ple and superficial parallel between the wooden
pictures of admirals and the wooden pictures of angels.
Still less will he appreciate the intense spiritual atmosphere,
that makes the real difference between an ikon and an inn-sign,
and makes the inns of England, noble and national as they are,
relatively the homes of Christian charity but hardly a Christian faith.
He can hardly bring himself to believe that Syrians can be as fond
of religion as Englishmen of beer.

Nobody can do justice to these cults who has not some sympathy with
the power of a mystical idea to transmute the meanest and most trivial
objects with a kind of magic. It is easy to talk of superstitiously
attaching importance to sticks and stones, but the whole poetry
of life consists of attaching importance to sticks and stones;
and not only to those tall sticks we call the trees or those large
stones we call the mountains. Anything that gives to the sticks of our
own furniture, or the stones of our own backyard, even a reflected
or indirect divinity is good for the dignity of life; and this
is often achieved by the dedication of similar and special things.
At least we should desire to see the profane things transfigured
by the sacred, rather than the sacred disenchanted by the profane;
and it was a prophet walking on the walls of this mountain city,
who said that in his vision all the bowls should be as the bowls
before the altar, and on every pot in Jerusalem should be written
Holy unto the Lord.

Anyhow, this intensity about trifles is not always understood.
Several quite sympathetic Englishmen told me merely as a funny story
(and God forbid that I should deny that it is funny) the fact
of the Armenians or some such people having been allowed to suspend
a string of lamps from a Greek pillar by means of a nail, and their
subsequent alarm when their nail was washed by the owners of the pillar;
a sort of symbol that their nail had finally fallen into the hands
of the enemy. It strikes us as odd that a nail should be so valuable
or so vivid to the imagination. And yet, to men so close to Calvary,
even nails are not entirely commonplace.

All this, regarding a decent delay and respect for religion or
even for superstition, is obvious and has already been observed.
But before leaving it, we may note that the same argument cuts
the other way; I mean that we should not insolently impose our own ideas
of what is picturesque any more than our own ideas of