s of Judas are hung on trees or dragged
about the streets, to be finally burned or otherwise destroyed.[317] In
the Indian villages scattered among the wild valleys of the Peruvian
Andes figures of the traitor, made of pasteboard and stuffed with squibs
and crackers, are hanged on gibbets before the door of the church on
Easter Saturday. Fire is set to them, and while they crackle and
explode, the Indians dance and shout for joy at the destruction of their
hated enemy.[318] Similarly at Rio Hacha, in Colombia, Judas is
represented during Holy Week by life-sized effigies, and the people fire
at them as if they were discharging a sacred duty.[319]

[The new fire on Easter Saturday in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre at
Jerusalem.]

But usages of this sort are not confined to the Latin Church; they are
common to the Greek Church also. Every year on the Saturday before
Easter Sunday a new fire is miraculously kindled at the Holy Sepulchre
in Jerusalem. It descends from heaven and ignites the candles which the
patriarch holds in his hands, while with closed eyes he wrestles in
prayer all alone in the chapel of the Angel. The worshippers meanwhile
wait anxiously in the body of the church, and great are their transports
of joy when at one of the windows of the chapel, which had been all dark
a minute before, there suddenly appears the hand of an angel, or of the
patriarch, holding a lighted taper. This is the sacred new fire; it is
passed out to the expectant believers, and the desperate struggle which
ensues among them to get a share of its blessed influence is only
terminated by the intervention of the Turkish soldiery, who restore
peace and order by hustling the whole multitude impartially out of the
church. In days gone by many lives were often lost in these holy
scrimmages. For example, in the year 1834, the famous Ibrahim Pasha
witnessed the frantic scene from one of the galleries, and, being moved
with compassion at the sight, descended with a few guards into the arena
in the chimerical hope of restoring peace and order among the contending
Christians. He contrived to force his way into the midst of the dense
crowd, but there the heat and pressure were so great that he fainted
away; a body of soldiers, seeing his danger, charged straight into the
throng and carried him out of it in their arms, trampling under foot the
dying and dead in their passage. Nearly two hundred people were killed
that day in the church. The for