Next: Abraham was standing before an altar on a hillock in the valley of Jehoshaphat. His flocks were grazing around or drinking from the brook Cedron: his camels and beasts of burden and armed servants in the distance. The patriarch, flushed with victory, stood as if in awe and expectation. Majestic, white-winged Melchizedek came from Salem. His tall, slender frame was full of tempered majesty. He wore a garment of dazzling whiteness, confined by a girdle on which were embroidered characters of mystic import. His long hair was fair and glossy as silk; his beard white, short, and pointed. His face shone with divine splendor. A holy calm seemed diffused in the air around him. He bore in his hands the holy vessel handed down from Noah. He placed it upon the altar, behind which rose three clouds of smoke; the one in the midst rose higher than the other two. On the altar lay the bones of Adam--long after buried beneath the great altar of Calvary--and both prayed God to fulfil the promise he had made to Adam of one day sending the great Deliverer who would bruise the serpent's head. {138} The priest of the most high God then took bread and wine-- emblems of the great Eucharistic Sacrifice--raised them toward heaven, and blessed them, and gave thereof to Abraham and his servants, but tasted not thereof himself. They who ate of this bread and drank of this wine seemed strengthened and devoutly inspired thereby. And Melchizedek blessed Abraham, and said: "Blessed be Abram by the most high God, who created heaven and earth." And he renewed to him the promise that in him should all the families of the earth be blessed. The San Greal seemed, in the vision, left with Abraham as a pledge of that promise, and afterward, was carried down into Egypt by the children of Israel. Moses took it with him when he fled to the land of Midian, and was using it for some mysterious oblation on Mount Horeb, when the Lord appeared to him in a flame of fire out of the burning bush. Sir Launcelot saw the vessel long after in the temple of Jerusalem among other precious objects of antiquity; its use and origin nearly forgotten. Only a few remembered its strange history, and _felt_, rather than knew, that it yet awaited its most glorious use. Its holy guardians had always watched over its safety with jealous care, until the abomination of desolation entered the holy place. But a divine Eye seemed to watch over it. At the institution of the Mass, it was in the possession of a holy woman, since known as Veronica--her who took off her veil to wipe the dust and sweat and blood from the divine face of suffering Jesus, which was left thereon so miraculously imprinted. Veronica brought the vessel to the disciples of Jesus to be used at the Last Supper.