The Priest's Authority Has So Mastered
His Faith, That It Accommodates Itself To Any Demand Upon It; And
The English Stranger Looks On The Scene, For The First Time, With A
Feeling Of Scorn, Bewilderment, And Shame At That Grovelling
Credulity, Those Strange Rites And Ceremonies, That Almost
Confessed Imposture.
Jarred and distracted by these, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre,
for some time, seems to an Englishman the least sacred spot about
Jerusalem.
It is the lies, and the legends, and the priests, and
their quarrels, and their ceremonies, which keep the Holy Place out
of sight. A man has not leisure to view it, for the brawling of
the guardians of the spot. The Roman conquerors, they say, raised
up a statue of Venus in this sacred place, intending to destroy all
memory of it. I don't think the heathen was as criminal as the
Christian is now. To deny and disbelieve, is not so bad as to make
belief a ground to cheat upon. The liar Ananias perished for that;
and yet out of these gates, where angels may have kept watch - out
of the tomb of Christ - Christian priests issue with a lie in their
hands. What a place to choose for imposture, good God! to sully
with brutal struggles for self-aggrandisement or shameful schemes
of gain!
The situation of the Tomb (into which, be it authentic or not, no
man can enter without a shock of breathless fear, and deep and
awful self-humiliation) must have struck all travellers.
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