indeed, the repose of Death?
Or, that last scene, when the trumpet sounds and earth is shivering to
its foundations, the fire is bubbling forth through the rents in its
surface, and the dead are coming together flesh to flesh, and bone to
bone, and muscle to muscle--then the weary man sits down and casts off
his shoes! Strange sights are around him, he sees them not; strange
sounds assail his ears, he hears but one--the trumpet-note which gives
the signal for him to stay his wanderings and rest his weary feet.
I can linger over those noble woodcuts, and learn from them something
new each time that I study them; they are picture-poems full of latent
depths of thought. And now let us to the history of this most
thrilling of all mediæval myths, if a myth.
If a myth, I say, for who can say for certain that it is not true?
"Verily I say unto you, There be some standing here, which shall not
taste of death till they see the Son of Man coming in His kingdom,"[1]
are our Lord's words, which I can hardly think apply to the
destruction of Jerusalem, as commentators explain it to escape the
difficulty. That some should live to see Jerusalem destroyed was not
very surprising, and hardly needed the emphatic Verily which Christ
only used when speaking something of peculiarly solemn or mysterious
import.
Besides, St. Luke's account manifestly refers the coming in the
kingdom to the Judgment, for the saying stands as follows: "Whosoever
shall be ashamed of Me, and of My words, of him shall the Son of Man
be ashamed, when He shall come in His own glory, and in His Father's,
and of the holy angels. But I tell you of a truth, there be some
standing here, which shall not taste of death till they see the
kingdom of God."[2]
There can, I think, be no doubt in the mind of an unprejudiced person
that the words of our Lord do imply that some one or more of those
then living should not die till He came again. I do not mean to insist
on the literal signification, but I plead that there is no
improbability in our Lord's words being fulfilled to the letter. That
the circumstance is unrecorded in the Gospels is no evidence that it
did not take place, for we are expressly told, "Many other signs truly
did Jesus in the presence of His disciples, which are not written in
this book;"[3] and again, "There are also many other things which
Jesus did, the which, if they should be written every one, I suppose
that even the world itself could not contain the books that should be
written."[4]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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