idolatries, as the educated English are now trying to forget their very recent idolatry of everything German.  These Christian bodies have been in Jerusalem for at least fifteen hundred years.  Save for a few years after the time of Constantine and a few years after the First Crusade, they have been practically persecuted all the time.  At least they have been under heathen masters whose attitude towards Christendom was hatred and whose type of government was despotism.  No man living in the West can form the faintest conception of what it must have been to live in the very heart of the East through the long and seemingly everlasting epoch of Moslem power.  A man in Jerusalem was in the centre of the Turkish Empire as a man in Rome was in the centre of the Roman Empire.  The imperial power of Islam stretched away to the sunrise and the sunset; westward to the mountains of Spain and eastward towards the wall of China.  It must have seemed as if the whole earth belonged to Mahomet to those who in this rocky city renewed their hopeless witness to Christ.  What we have to ask ourselves is not whether we happen in all respects to agree with them, but whether we in the same condition should even have the courage to agree with ourselves.  It is not a question of how much of their religion is superstition, but of how much of our religion is convention; how much is custom and how much a compromise even with custom; how much a thing made facile by the security of our own society or the success of our own state.  These are powerful supports; and the enlightened Englishman, from a cathedral town or a suburban chapel, walks these wild Eastern places with a certain sense of assurance and stability.  Even after centuries of Turkish supremacy, such a man feels, he would not have descended to such a credulity.  He would not be fighting for the Holy Fire or wrangling with beggars in the Holy Sepulchre.  He would not be hanging fantastic lamps on a pillar peculiar to the Armenians, or peering into the gilded cage that contains the brown Madonna of the Copts.  He would not be the dupe of such degenerate fables; God forbid.  He would not be grovelling at such grotesque shrines; no indeed.  He would be many hundred yards away, decorously bowing towards a more distant city; where, above the only formal and official open place in Jerusalem, the mighty mosaics of the Mosque of Omar proclaim across the valleys the victory and the glory of Mahomet.

That is the real lesson that the enlightened traveller should learn; the lesson about himself.  That is the test that should really be put to those who say that the Christianity of Jerusalem is degraded.  After a thousand years of Turkish tyranny, the religion of a London fashionable preacher would not be degraded.  It would be destroyed.  It would not be there at all, to be jeered at by every prosperous tourist out of a train de luxe.  It is worth while to pause upon the point; for nothing has been so wholly