hear
mass in the Greek Church, and ascertain for himself how much devotion
an English Protestant could experience in the midst of this foreign
worship. But one mass was over and another not begun when he reached
the building, and he had thus time to follow his dragoman to the
various wonders of that very wonderful building.

It is now generally known in England of what the church of the holy
places consists; but no one who has not seen it, and none, indeed,
who have not seen it at Easter-time, can fully realize all the
absurdity which it contains and all the devotion which it occasions.
Bertram was first carried to the five different churches which have
crowded themselves together under the same roof. The Greeks have by
far the best of it. Their shrine is gaudy and glittering, and their
temple is large and in some degree imposing. The Latins, whom we call
Roman Catholics, are much less handsomely lodged, and their tinsel
is by far more dingy. The Greeks, too, possess the hole in which
stood--so they say--the cross of Our Saviour; while the Latins are
obliged to put up with the sites on which the two thieves were
crucified. Then the church of the Armenians, for which you have to
descend almost into the bowels of the earth, is still less grand in
its pretensions, is more sombre, more dark, more dirty; but it is as
the nave of St. Peter's when compared to the poor wooden-cased altar
of the Abyssinians, or the dark unfurnished gloomy cave in which
the Syrian Christians worship, so dark that the eye cannot at first
discover its only ornament--a small ill-made figure of the crucified
Redeemer.

We who are accustomed to Roman Catholic gorgeousness in Italy and
France can hardly at first understand why the Pope here should
playso decidedly a second fiddle. But as he is held to be God's
viceregent among the people of south-western Europe, so is the
Russian emperor among the Christians of the East. He, the Russian, is
still by far the greatest pope in Jerusalem, and is treated with a
much greater respect, a much truer belief, than is his brother of
Rome, even among Romans.

Five or six times Bertram had attempted to get into the Tabernacle of
the Holy Sepulchre; but so great had been the rush of pilgrims, that
he had hitherto failed. At last his dragoman espied a lull, and went
again to the battle. To get into the little outside chapel, which
forms, as it were, a vestibule to the cell of the sepulchre, and from
which on East