The crown of the pilgrimage was Holy Week.  By Palm Sunday all the pilgrims were back in Jerusalem from their little pilgrimages to Nazareth, Jericho, and Jordan.  The hostelries were crowded.  Fully five hundred men and women slept in the hall in which I was accommodated.  All night long the sound of prayer and hymn never died away.  At dawn each day a beggar pilgrim sanctified our benches with incense which he burned in an old tin can.  By day we visited the shrines of Jerusalem, the Virgin’s tomb, the Mount of Olives, the Praetorium, Pilate’s house, the dungeon where Jesus was put in the stocks.  We saw the washing of the feet on Holy Thursday; we walked down the steep and narrow way where Christ carried the cross and stumbled, kissed the place where Saint Veronica held out the cloth which took the miraculous likeness.  We examined our souls before Good Friday; we went to the special yearly Holy Communion now invested with a strange and awful solemnity.  There was the prostration before the Cross at Golgotha on Good Friday, the receiving of the Sacred Fire, symbol of the Resurrection, on Holy Saturday, and then the night of the year and the Great Morning.  It seemed when we all kissed one another on Easter Morning that we had outlived everything—­our own life, our own death; we were in heaven.  In symbolic act we had attained unto bliss.  The procession had marched round the church to the supreme emotional moment.  We had all stood on the highest holy place on earth and looked out for a moment upon Paradise.  We had caught the gleam of the Sun of another universe.

What happens in the pilgrim’s soul on Easter Night is something which you and I and all of us know; if not in our own minds and in the domain of letters and words, at least in the heart where music speaks.  To those who have not themselves attained unto Jerusalem and the “highest of all earthly” it is a promise, and to those who have been it is a memory and a possession.  The Greek monks say that at the sepulchre a fire bursts out of its own account each Easter Eve, and there is at least a truth of symbolism in their miracle.  An old bishop and saint was once asked to give sight to a blind woman.  He had performed no miracles in his life, yet he promised to pray for her.  And whilst he knelt in church praying, the candles which were unlit burst of themselves into flame.  The woman at that moment also received her sight and went home praising God.  It is something like that which happens when the pilgrim kneels on Easter Night.  Candles unlit in the temple of his soul burst into flame, and by their light new pictures are seen.  The part of him that was blind and craved sight gains open eyes at that moment, and that which seemed impossible is accomplished.

IV

And I, to use the metaphor of the unvisited island, had in a dream crossed the ocean, had become, through the fulfilling of a rite, more bound to the life which is beyond.  Henceforth I have a more credible promise and a more substantial hope.