Haifa; or, Life in modern Palestine. Laurence Oliphant
at a loss to conjecture. It consisted of three sides of a square excavation hewn out of the solid rock of the hillside, uncovered, and the depth of which it was difficult to determine, on account of the débris which had accumulated. Upon the faces of the chamber thus formed, rows of small niches had been carved, each niche about a foot high, six inches wide, and six inches deep. The niches were about two inches apart, and on one face I counted six rows or tiers of eighteen niches each. The other sides were not so perfect, and the rock had broken away in places. I finally decided that the whole had probably in ancient times been a vault appropriated to the reception of cinerary urns, but the matter is one which I must leave to some more experienced antiquarian than I am to determine definitely. It is not to be wondered at that this obscure and partially concealed ruin should have escaped the notice of the Palestine Exploration Survey.
One of the fellahin now told us of a marvel in the neighbourhood. It was a hole in the rock, to which, by applying one's ear, one could hear the roar of a mighty river. Attracted by the prospect of so singular a phenomenon, we scrambled through the prickly underwood with which the hillsides are thickly covered, and finally emerged upon a small valley, at the head of which was an open grassy space, and near it a table of flat limestone rock. In the centre of it was an oblong hole, about two inches by three, the sides of which had been worn smooth by the curious or superstitious, who had probably visited the spot for ages. First, the Arab stretched himself at full length, and laid his ear upon the aperture. I followed suit, and became conscious not only of a strong draught rushing upward from subterranean depths, but of a distant roaring sound, as of a remote Niagara. For a moment I was puzzled, and the Arab was triumphant, for I had treated his rushing subterranean river with a contemptuous scepticism; yet here were undeniably the sounds of roaring water. Had it been a distant gurgle or trickle it would have been explicable, but it was manifestly impossible that any river could exist large enough to produce the sounds I heard. Though the day was perfectly still, the draught upward was strong enough to blow away the corner of a handkerchief held over the mouth of the hole. At last I solved the problem to my own satisfaction. By ascending the hill on the right the roar of “the loud-voiced neighbouring ocean,” distant between two and three miles, was distinctly audible. It had been blowing the day before, and the rollers were breaking upon the long line of coast. I now conjectured that the crack in the rock must extend to some cavern on the seashore, and form a sort of whispering-gallery, conducting the sound of the breakers with great distinctness to the top of the hills, but blending them so much that it seemed at first a continuous rushing noise. This was an explanation contrary to all tradition, and it was received by the Arab with incredulity.
We now descended once more to the plains, and, crossing them, reached the village of Tantura, where we arrived about midday, passing first, however, the ruined fortress of Muzraá, a massive block of masonry about fifty yards square, the walls of which are standing to a height of about ten feet; then turning aside to the old Roman bridge, which spans in a single high arch the artificial cutting through the limestone rocks by which the ancients facilitated the egress of a winter-torrent to the sea. The inhabitants of Tantura have the reputation of being very bad people, and three years ago I saw a party of French tourists at Jerusalem who had been attacked and robbed by them. We were, however, entertained with the greatest hospitality, having a levée of the sheik and village notables, and with difficulty escaping from a banquet which they were preparing for us. They live in a miserable collection of hovels amid the almost defaced ruins of the old town, traces of which, however, are abundant in the neighbourhood. A lofty fragment of wall on a projecting promontory half a mile to the north of the town is all that remains of what must have been a castle of grand dimensions. A chain of small, rocky islets, a few hundred yards from the shore, forms a sort of natural breakwater, and at very little expense Tantura could be converted into a good port. As it is, when the weather is smooth, native craft run in here, and when once at their anchorage can defy any gale. Tantura, or Dor, was one of the towns assigned to the half tribe of Manasseh, but we read that they failed to expel the Canaanites from it, though when Israel “became strong they put them to tribute, but did not utterly drive them out.”
In the time of the Romans Dor was a mercantile town of some importance, and, though in the wars of the Diadochi it was besieged and partly destroyed, the Roman general Gabinius restored the town and harbor, and its architectural beauty was such that we read that even in the time of St. Jerome its ruins were still an object of admiration. Unfortunately, since the Turkish occupation, all these coast cities have been used as quarries for the construction of mosques and fortifications. The marble and granite pillars and columns, and the carved blocks of stone which formed the outside casings of the walls, have been carried away, leaving nothing but the mere skeletons of ruins as forlorn and desolate as the peasantry who find shelter beneath them.
Haifa, Dec. 25.—There are probably not many of your readers who have ever heard of “The Temple Society,” and yet it is a religious body numbering over 5000 members, of whom more than 300 are in America, 1000 in Palestine, and the remainder scattered over Europe, principally in Germany, Russia, and Switzerland.
The founder of the sect, if sect it can be called, is a certain Prof. Christophe Hoffman of Würtemberg, who, after studying at the University of Tübingen about thirty-five years ago, became a minister of the Lutheran Church and the principal of the College of Crischona, not far from Basle, in Switzerland. Here he became known as entertaining certain theological opinions which soon acquired some notoriety, as they consisted mainly of a criticism on the action of the Church with reference to the rationalistic opinions then becoming prevalent in Germany, and which found their culminating expression in the writings of the late Dr. Strauss. Mr. Hoffman, who was an ardent opponent of the modern and sceptical tendency of German thought, attributed its growing influence to the feeble opposition offered to it by the Church, and maintained that its impotency to arrest the evil arose from the inconsistent practice of its members with the moral teaching which they professed. Under the influence of this conviction he abandoned his charge at Crischona, and with his brothers-in-law founded a college at “Salon,” not far from Stuttgart, and commenced an agitation in favour of church reform, both in written publications and by his personal influence. He was shortly after elected to the Diet at Frankfort, where he presented a petition signed by 12,000 persons in favour of reform of the Lutheran Church.
His Biblical studies at this time, especially of the book of Revelations, led him to the conclusion that the period of the second advent of the Messiah was approaching, but that Christ could only be received by a Church which had attempted to embody his moral teaching in daily life; in fact, that he could only recognize those as his own at his second coming who had succeeded in practically applying the ethical code which he had taught when he came first; and he reproached the Church with failing to inaugurate a social reconstruction which should render possible a Christ life in the true acceptation of the term. A doctrine based on Scripture, and directed against the ecclesiastical system to which he belonged, naturally brought him into direct collision with it; and as an interpretation of the New Testament which strikes at the root of all compromise between profession and practice must ever be an inconvenient doctrine to churches which are based upon such compromise, Mr. Hoffman was summarily expelled, carrying with him, however, a large body of followers.
He now, with a few friends, established a sort of colony in Würtemberg, where an effort was made to put into daily practice these high aspirations, and the number of adherents throughout Europe and in America grew as his views began to be more widely promulgated and understood. In 1867 the more prominent members of the society held a meeting, at which it was decided that as the second advent of the Messiah was expected to occur in Palestine, the Holy Land was the fitting place for the establishment of the central point of the Church which was preparing itself to receive him; that there should be laid the corner-stone of the new spiritual temple which gave the name of the society; and that it was the first duty of those who were waiting for his coming to restore the land to which so many Biblical promises especially attached. While they considered that the new kingdom which was to own Christ as its king was to embrace