The Catalogue of the Last Day
A sermon by the Rev. Dr. George Lewis Boar-Hays for Proper 27 Year A on Amos 5 In 1937, the municipal library of San Jerónimo acquired a manuscript whose existence had been denied by three successive governments. The manuscript was bound in black leather, bore no title, and consisted of forty-seven pages, of which the last was blank. Its author was unknown. The catalogue assigned it to the seventeenth century, although a reference on page nineteen to a railway accident in Córdoba made that date improbable. The librarian, an elderly man named Salcedo, suggested that the reference was a later interpolation. This explanation was generally accepted, principally because no one could suggest another. The manuscript described a city called Orán. I have found no evidence that such a city existed, though its institutions were sufficiently familiar: a magistracy, a council of merchants, several temples, a tribunal for the adjudication of debts, and an elaborate system of public festiva...