There are, however, two great churches of this ancient time which waken feelings very different from these; they have been for centuries the centres of Christian interest and devotion in the land, covering, as they are supposed to do, the sites of the birth and death of Jesus Christ. In some respects they are alike. The outsides of them are huddled and packed together, a heterogeneous mass of apparently unrelated buildings. The insides are not, like the houses, Rembrandt studies in intense light and shadow. By some skilful arrangement, the sunlight seems to be caught and diffused in a pale luminous twilight that sinks gradually to darkness in chapels and recesses, and blends with the light of many lamps and candles not unpleasingly. The Church of the Holy Sepulchre is the gift of St. Helena, mother of Constantine, and was consecrated by her in A.D. 336. Tradition relates how, at the age of seventy-nine, she made her pilgrimage to Jerusalem, was baptized in Jordan, discovered the true Cross, and built the church upon the spot of its discovery. Our guide-book tells us of an ante-chamber “where Oriental Christians are in the habit of removing their shoes, though we need not follow their example.” Yet the Crusaders entered it barefooted, though with songs of praise, a thousand years ago; and the impulse of most Christians, however little they may be disposed to believe in the identity of the sacred sites within, will be to share the veneration of the Easterns. Not that what we see now is the original building. That was a rotunda and a basilica, the former quite other than the present rotunda, as we know from the fact that it formed the model for the Mosque of Omar. It has suffered many things from assault, from decay, from fire, and from rebuilding. In the twelfth century the whole group of detached shrines and monuments was included for the first time in one huge and complicated building. Probably no such patchwork in stone is to be seen elsewhere in the world. Yet each rebuilding found many of the older materials ready for its use, and incorporated them in the newer work. Thus the columns at the eastern door are supposed to have come from some ancient pagan temple, and the present foundations of the pillars belong to the old rotunda. The capitals of many pillars are Byzantine, while the pink limestone column which is embedded in the wall to the right of the eastern entrance is also very ancient.