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 where the baby Jesus was laid, that first cradle as opposed to the second, the hollow in the rock.  We came as the Kings, saw the shepherds and their flocks, saw the star stop over the house of Mary, and went in to do homage, bringing thither the gifts of our hearts—­gold, frankincense, and myrrh.