It was the most extraordinary thing of the kind that has ever been seen, the strangeness of the affair being intensified by that same mixture of the mediaeval with the intensely modern and up-to-date ways which constitutes so peculiar a phase of William’s character.  The emperor rode into Jerusalem by the same route as that followed by the Founder of Christianity on the first Palm Sunday, wearing a flowing white mantle, and mounted on a milk-white steed.  He prayed at dusk with the members of his suite in the Garden of Gethsemane, piously kneeling on the ground, pronounced a religious discourse on the Mount of Olives, received the Holy Communion in the Coenaculum, that is to say, the house in which, according to tradition, Christ celebrated the Last Supper,—­nay, he even preached a full-fledged sermon on the occasion of the dedication of the Church of the Saviour at Jerusalem, and traveled by road from Jerusalem to Damascus!  And yet, destroying all the romance and old-time glamor that might otherwise have surrounded this imperial crusade, was the fact that he was a “personally conducted” Cook’s tourist, that his meals were prepared by French chefs, that champagne was the ordinary beverage at his table, and that, while tramcars were used to go about Damascus, the railroad was selected by him to get back from Jerusalem to Jaffa!

Emperor William has a weakness for preaching, and it must be confessed that he does it well.  He possesses a very ready gift of speech, and his fervent religious belief seems to serve as a species of inspiration to his eloquence.  Thus on board the Hohenzollern, during his annual yachting cruise along the coast of Norway, he invariably conducts divine service on Sunday morning, taking his place in front of an altar erected on deck, upon which the German war-flag is spread, in lieu of an altar-cloth.  Luther’s hymns, accompanied by the trombones of the band, are sung.  Then the emperor reads the epistle and the gospel with great feeling, and recites the liturgical prayers with considerable fervor.  Next he preaches a sermon, which, as a rule, is of his own composition, and extemporary, though occasionally he will read the sermon of some well-known pulpit orator.

It has been observed that he is always much more indulgent in cases of inattention on the part of the congregation when he reads a sermon than when he preaches one of his own.  Any sailor who has the misfortune to fall asleep during the discourse is disciplined, and his name figures, of course, on the punishment roll on the following morning, when the day’s report is presented to the emperor as the commanding officer of the ship.  If the sermon has been one of his majesty’s own composition, as a rule he allows the punishment to stand.  But if the discourse happens to have been of less illustrious origin, he will almost invariably order the penalty to be remitted, adding, with a smile of indulgence, that “the sermon was rather dreary, wasn’t it?”