Amidst a hundred other schemes, the German Emperor, King of Prussia, is by no means neglecting his apotheosis at Jerusalem.  We are told even the details of his clothes, which combine the military with the civil, “An open tunic of light cloth, brown coloured; tight trousers, boots and sword-scabbard of yellow leather, the insignia of a German General of the Guards, a helmet winged with the Prussian eagle.”  A truly pious rig-out forsooth, in which to go and kneel before the tomb of Christ!  They say that, in order to judge of the effect of this costume, William II has posed for his photograph forty times.

The German Church in Palestine certainly never expected to see the summus episcopus adopting an attitude of extreme humility in that country.  If any simple-minded Lutheran were to address the Kaiser in the streets of Jerusalem, after the manner of the Hungarian workman, who saw the archbishop primate, all glittering with gold in his gala coach, passing over the Buda bridge, William II would answer him in the same style as did the archbishop:  “That is just the sort of carriage in which Jesus used to drive,” exclaimed the workman.  The archbishop heard him, and leaning from the carriage door, replied:  “Jesus, my good fellow, was the son of a carpenter.  I am the son of a magnate, and Archbishop Primate of Hungary.”

William II undoubtedly believes that he does Christ an honour in going to visit Him.  He goes in the full pride of a personality which sees in itself all the great events of the past, gathered together as in an historic procession.  He goes, with all the pomp and circumstance of a glorious omnipotence, he, whose diplomacy has made a protege of the Khalif and a footstool of the Crescent—­he goes, I say, to manifest himself as the Emperor of Christianity.

Was all then to be lost to us at a stroke—­the Crusades, all the moral and economic interests of France in the East, that secular protectorate of which we, the possessors, make so light whilst William II devotes to its conquest all the resources of his skill and cunning?  Not so!  Our Minister of Foreign Affairs was on the alert.  William XI, who is an artistic walking advertisement, designed, like a Mucha or a Cheret, for the German market, has now had evidence of the fact that, if religion is an article of export for him, anti-clericalism is nothing of the kind for us.  Our interests in the East have been protected and preserved.  The Pope of Lutheranism has not been able to silence the Pope of Rome.  The radical Republic which represents France remains the grand-daughter of Saint Louis.  On hearing the authoritative news of William II’s journey to Jerusalem, Cardinal Langenieux, Archbishop of Rheims, begged Leo XIII for “a reassuring word.”  Up to the present, the Holy See has recognised our Protectorate in the East as a simple fact; to-day it is recognised as a right.  Here is the “reassuring word,” the answer given by Leo XIII to Cardinal Langenieux:—­