The following year, however, the Government took better measures for the prevention of these calamities. I was not present at the ceremony, having gone away from Jerusalem some time before, but I afterwards returned into Palestine, and Ithen learned that the day had passed off without any disturbance of a fatal kind. It is, however, almost too much to expect that so many ministers of peace can assemble without finding some occasion for strife, and in that year a tribe of wild Bedouins became the subject of discord. These men, it seems, led an Arab life in some of the desert tracts bordering on the neighbourhood of Jerusalem, but were not connected with any of the great ruling tribes. Some whim or notion of policy had induced them to embrace Christianity;but they were grossly ignorant of the rudiments of their adopted faith, and having no priest with them in their desert, they had as little knowledge of religious ceremonies as of religion itself. They were not even capable of conducting themselves in a place of worship with ordinary decorum, but would interrupt the service with scandalous cries and warlike shouts. Such is the account the Latins give of them, but I have never heard the other side of the question. These wild fellows, notwithstanding their entire ignorance of all religion, are yet claimed by the Greeks, not only as proselytes who have embraced Christianity generally, but as converts to the particular doctrines and practice of their Church. The people thus alleged to have concurred in the great schism of the Eastern Empire are never, I believe, within the walls of a church, or even of any building at all, except upon this occasion of Easter; and as they then never fail to find a row of some kind going on by the side of the sepulchre, they fancy, it seems, that the ceremonies there enacted are funeral games of a martial character, held in honour of a deceased chieftain, and that a Christian festival is a peculiar kind of battle, fought between walls, and without cavalry. It does not appear, however, that these men are guilty of any ferocious acts, or that they attempt to commit depredations. The charge against them is merely that by their way of applauding the performance, by their horrible cries and frightful gestures, they destroy the solemnity of divine service, and upon this ground the Franciscans obtained a firman for the exclusion of such tumultuous worshippers.
The Greeks, however, did not choose to lose the aid of their wild converts merely because they were a little backward in their religious education, and they therefore persuaded them to defy the firman by entering the city EN MASSE and overawing their enemies. The Franciscans, as well as the Government authorities, were obliged to give way, and the Arabs triumphantly marched into the church. The festival, however, must have seemed to them rather flat, for although there may have been some "casualties" in the way of eyes black and noses bloody, and women "missing," there was no return of "killed."Formerly the Latin Catholics concurred in acknowledging (but not, I hope, in working) the annual miracle of the heavenly fire, but they have for many years withdrawn their countenance from this exhibition, and they now repudiate it as a trick of the Greek Church. Thus of course the violence of feeling with which the rival Churches meet at the Holy Sepulchre on Easter Saturday is greatly increased, and a disturbance of some kind is certain. In the year I speak of, though no lives were lost, there was, as it seems, a tough struggle in the church. I was amused at hearing of a taunt that was thrown that day upon an English traveller. He had taken his station in a convenient part of the church, and was no doubt displaying that peculiar air of serenity and gratification with which an English gentleman usually looks on at a row, when one of the Franciscans came by, all reeking from the fight, and was so disgusted at the coolness and placid contentment of the Englishman (who was a guest at the convent), that he forgot his monkish humility as well as the duties of hospitality, and plainly said, "You sleep under our roof, you eat our bread, you drink our wine, and then when Easter Saturday comes you don't fight for us!"Yet these rival Churches go on quietly enough till their blood is up. The terms on which they live remind one of the peculiar relation subsisting at Cambridge between "town and gown."These contests and disturbances certainly do not originate with the lay-pilgrims, the great body of whom are, as Ibelieve, quiet and inoffensive people. It is true, however, that their pious enterprise is believed by them to operate as a counterpoise for a multitude of sins, whether past or future, and perhaps they exert themselves in after life to restore the balance of good and evil. The Turks have a maxim which, like most cynical apophthegms, carries with it the buzzing trumpet of falsehood as well as the small, fine "sting of truth." "If your friend has made the pilgrimage once, distrust him; if he has made the pilgrimage twice, cut him dead!" The caution is said to be as applicable to the visitants of Jerusalem as to those of Mecca, but I cannot help believing that the frailties of all the hadjis, *whether Christian or Mahometan, are greatly exaggerated. Icertainly regarded the pilgrims to Palestine as a well-disposed orderly body of people, not strongly enthusiastic, but desirous to comply with the ordinances of their religion, and to attain the great end of salvation as quietly and economically as possible.
Hadj a pilgrim.
