Anyhow, he did not talk like a cheap-jack at a stall; but rather like a teacher in an infant school.
He made it very clear that Jesus Christ was crucified in case any one should suppose he was beheaded; and often stopped in his narrative to repeat that the hero of these events was Jesus Christ, lest we should fancy it was Nebuchadnezzar or the Duke of Wellington.
I do not in the least mind being amused at this; but I have no reason whatever for doubting that he may have been a better man than I.I gave him what I should have given a similar guide in my own country; I parted from him as politely as from one of my own countrymen.
I also, of course, gave money, as is the custom, to the various monastic custodians of the shrines; but I see nothing surprising about that.
I am not quite so ignorant as not to know that without the monastic brotherhoods, supported by such charity, there would not by this time be anything to see in Jerusalem at all.

There was only one class of men whose consistent concern was to watch these things, from the age of heathens and heresies to the age of Turks and tourists; and I am certainly not going to sneer at them for doing no practical work, and then refuse to pay them for the practical work they do.
For the rest, even the architectural defacement is overstated, the church was burned down and rebuilt in a bad and modern period; but the older parts, especially the Crusaders' porch, are as grand as the men who made them.

The incongruities there are, are those of local colour.

In connection, by the way, with what I said about beasts of burden, I mounted a series of steep staircases to the roof of the convent beside the Holy Sepulchre.

When I got to the top I found myself in the placid presence of two camels.
It would be curious to meet two cows on the roof of a village church.
Nevertheless it is the only moral of the chapter interpolated here, that we can meet things quite as curious in our own country.
When the critic says that Jerusalem is disappointing he generally means that the popular worship there is weak and degraded, and especially that the religious art is gaudy and grotesque.
In so far as there is any kind of truth in this, it is still true that the critic seldom sees the whole truth.
What is wrong with the critic is that he does not criticise himself.
He does not honestly compare what is weak, in this particular world of ideas, with what is weak in his own world of ideas.