get
their very recent idolatry of everything German. These Christian
bodies have been in Jerusalem for at least fifteen hundred years.
Save for a few years after the time of Constantine and a few years after
the First Crusade, they have been practically persecuted all the time.
At least they have been under heathen masters whose attitude towards
Christendom was hatred and whose type of government was despotism.
No man living in the West can form the faintest conception
of what it must have been to live in the very heart of the East
through the long and seemingly everlasting epoch of Moslem power.
A man in Jerusalem was in the centre of the Turkish Empire as a man
in Rome was in the centre of the Roman Empire. The imperial power
of Islam stretched away to the sunrise and the sunset; westward to
the mountains of Spain and eastward towards the wall of China.
It must have seemed as if the whole earth belonged to Mahomet to those
who in this rocky city renewed their hopeless witness to Christ.
What we have to ask ourselves is not whether we happen in
all respects to agree with them, but whether we in the same
condition should even have the courage to agree with ourselves.
It is not a question of how much of their religion is superstition,
but of how much of our religion is convention; how much is custom
and how much a compromise even with custom; how much a thing made facile
by the security of our own society or the success of our own state.
These are powerful supports; and the enlightened Englishman,
from a cathedral town or a suburban chapel, walks these wild
Eastern places with a certain sense of assurance and stability.
Even after centuries of Turkish supremacy, such a man feels,
he would not have descended to such a credulity. He would
not be fighting for the Holy Fire or wrangling with beggars
in the Holy Sepulchre. He would not be hanging fantastic
lamps on a pillar peculiar to the Armenians, or peering into
the gilded cage that contains the brown Madonna of the Copts.
He would not be the dupe of such degenerate fables; God forbid.
He would not be grovelling at such grotesque shrines; no indeed.
He would be many hundred yards away, decorously bowing towards
a more distant city; where, above the only formal and official
open place in Jerusalem, the mighty mosaics of the Mosque of Omar
proclaim across the valleys the victory and the glory of Mahomet.

That is the real lesson that the enlightened traveller should l