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risen again? There His memory was linked with outward objects, with the soil He had trodden, with the trees under whose shadow He had walked, with the rock which had been His tomb, if this they might only find. Helen, the mother of Constantine, represents perfectly this new form of the religious sentiment. One is fain to admire her fervent zeal, her burning love for Christ. She pours her riches at His feet as Mary broke over them the vase of precious ointment, but idolatry mingles with the adoration. That which she seeks above all else, that she may worship it and enshrine it in pure gold and precious stones is the true cross, and when she believes she has found it she makes it the first of all relics. It was paying dearly for an apocryphal piece of wood. Thus the gorgeous basilicas with which she covered Palestine, -monuments as they are of a touching, though blind devotion-entombed rather than kept alive the recollection of primitive Christianity.

Pilgrimages to the Holy Land become from this time more and more numerous. The most illustrious of pilgrims is St. Jerome; the cave of Bethlehem became the scene of his conflicts and labours; the star which had guided the Magi to this place arose upon him in the stormy night of

his youth it led him, as it had led them, to the cradle of the holy Child, there to offer incessantly the treasures of His rich intelligence, the frankincense and myrrh of his ardent adoration. From the depth of this obscure retreat, he takes part in all the great conflicts of the Church of the fourth century, sends forth the sword-thrusts of his impassioned words, and gathers round him great Roman ladies whom he teaches to be humble servants of Christ. There he translates the prophets and apostles into his manly Latin. Never was contemplative life more active and militant than that of Jerome; the asceticism which kept under his flesh doubled his moral force. In his solitude at Bethlehem he represents admirably the powerful reaction of the Christian spirit against a paganized Christianity; but even this reaction has not the lofty spirituality of the earliest ages; it has blended with it more than one error, is darkened by more than one superstition.*

In the convulsions which accompanied the dissolution of the Roman Empire, great num

*St. Jerome translated and enriched the Onomasticon of Eusebius-a kind of dictionary of sacred geography. It contains many valuable hints. See his small edition, vols. II. and III.-Works of St. Jerome, p. 771.

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bers of Christians sought refuge in Palestine, flocking thither, not because that country offered larger security than any other, but impelled by a sort of religious instinct.

The fields trodden by the Divine Shepherd of souls, seemed to the scattered and terrified flock the most secure fold, and the soil watered by His blood drew towards itself the victims of barbarian invasion as to the great refuge of suffering humanity.

At the time of Alaric's invasion of Italy (400), and of that of the Vandals (428), Palestine was re-peopled by fugitive Christians. The example of Jerome was followed by many pious anchorites. The caves near the Cedron, on the banks of the Dead Sea, were the favourite retreat of these new ascetics they found on those arid sands, and amidst that devastated nature, at once those grand religious associations which elevate the soul, and that aspect of external severity which their austerity demanded. About the year 600, twenty monasteries had arisen in these countries; more than ten thousand monks peopled the solitude of Engedi.

The course of pilgrimages now continued unbroken. The object was not merely to visit consecrated spots, but to find relics; if a pretended fragment of the holy cross was not to be met with,

the pilgrim could at least bring away an olivebranch, a phial of Jordan water, a garment dipped in the holy stream and thereby rendered an invulnerable panoply against demons, or sometimes he would content himself with a handful of earth, picked up at Jerusalem, a rose, or a palm-branch cut in the oasis of Jericho. The pilgrim's staff was hung over the hearth on his return, as a family relic. Accounts of these distant journeyings were read with avidity; they satisfied at once the religious sentiment, and the taste for the marvellous, for the East has ever been a land both of faith and of dreams. Of these old narratives, the most valuable to us is the "Itinerary of the Pilgrim of Bordeaux."* He describes with considerable exactness the state of Jerusalem under the Byzantine domination; it is evident that the city has undergone less change than might be supposed since that time. Pilgrimages did not cease with the invasion of Islamism, which began its work of destruction early in the eighth century. They did but become more meritorious as the danger connected with them increased.

*Itinerarium Burdigalense. It is to be found at the close of M. de Chateaubriand's "Itinéraire."

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Then came a time when the whole of Christian Europe went on pilgrimage, but this pilgrimage was made under arms, and with the firm resolve of re-conquering from the infidels, the tomb of Christ, and the country which had been consecrated by His presence.

The Crusades were a mighty explosion of the religious sentiment of the Middle Ages; they were fervid and ignorant as the time which produced them, and reveal in an extraordinary manner that blending of ardent fa ith and rude force, of sincere love to Christ, and frenzied fanaticism which characterizes the period. The theocracy reconstituted at Rome precipitated the new Israel into a new conquest of the land of Canaan, and sent it forth to carry on a war of extermination, as if the Christian had never been substituted for the Mosaic era, and as if the murderous sword was the chosen weapon of the Prince of Peace. That which remains for ever the grand feature of this mighty movement is the sincere enthusiasm which pervaded it, and which was a lever powerful enough to move millions of men, and to send them forth fearless of perils in the wilderness, perils by the heathen, perils by sword and by sea, to the conquest of a sepulchre. Nothing is a stronger