ll here within a few yards’ space. You mount a few steps, and are told it is Calvary upon which you stand. All this in the midst of blaring candles, reeking incense, savage pictures of Scripture story, or portraits of kings who have been Paris Saint-Germain Women Jersey benefactors to the various chapels; a din and clatter of strange people — these weeping, bowing, kissing — those utterly indifferent; and the priests clad in outlandish robes, snuffling and chanting incomprehensible litanies, robing, disrobing, lighting up candles or extinguishing them, advancing, retreating, bowing with all sorts Parajumpers Damen SOLB Billig of unfamiliar genuflexions. Had it pleased the inventors of the Sepulchre topography to have Belstaff Racemaster Blouson Takit Suomi fixed on fifty more spots of ground as the places of the events of the sacred story, the pilgrim would have believed just as now. The priest’s authority has so mastered his faith, that it Parajumpers Herr Windbreaker accommodates itself to any demand upon it; and the English stranger Germany Jerseys 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 Lodge Down jacka Sverige 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 Belstaff Brooklands Blouson Takit Suomi 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 scheme |