end in
the Sepulchre itself. I slept in a room with four hundred peasants,
on a wooden shelf covered with old pallets of straw. The shelves were
hard and dirty; there was no relaxation of our involuntary asceticism,
but we slept well. There was music in our ears. We had attained to
Jerusalem, and our dreams were with the angels. Jerusalem the earthly
had not forced itself upon our minds; we held the symbolism of the
journey lightly, and the mind read a mystery in delicate emotions. The
time was to come when some of us would be discontented with Jerusalem,
as some of the disciples who fell away were discontented with the poor
and humble Jesus; but as yet even to these all the material outward
appearance of Jerusalem was a rumour. We knew not what we should see
when we stepped out on the morrow; perhaps pearly gates, streets of
gold, angels with harps. Jerusalem the earthly was unproved. We had as
yet only toiled up the steep Jaffa way, and the road to heaven itself
might be not unlike that road. To-morrow ... who could say what
to-morrow would unfold? For those of us who could see with the eyes of
the heart there could be no disappointment. But for all, this night of
golden dreams was a respite, and Jerusalem the symbol and Jerusalem
the symbolised were one. Happy, happy pilgrims!

Next day we went to the strange and ugly church erected over the
Sepulchre of Jesus, the "Church of the Life-giving Grave"; and we
kissed the stone of anointing--the stone on which the body of Jesus
lay whilst it was being wrapped in fair linen and anointed with oil.
We knelt before the ark-like inner temple which is built over _the
hollow in the rock_. We were received into that temple, and one by one
crept along the passage-way to the Holy of Holies, the inmost shrine
of Christendom. Only music could tell what the peasant realised in
that chamber as he knelt where the sacred Body lay, and kissed the
hollow in the stone.

Then we spent a whole night in the Sepulchre and entered into the
mystery of death--saw our own death as in a picture before us, our
abiding in the grave until the resurrection. In the great dark church
the solemn service went forward. On the throne of the altar at
Golgotha near by, the candles gleamed. Night grew quiet all around,
and the Syrian stars looked over us, so that centuries and ages passed
away.

III

We went through the life of Jesus in symbolical procession, journeyed
to Bethlehem and kissed the manger