It is true, as I have suggested, that after all the Sphinx is larger than I am; and on the same principle the painted saints are saintlier than I am, and the patient pilgrims more constant than I am.
But it is also true, as in the lesser matter before mentioned, that even those who think the Sphinx small generally do not notice the small things about it.

They do not even discover what is interesting about their own disappointment.

And similarly even those who are truly irritated by the unfamiliar fashions of worship in a place like Jerusalem, do not know how to discover what is interesting in the very existence of what is irritating.
For instance, they talk of Byzantine decay or barbaric delusion, and they generally go away with an impression that the ritual and symbolism is something dating from the Dark Ages.
But if they would really note the details of their surroundings, or even of their sensations, they would observe a rather curious fact about such ornament of such places as the Church of the Holy Sepulchre as may really be counted unworthy of them.

They would realise that what they would most instinctively reject as superstitious does not date from what they would regard as the ages of superstition.
There really are bad pictures but they are not barbaric pictures; they are florid pictures in the last faded realism of the Renascence.
There really is stiff and ungainly decoration, but it is not the harsh or ascetic decoration of a Spanish cloister; it is much more like the pompous yet frivolous decorations of a Parisian hotel.
In short, in so far as the shrine has really been defaced it has not been defaced by the Dark Ages, but rather if anything by the Age of Reason.

It is the enlightened eighteenth century, which regarded itself as the very noonday of natural culture and common sense, that has really though indirectly laid its disfiguring finger on the dark but dignified Byzantine temple.
I do not particularly mind it myself; for in such great matters I do not think taste is the test.