Such is a brief description of a scene which annually occurs in Jerusalem; and though producing a transient impression on the common mind, darkened by error and deluded by superstition, the sublime farce is as irreverent as it is offensive to the enlightened Christian. Debased must be the intellect and vitiated the moral sensibilities of a people who delight in such mournful tragedies, and corrupt must be the church which sanctions ceremonies so degrading to earth and repugnant to heaven. With equal propriety, the murder scene of a beloved friend might be yearly re-enacted, harrowing the soul with the bloody memories of the past, and imitating in fiction the ghastly deeds of veritable murderers. Who could be induced to witness a sight so mournful? The last request of the Redeemer to his people was to remember his death, and not to re-enact it; to cherish his memory, and not perpetuate the triumph of his foes. Devotion attains its greatest purity, and piety its highest form of spirituality, as pompous ceremonials are displaced by the simple aspirations of the heart for God, and by the practical embodiment of faith, hope, and charity. For fifteen hundred years the Church of the Holy Sepulchre has been the shrine of devout worshipers from all lands, and the antiquity of its traditions, together with the profound reverence in which it is held by the Christian world, render it an object worthy of consideration. Whether considered as a work of art, or as a historic site around which cluster the most sacred legends of the Eastern churches, it awakens a thrilling interest in the thoughtful and intelligent mind. Such are the number and complications of the added apartments, a delineation of the structure is as tedious as it is difficult. Though, as a whole, the architecture is of the Romanesque order, yet in its different parts it combines a greater variety of styles than any other edifice of equal notoriety extant. Standing on the eastern slope of Mount Akra, in the most populous part of the Holy City, its approaches are from the east and west through low, narrow doorways leading into a spacious court ninety feet long and seventy wide, formed laterally by the two projecting wings of the church, by the façade of the basilica on the north, and by a stone wall on the south, inclosing the green plateau once adorned by the palace of the Knights of St. John. A more novel sight is not to be seen on earth than is daily presented in this stone court-yard during Passion Week. Lining three of its sides, with now and then one in the centre, sit the hucksters of pious wares, recalling the money-changers in the court of Solomon’s Temple. It is the great religious mart for holy trinkets in Jerusalem, and the most auspicious place for the ethnologist to study human varieties, for the costumer to examine diversities of dress, for the traveler to witness the manners of many nations, and for the artist to sketch the most picturesque of living scenes.