The Age of Erasmus: Lectures Delivered in the Universities of Oxford and LondonAllen, P. S. (Percy Stafford)
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The Age of Erasmus: Lectures Delivered in the Universities of Oxford and London
Allen, P. S. (Percy Stafford)
Erasmus, Desiderius, -1536; Renaissance
[33] Right so, if thou be religious, renne thou never ferthere
To Rome ne to Roquemadoure: but as thy rule techeth,
Holde thee to thine obedience: that heighway is to heaven.
The third class of pilgrimage sites is of those which are sanctified
through association with divinities or saints or relics: Gaya in
Bihar, with its pilgrims' way leading pious Buddhists by long flights
of steps up and down the circle of hills, like the great way at
Bologna; Jerusalem, Rome, Canterbury, Treves; and Santiago (St.
James) de Compostella, rendered attractive also by remote distance. Or
a settlement of hermits in a wilderness might become a place of
pilgrimage, especially when death had heightened the fame enjoyed
during their lives: such as Gueremeh in Cappadocia, St. Bertrand among
the Pyrenees, or Einsiedeln above the Lake of Lucerne, where in 1487
died Nicholas the Hermit, reputed to have lived for twenty years
without food. And we may make a special category for sacred houses;
the Bait-ullah or Qaabah at Mecca, the house of the Virgin at Loretto,
St. Columba's at Glencolumbkill, and the house in which St. Francis
died, in dei Angeli at Assisi.
In many cases there is definite evidence to show that pilgrimage sites
remain sacred even when religions change. Mecca was a resort of
pilgrims in the first century B.C., 700 years before Muhammad. The
Central-Asian shrines visited by Buddhist pilgrims from China on their
way to India, Fa-hsien in the fifth and Hsuan-tsang in the seventh
century, are now appropriated to Islam. The so-called foot-mark on
Adam's Peak in Ceylon has been attributed by Brahmans to Siva, by
Buddhists to Sakyamuni, by Gnostics to Ieu, by Muhammadans to Adam,
and by the Portuguese Christians to either St. Thomas or the eunuch of
Candace, queen of Ethiopia.[34]
[34] J.E. Tennent's _Ceylon_ (1860), ii. 133, quoted in Yule's
_Marco Polo_, ed. H. Cordier, 1903, ii. 321.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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