at
admirable man is that he is blind about himself.

No man will really attempt to describe his feelings, when he first
stood at the gateway of the grave of Christ. The only record relevant
here is that I did not feel the reaction, not to say repulsion,
that many seem to have felt about its formal surroundings.

Either I was particularly fortunate or others are
particularly fastidious. The guide who showed me the Sepulchre
was not particularly noisy or profane or palpably mercenary;
he was rather more than less sympathetic than the same sort of man
who might have shown me Westminster Abbey or Stratford-on-Avon. He
was a small, solemn, owlish old man, a Roman Catholic in religion;
but so far from deserving the charge of not knowing the Bible,
he deserved rather a gentle remonstrance against his assumption
that nobody else knew it. If there was anything to smile at,
in associations so sacred, it was the elaborate simplicity with
which he told the first facts of the Gospel story, as if he were
evangelising a savage. Anyhow, he did not talk like a cheap-jack
at a stall; but rather like a teacher in an infant school.
He made it very clear that Jesus Christ was crucified in case
any one should suppose he was beheaded; and often stopped in his
narrative to repeat that the hero of these events was Jesus Christ,
lest we should fancy it was Nebuchadnezzar or the Duke of Wellington.
I do not in the least mind being amused at this; but I have no reason
whatever for doubting that he may have been a better man than I. I
gave him what I should have given a similar guide in my own country;
I parted from him as politely as from one of my own countrymen.
I also, of course, gave money, as is the custom, to the various monastic
custodians of the shrines; but I see nothing surprising about that.
I am not quite so ignorant as not to know that without the monastic
brotherhoods, supported by such charity, there would not by this
time be anything to see in Jerusalem at all. There was only one
class of men whose consistent concern was to watch these things,
from the age of heathens and heresies to the age of Turks and tourists;
and I am certainly not going to sneer at them for doing no practical work,
and then refuse to pay them for the practical work they do.
For the rest, even the architectural defacement is overstated,
the church was burned down and rebuilt in a bad and modern period;
but the older parts, especially the Crusaders' por