, by the mortifications to which they subject themselves,
they rebuke the regular priesthood, who do not go so far, although these
latter fast in the year above one hundred days, and always rise to
midnight prayer. In the dissent, if such it be, of these monks of the
desert there is a dignity and self-denying firmness much to be
respected. They follow the tenets of their faith and the ordinances of
their religion in a manner which is almost sublime. They are in this
respect the very opposite to European dissenters, who are as undignified
as they are generally snug and cosy in their mode of life. Here, among
the followers of St. Anthony, there are no mock heroics, no turning up
of the whites of the eyes and drawing down of the corners of the mouth:
they form their rule of life from the ascetic writings of the early
fathers of the Church: their self-denial is extreme, their devotion
heroic; but yet to our eyes it appears puerile and irrational that men
should give up their whole lives to a routine of observances which,
although they are hard and stern, are yet so trivial that they appear
almost ridiculous.

In one of the courts of the monastery there is a palm-tree, said to be
endowed with miraculous properties, which was planted by St. Sabba, and
is to be numbered among the few now existing in the Holy Land, for at
present they are very rarely to be met with, except in the vale of
Jericho and the valley of the Jordan and the Dead Sea, in which
localities, in consequence of their being so much beneath the level of
the rest of the country, the temperature is many degrees higher than it
is elsewhere.

The church is rather large and is very solidly built. There are many
ancient frescos painted on the walls, and various early Greek pictures
are hung round about: many of these are representations of the most
famous saints, and on the feast of each his picture is exposed upon a
kind of desk before the iconostasis or wooden partition which divides
the church from the sanctuary and the altar, and there it receives the
kisses and oblations of all the worshippers who enter the sacred edifice
on that day.

The [Greek: ikonostasis] is dimly represented in our older
churches by the rood-loft and screen which divides the chancel from the
nave: it is retained also in Lombardy and in the sees under the
Ambrosian rule; but these screens and rood-lofts, which destroy the
beauty of a cathedral or any large church, are unknown in the Roma