one, at least they possessed a
faith. Christ to them was an actual living truth, though they knew
how to worship him no better than by thus kissing a stone, which had
in fact no closer reference to the Saviour than any other stone they
might have kissed in their own country. They believed; and as they
reverently pressed their foreheads, lips, and hands to the top and
sides and edges of the sepulchre, their faith became ecstatic. It was
thus that Bertram would fain have entered that little chapel, thus
that he would have felt, thus that he would have acted had he been
able. So had he thought to feel--in such an agony of faith had he
been minded there to kneel. But he did not kneel at all. He remarked
to himself that the place was inordinately close, that his contiguity
to his religious neighbours was disagreeable; and then, stooping low
his head, not in reverence, but with a view to backing himself out
from the small enclosure, with some delay and much precaution, and,
to speak truth, with various expressions of anger against those who
with their heads continued to push him the way he did not wish to go,
he retreated from the chapel. Nor while he was at Jerusalem did he
feel sufficient interest in the matter again to enter it. He had done
that deed, he had killed that lion, and, ticking it off from his list
of celebrities as one celebrity disposed of, he thought but little
more about it. Such, we believe, are the visits of most English
Christians to the so-called Holy Sepulchre.

And then he killed the other lions there: Calvary up in the gallery;
the garden, so called, in which the risen Saviour addressed the women
running from the sepulchre; the place where Peter's cock crew; the
tomb of Nicodemus--all within the same church, all under the one
roof--all at least under what should be a roof, only now it has
fallen into ruin, so that these sacred places are open to the rain
of heaven, and Greeks and Latins having quarrelled about the repairs,
the Turks, now lords of the Holy Sepulchre, have taken the matter
into their own hands, and declared that no repairs shall be done by
any of them.

And then he attended the Greek mass--at least, he partly believed
that he did so, somewhat doubting, for the mass was not said as are
those of the Romans, out at an open altar before the people, but in
a holy of holies; very holy, it may be imagined, from the manner
in which the worshippers rubbed their foreheads against certain
grati