Among all these different nationalities and sects, which as a rule hold each other in holy abhorrence, it is singular that they all have one view in common, or rather, perhaps, it should be said that they all seem to labour under one impression, or presentiment, and that is that before very long the Holy City will undergo a change of some sort. The nature of this change naturally takes the form peculiar to the national or religious tendency of thought. With the Russians and French it is reduced to a very simple political expression, which may be summed up in the word annexation. This idea is more firmly fixed among the Russians than the French. Indeed, the Holy City plays a greater part in the Greek religion than it does in the Latin, and the affections of the orthodox are centred on these shrines to a degree unknown among Christians of any other denomination. There is hardly a village in Russia in which there is not to be found a bottle of Jordan water, and the devotional instincts of the peasantry, which are very strong, are directed by the Church, which is in Russia synonymous with the government, upon the holy places in Palestine, as shrines which have a spiritual value not recognized by other churches to the same extent, and which, therefore, when the day comes, should entitle it to their temporal and territorial proprietorship. In other words, there is not a Russian pilgrim who visits Jerusalem who does not hope that he may live to see the day when it will become a Russian city, and who does not long for the call to a holy war, the object of which should be the exclusive possession by Russia of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and of the city in which it stands.^[5] In France there is no such religious enthusiasm, except with a section of society, and, although the conquest of Syria and Palestine enters into the programme of the government, and their religious protectorate over the Latin Church and its interests gives them a strong point of departure, it is weakened by the fact that the government is professedly anti-Catholic, and that, even were it not so, the sentiment for the holy places is not so strong among the Latins as among the Greeks. With the Protestants there is a large class who base their belief in an immediately pending alteration in the political conditions under which Jerusalem now exists, upon their interpretation of prophecy. They profess to find it clearly indicated in Ezekiel, Daniel, Revelations, and elsewhere in the Bible, that the protectorate of Palestine is to be vested in England. Among the Jews there are many also, though they interpret the prophetic writings in a totally different sense, who believe that the fulfilment of the prophecy which is to restore to them their ancient country, with its sacred city, is at hand, and all Moslem tradition points to the present time as one critical to the fortunes of Islam, with which the fate of Jerusalem, which is to them also a holy city, is inextricably interwoven.