Page:Andrew Klarmann - The Fool of God (1913).pdf/32

Rh These considerations furnished an inexhaustible supply of food for Rachor's self-reproach and an abundance of fuel for his wrath and consternation at discovering that the favored child was lost. He had betrayed a trust in the keeping of which Heaven was apparently as much interested as Jacob. But Rachor was so disheartened that he forgot to credit Providence above with greater power of disposition than himself. He had been despoiled of a gift of Heaven; hence Heaven also had been despoiled. He was helpless to retrieve his loss; hence Heaven also—by a mistake most common among the desolate, disconsolate, or disappointed-was rendered helpless to realize its designs.

—The reader will do well to remember that this narrative is indeed dealing with an epoch of history which appears to be for remote from the dividing line where history began to be written in books, but that in those days history was largely written in stone. The silent witnesses of antiquity have been made to speak in our own days, and from them has been wrested a story of the darings and doings of ancient generations, just as human as the story of mankind's darings and doings of the hour. "There is nothing new under the sun" is never more intensely realized to be true than when some eager explorer unearths a sphinx five or six thousand years old and extracts from him a tale as modern as the story of the late Spanish war.

For fuller information on the interesting details interwoven with this story, and for the verification of seemingly impossible descriptions of scenery, customs and characters, the kind reader is referred to Rawlinson, Ancient Egypt; L. Szczepanski, S. J., Nach Petra und zum Sinai; Heyes, Bibel und Egypten; Kaiser-Roloff, Egypten einst und jetzt; Freiherr von Ow, Hom, der Falsche Prophet; the Visions of Catherine Emmerich, etc.