Most of the ancient churches have utterly vanished, like that roofless basilica which Constantine built on the supposed scene of the Ascension on the Mount of Olives. In other cases they are mere heaps of ruin, like the remaining fragments of the Church of Jacob’s Well, which was built about the middle of the fourth century, and has been several times rebuilt since then. This church takes most travellers by surprise. They go expecting an out-door scene, with all the harvest breeze of the Scripture story on it. They find a newly built white wall, glaring in the sunshine. Through a gate in this wall they are admitted by certain broken-down-looking persons in the greenish-black garments of the Greek clergy. Within the gate, a few steps bring them to the edge of a sort of oblong pit full of masonry. It is the nave of the old church, and the splendidly carved pillars of its white stone show how beautiful it must have been. A door in the sunk side-wall opens upon a groined vault newly rebuilt. In the dim light you can discern in the centre a rough stone altar, with candles and lamps and a couple of execrable pictures of Christ and the woman of Sychar. On the ground before the altar is a flat stone perforated with a hole two feet in diameter. This is the cover of the well, and a second clerical person, badly marked with smallpox, lets down a twist of lighted candles by a long rope, while a little green lamp of silver hangs above, dripping oil steadily down the well. Surely this is the infatuation of reverence! If there is any memory of Jesus which is essentially of the open air, it is this incident of the Well of Samaria. Yet reverence must build its dark chamber, and proceed to illuminate with candles the spot where Jesus sat and saw the miles and miles of waving fields, white already to harvest. No doubt the church dates from the fourth century; but what right had even the ancients to build a church here, to keep men busy with their sectarianism on the very spot where they and all the world were told that the hour was come when neither in this mountain nor yet at Jerusalem would the Father be worshipped, but in spirit and in truth?