He would not be hanging fantastic lamps on a pillar peculiar to the Armenians, or peering into the gilded cage that contains the brown Madonna of the Copts.
He would not be the dupe of such degenerate fables; God forbid.
He would not be grovelling at such grotesque shrines; no indeed.
He would be many hundred yards away, decorously bowing towards a more distant city; where, above the only formal and official open place in Jerusalem, the mighty mosaics of the Mosque of Omar proclaim across the valleys the victory and the glory of Mahomet.
That is the real lesson that the enlightened traveller should learn; the lesson about himself.

That is the test that should really be put to those who say that the Christianity of Jerusalem is degraded.
After a thousand years of Turkish tyranny, the religion of a London fashionable preacher would not be degraded.

It would be destroyed.
It would not be there at all, to be jeered at by every prosperous tourist out of a _train de luxe_.

It is worth while to pause upon the point; for nothing has been so wholly missed in our modern religious ideals as the ideal of tenacity.

Fashion is called progress.
Every new fashion is called a new faith.