The Entire Project Gutenberg Works of Mark Twain eBook

And so I close my chapter on the Church of the Holy Sepulchre—­the most sacred locality on earth to millions and millions of men, and women, and children, the noble and the humble, bond and free.  In its history from the first, and in its tremendous associations, it is the most illustrious edifice in Christendom.  With all its clap-trap side-shows and unseemly impostures of every kind, it is still grand, reverend, venerable—­for a god died there; for fifteen hundred years its shrines have been wet with the tears of pilgrims from the earth’s remotest confines; for more than two hundred, the most gallant knights that ever wielded sword wasted their lives away in a struggle to seize it and hold it sacred from infidel pollution.  Even in our own day a war, that cost millions of treasure and rivers of blood, was fought because two rival nations claimed the sole right to put a new dome upon it.  History is full of this old Church of the Holy Sepulchre—­full of blood that was shed because of the respect and the veneration in which men held the last resting-place of the meek and lowly, the mild and gentle, Prince of Peace!

CHAPTER LIV.

We were standing in a narrow street, by the Tower of Antonio.  “On these stones that are crumbling away,” the guide said, “the Saviour sat and rested before taking up the cross.  This is the beginning of the Sorrowful Way, or the Way of Grief.”  The party took note of the sacred spot, and moved on.  We passed under the “Ecce Homo Arch,” and saw the very window from which Pilate’s wife warned her husband to have nothing to do with the persecution of the Just Man.  This window is in an excellent state of preservation, considering its great age.  They showed us where Jesus rested the second time, and where the mob refused to give him up, and said, “Let his blood be upon our heads, and upon our children’s children forever.”  The French Catholics are building a church on this spot, and with their usual veneration for historical relics, are incorporating into the new such scraps of ancient walls as they have found there.  Further on, we saw the spot where the fainting Saviour fell under the weight of his cross.  A great granite column of some ancient temple lay there at the time, and the heavy cross struck it such a blow that it broke in two in the middle.  Such was the guide’s story when he halted us before the broken column.

We crossed a street, and came presently to the former residence of St. Veronica.  When the Saviour passed there, she came out, full of womanly compassion, and spoke pitying words to him, undaunted by the hootings and the threatenings of the mob, and wiped the perspiration from his face with her handkerchief.  We had heard so much of St. Veronica, and seen her picture by so many masters, that it was like meeting an old friend unexpectedly to come upon her ancient home in Jerusalem.  The strangest thing about the