But what then?  The journey is ended, the gleam of the vision fades, and we all return to the life we came from.  We descend from what the pilgrims call the highest holy place on earth and get back to the ordinary level of life.  How can we go back and live the dull round again?  Shall we not be as Lazarus is depicted in Browning’s story of him, spoiled for earth, having seen heaven?  The Russian at home calls the returned pilgrim polu-svatoe, a half-saint:  does that perhaps mean that life is spoilt for him?

Some hundreds of aged pilgrims die every year in Lent; they fall dead on the long tramps in Galilee on the way to Nazareth.  Many pass peacefully away in Jerusalem itself without even seeing Easter there.  They are accounted happy.  To be buried at Jerusalem is considered an especially sweet thing, and it is indeed very good for these aged ones that the symbol and that which it symbolised should coincide, and that for them the journey to Jerusalem the earthly should be so obviously and materially a big step towards Jerusalem the golden.  It would have been sad in a way for such old folk to return once more across the ocean to the old, somewhat irrelevant life of Mother Russia.  But what of the young who must of necessity go back?

Once Easter was over it was marvellous how eager we were to get on the first boat and go home again.  What were we going to do when we got there, seeing that we had been to Jerusalem?

We carry our vision back into daily life, or rather, we carry the memory of it in our hearts until a day of fulfilment.  All true visions are promises, and that which we had was but a glimpse of a Jerusalem we shall one day live in altogether.

The peasants took many pictures of the sacred places of Jerusalem, and Jerusalem ikons, back with them to their little houses in Russia, there to put them in the East corners of their rooms.  They will henceforth light lamps and candles before these pictures.  The candle before the picture is, as we know, man’s life being lived in front of the vision of Jerusalem; man’s ordinary daily life in the presence of the heavenly city.

We realise life itself as the pilgrimage of pilgrimages.  Life contains many pilgrimages to Jerusalem, just as it contains many flowerings of spring to summer, just as it contains many feasts of Communion and not merely one.  Some of the pilgrims actually go as many as ten times to that Jerusalem in Palestine.  But there are Jerusalems in other places if they only knew, and pilgrimages in other modes.  It is possible to go back and live the pilgrimage in another way, and to find another Jerusalem.  Life has its depths:  we will go down into them.  We may forget the vision there, but as a true pilgrim once said, “We shall always live again to see our golden hour of victory.”  That is the true pilgrim’s faith.  He will reach Jerusalem again and again.  He may forget, but he will always remember again; he will always rise again to the light of memory.