hole of the sacred night.

Yet the pilgrim is not in communion with the Latin Church; neither is
he of the Church Armenian, or the Church Greek; Maronite Coptic, or
Abyssinian--these also are Christian churches which can not call him
child.

He comes from a distant and a northern isle to bow before the tomb of
a descendant of the kings of Israel, because he, in common with all
the people of that isle, recognizes in that sublime Hebrew incarnation
the presence of a divine Redeemer. Then why does he come alone? It is
not that he has availed himself of the inventions of modern science,
to repair first to a spot, which all his countrymen may equally desire
to visit, and thus anticipate their hurrying arrival. Before the
inventions of modern science, all his countrymen used to flock hither.
Then why do they not now? Is the Holy Land no longer hallowed? Is it
not the land of sacred and mysterious truths? The land of heavenly
messages and earthly miracles? The land of prophets and apostles? Is
it not the land upon whose mountains the Creator of the Universe
parleyed with man, and the flesh of whose anointed race He mystically
assumed, when He struck the last blow at the powers of evil? Is it to
be believed that there are no peculiar and eternal qualities in a land
thus visited, which distinguish it from all others--that Palestine is
like Normandy or Yorkshire, or even Attica or Rome?

There may be some who maintain this; there have been some, and those,
too, among the wisest and the wittiest of the northern and western
races, who, touched by a presumptuous jealousy of the long
predominance of that Oriental intellect to which they owed their
civilization, would have persuaded themselves and the world that the
traditions of Sinai and Calvary were fables. Half a century ago,
Europe made a violent and apparently successful effort to disembarrass
itself of its Asian faith. The most powerful and the most civilized of
its kingdoms, about to conquer the rest, shut up its churches,
desecrated its altars, massacred and persecuted their sacred servants,
and announced that the Hebrew creeds which Simon Peter brought from
Palestine, and which his successors revealed to Clovis, were a mockery
and a fiction. What has been the result? In every city, town, village,
and hamlet of that great kingdom, the divine image of the most
illustrious of Hebrews has been again raised amid the homage of
kneeling millions; while, in the heart of its brigh