. THE CAPTURE OF JERUSALEM, 82

Peter the Hermit

CHAPTER I.

PETER THE HERMIT.

THE FOREGROUND.

The great movements called the Crusades followed the leading of
universal religious instincts.

[Sidenote: _The Cause of Pilgrimages_]

[Sidenote: _Belong to all Religions_]

[Sidenote: _The Impulse of To-day._]

[Sidenote: _Pilgrimages and Historic Memory_]

Wherever a great leader has been born, has taught, has suffered, died,
or been buried, the feet of his followers have been glad to stand. At
such spots religious emotions are revived, holy influences are believed
to be absorbed, and a sense of nearness to the prophets of God acquired.
Whatever the teacher wore, used, or even looked upon, became a treasure
through its relation to him. In India pilgrimages to holy shrines,
rivers, and cities have been works of merit, even from prehistoric
times. The same is true of China as to temples, tombs, springs, and
mountain summits. Devotees of later religions, like that of Mahomet,
have their Meccas, as the Roman Church has her Loretto and her Lourdes.
The murder of Thomas a Becket was followed by the Canterbury
pilgrimages, immortalized by Chaucer. "From the lowest Fetichism up to
Christianity itself this general and unconquerable propensity has either
been sanctioned by religion or sprung up out of it."[1] Humanity leans
more readily on the Incarnate Savior than on Him who was "before the
world was." To-day the devout Christian feels the impulse to walk where
the Master walked, to behold the sea which He stilled, to sit by the
well where He preached, to pray in the garden of His agony, and to stand
on the summit above which He shone. And if his faith can be assured as
to the site of Calvary, the great tragedy loses all historical dimness
and is made real, visible, and present, though its story be read through
penitent tears. The place suggests the man; the man suggests the Divine
Man; He seems nearer when we worship where an apostle said, "My Lord and
my God."

[Sidenote: _The East the Fountain of Religions_]

[Sidenote: _Influence of Magna Graecia_]

The East has always been the fountain of religions to the European mind.
To the westward flowed the stream of doctrines which sprang up in the
Orient. We are beginning to see that Greece came to many of her gods
through instruction from the Asiatic continent, and that her originality
in religion lay chiefly in her refinement of nature worship an