"'Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. And I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven; and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.'
"These words," the Doctor continued, "have a greater significance than you might suppose. They are the foundation of the Roman Catholic Church. Peter, the disciple to whom they were spoken, became the head of the Church, and the first Pope. All his successors have been regarded as the inheritors of his divine authority; and the efforts of the Catholic Church, from the time of our Saviour till the present, have been directed to the maintenance of the principles involved in this short passage of Scripture. Volumes have been written to sustain it, and other volumes to show its fallacy; but the words remain unchanged, and the power of the Church still exists.
"Dean Stanley and others maintain that the words refer to the rock or cliff on which the Castle of Banias stands, and certainly the position is a commanding one. Another scriptural reference to the high mountain where Jesus went with three of his disciples, 'and was transfigured before them,' is easy to understand when we look from the ruins of Banias to the heights of Mount Hermon, which almost overshadow the source of the Jordan."
The next morning the party was off at daybreak to visit the Castle of Banias, which is known to the Arabs as Kul'at-es-Subeibeh. It is about a thousand feet above the town, and, consequently, has a position that must have been of great importance before the invention of artillery. The path is narrow and difficult, and the spot is one of those where a hundred men could successfully defend themselves against an army.
SUBSTRUCTIONS OF THE CASTLE OF BANIAS.
A couple of hours were spent in the castle, and even at the end of this time there was a great deal that had not been seen. The castle is on the crest of a peak, and the space it occupies may be roughly set down as a thousand feet long by two hundred in width. There are great cisterns for holding water, so that a garrison could not be made to suffer by thirst, and there are immense store-rooms in the cellars for protection against a long siege. The walls are unusually thick and strong, and many of the hewn stones are ten or twelve feet long, and with proportional width and depth. Taken altogether, the Castle of Banias is one of the wonders of Palestine, and is better preserved than the majority of its fortresses or other works of the architect.
