r has long since been numbered when
pilgrims there kneel and monks pray?

An armed Turkish guard are bivouacked in the court of the Church; within
the Church itself, two brethren of the convent of Terra Santa keep holy
watch and ward; while, at the tomb beneath, there kneels a solitary
youth, who prostrated himself at sunset, and who will there pass unmoved
the whole 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 cannot 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, recognises 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 civilisation, 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 civilised 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 H