The Roman Church, however, which clings with such natural and tender piety to the image of the Madonna, has fostered many a picture in which artistic imagination restores to Mary all that the human heart desires. I remember in one of the small rooms of the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, a little painting representing the mother, young and fair, sitting in a pleasant room and sewing. She is looking up with maternal fondness at the young Jesus, who comes running in, a beautiful boy, and holds up to her a Passion-flower.

But not in any pleasant room to Mary sewing and smiling, did her child truly show the Passionflower, but here at the fountain of El Bir, in the Syrian twilight, when she discovered that he had tarried in Jerusalem.

As you go northward from Jerusalem, the loneliness of the country is oppressive. Grain waves in all the valleys. Olives and figs abound, but there are no scattered houses, only little villages, stern masses of gray stone upon high points, whose air and position are warlike. There are few figures in the landscape, and they pass with guns and stare strangely, nor always with a greeting. There are no proper roads in Palestine, only miserable stony paths, along which the water runs in rainy days. Often the broad sweep of grain is beautiful. But so spacious a landscape is always

sad, if unrelieved by some feature humanly sympathetic.

"That we shall find in the town of Nablous," I said to Leisurlie, as we quietly eat our dates and alighted at the Well of Jacob, which lies finely at the opening of the valley of Nablous. The church which the Empress Helena erected over it has now, with the exception of four columns, happily disappeared, and it lies open to the blue sky and the bare mountains.

This Empress Helena, the mother of the Emperor Constantine, is also the mother of most of the church traditions and of the churches themselves in Palestine. It was she who discovered the true cross, and went up and down the country finding nails, and footprints, and blood, and milk, and other consolations for the half-idolatrous feeling of the church which canonised her.

I say half-idolatrous, because, although the interest in relics is very intelligible, and every man would be glad to have an original manuscript page of Shakspeare yet the religious appeal through relics rather than symbols, when addressed to an unrefined and unspiritual nature, is sensual and not spiritual. The fact is lost in the form. The Roman peasant kneeling before the statue of Jupiter, which now stands for St. Peter in his church at Rome, does really worship that identical

bronze, as any spectator by observation and conversation may discover-although he is taught by the Church that the statue is only a representation. But deeply as his mind is moved by the statue, when his eyes, and hands, and forehead are touched by the actual bones of a saint, does any man doubt that he ascribes to them, per se, a direct influence upon his spiritual condition?

The Empress Helena was recently emancipated from Paganism, and regarded the new faith in a pagan spirit. The traveller gets very tired of her doings in Palestine, feeling, as he must feel, that, although a Romish saint, she was very little of a Christian, if measured by any other than the external standards. He is quite able to believe the naïve story of the guides at Jerusalem-that Helena sought everywhere for the cross, but vainly, until, "after spending a great deal of money, she found the true cross."

Many are the modern travellers who tread closely in the path of the Empress, anxious to see the footprints and nails, writing huge volumes upon the authenticity of localities, and losing, like most other critics, the spirit in the science.

It is not necessary to the satisfaction of Syrian travel, to settle the disputed points of position and tradition. The great points are for ever settled. Jerusalem, the Jordan, Nazareth and Bethlehem,

and, in general, the whole country. Why vex your mind with the study of the surprising erudition that has been lavished upon the question whether the Calvary Chapel in the Church of the Sepulchre is the identical spot of the crucifixion,— knowing, as you do, that here, in or around Jerusalem, Christ was crucified? The surprising erudition displayed will for ever forbid the solution of the question. And even were this spot determined to be the true one, after a single glance of reverence and curiosity, you would not willingly look again upon the tawdry disfiguration of the place.

To a man of thought and just religious feeling, it is the contemplation of the landscape and of all the external local influences with which Jesus Christ conversed which is the true point of interest in the Holy Land. The curiosity that hunts the shape, and size, and direction of his footprints, is far from the sympathy of reverence. It is natural to a certain degree, and honourable. But pushed to furious dispute and elaborate research, it becomes petty and wearisome.

Is it suggested that it strengthens the evidences of Christianity?

But, on the other hand, does Christianity require any such evidences as this?

Is it thought to influence the authenticity of the narratives?

But is not the essential substance of those narratives entirely independent of localities?

In any case these decisions must all be speculative and relative. It is only quarrelling with great agony of argument, whether the robe of an emperor was edged with red or purple, and some ingenious commentator suddenly breaks in with the theory that the emperor had no robe at all.

In Palestine, as elsewhere in the world, wherever the peculiar aspects of the climate, the landscape, and the life of the people harmonise with tradition, it is better to believe than to doubt. The Rev. Dr. Duck was dissatisfied with the identity of the tomb of Lazarus, because of the reason already related. On the other hand, the situation of Bethany and the general character of tombs at that period once ascertained, it was not unfair to suppose, for obvious reasons, that tradition had cherished the precise locality. It was simply easier to believe than to disbelieve. And the Pacha feared that the secret of the Rev. Dr. Duck's incredulity lay in the fact that the tradition was 66 Romish."

If this itching wish to thrust your finger in the hole in the side haunts you constantly-look up and look around you. These are the same eternal sky and mountains his eyes beheld. Whether he suffered here or there,-whether this is Pontius