It belongs to precisely the same class of ideas as the belief that if a man drinks the ink, with which a text of the Koran has been written, dissolved in a cup of water, he will be thereby spiritually benefited; that bodily uncleanness injuriously affects the soul; that having eaten some particles of dust from the Prophet’s tomb makes you a better man; or to take the process reversely, that the thoughts of an envious or covetous man (the evil eye), will do you some bodily hurt; or that Ghouls and Afreets—creatures of your mind—feed on dead bodies, and throw stones at you from the house-top. When our Christian ancestors were in the same stage of mental progress, similar beliefs, or rather confusions of ideas, some precisely the same, were manifested in them. A great advance has been made when men have come to see that what defiles is not what goes in at the mouth, but what comes from the heart. This has a wide application; at all events men, when it is seen, go no more pilgrimages. I went up to Jerusalem with the ideas about pilgrimages I have just set down stirring in my mind. My object in going was that I might be enabled the better to understand history by making myself acquainted with the very scenes on which it had been enacted. I wished to become familiar with those peculiar local aspects, and influences of nature, which had gone some way towards forming the character of those who had made the history, and which had, indeed, themselves had in this way much to do with the making of it. Nothing could be further from the pilgrim condition of mind. I believe, however, that I did not come away with my (as some would call it) cold-blooded philosophy quite untouched. True, I turned with repugnance from the scenes that presented themselves around the supposed Holy Sepulchre. I felt commiseration, mingled in some sort with respect, for the prostrations, the tears, the hysterical sobs of the poor Greek, Armenian, and Latin pilgrims. I contemplated them for a time, till feelings of pain preponderated, which, as I turned away, were exchanged only for feelings of disgust as I saw the priests, and thought of their frauds, their greed, their indifference, their dirt, and their mutual animosities. I again had to repress the same feelings in the Garden of Gethsemane, when I found it in possession of some unusually begrimed monks, who had enclosed it with a wall ten feet high, and without a single opening through which the eye could catch a glimpse of the interior; and who only admitted you in the hope of backsheesh. Still the pilgrim feeling grew upon me. I had crossed the Brook Kedron to a place where there had been a garden; I had stood in what had been the courts of the temple, and where had been the temple itself; I had looked on the goodly stones of the substructures of the temple, I had beheld the city from the Mount of Olives. In my walks round the walls I had stood on the rock, somewhere at the north-west angle, where the