So thought the Scribe, as from the comparative safety of an upper
monastery where no Jewish foot had ever trod, he looked down upon the
glowing, heaving mass. The right emotion did not come to him. He was
irritated; the thought of entering so historic and so Jewish a shrine
only at peril of his life, recalled the long intolerance of mediæval
Christendom, the Dark Ages of the Ghettos. His imagination conjured up
an ironic vision of himself as the sport of that seething mob, saw
himself seeking a last refuge in the Sepulchre, and falling dead
across the holy tomb. And then the close air charged with all those
breaths and candles and censers, the jewelled pageantry flaunted in
that city of squalor and starvation, the military line of contemptuous
Mussulmen complicating the mutual contempt of the Christian sects, and
reminding him of the obligation on a new Jewish State, if it ever
came, to safeguard these divine curios; the grotesque incongruity of
all this around the tomb of the Prince of Peace, the tomb itself of
very dubious authenticity, to say nothing of the thirty-six
parasitical sanctities!...
He thought of the even more tumultuous scene about to be enacted here
on the day of the Greek fire: when in the awful darkness of
extinguished lamps, through a rift in the Holy Sepulchre within which
the Patriarch prayed in solitude and darkness, a tongue of heavenly
flame would shoot, God's annual witness to the exclusive rightness of
the Greek Church, and the poor foot-sore pilgrims, mad with ecstasy,
would leap over one another to kindle their candles and torches at it,
while a vessel now riding at anchor would haste with its freight of
sacred flame to kindle the church-lamps of Holy Russia.
And then the long historic tragi-comedy of warring sects swept before
him, the Greek Church regarding the Roman as astray in the sacraments
of Baptism and the Lord's Supper; at one with the Protestant only in
not praying to the Virgin; every new misreading of human texts
sufficing to start a new heresy.