Protestants at Bethlehem.

Auckland Star, Volume XXI, Issue 32, 8 February 1890, Page 4 (Supplement)

Protestants at Bethlehem.

Ax interesting outcome of the visit of bhe German Kaiser to Constantinople is the trade by which the Sultan sanctions the building of a chapel at Bethlehem for the use of Protestant pilgrims. Perhaps no incident could bring out more clearly the fact thab the preponderant influence over Turkey, for which Russia on the one hand and France and England on the other used to contend so hotly, has passed to Germany. Ib was a dispute about the Holy Places which ostensibly brought on the Crimean War. Tho term Holy Places is the collective title applied to the sacred precincts in and near Jerusalem, whose tradition ha 3 placed the birth suffering, death, and burial of the Saviour. Theso localities are still regaided by the RussianadherantsofbheGreek Church with an intense veneration only comparable with thab felb in Wesbern Europe at the period of the Crusaders, and they long had rights there possessed by no other Christians. Louis Napoleon secured- certain rights for the Catholics. It was agreed that the Latin Christians should possess a key to the great door of the Church of Bethlehem, and should have the right to place in the Church of the Nativity a silver star bearing the arms of France. This key and star concession produced such a violent agibabion among the Russian Christians, and such forcible expression was given to their feelings by Czar Nicholas, that the Sultan was eventually coerced into granting certain counter privileges, to the Greek Church. It wa3 stipulated, for instance, that the Greeks should havo the right of repairing the cupola of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre; that they should have precedence as regards hours of worship at the tomb of the Virgin, and that a Greek priest should always proside over the great door of the Church of, Bethlehem, to which, as we have seen, bhe Catholics had obtained a key. Theso privileges have to this day been guarded with jealous vigilance by the representatives of the Greek and Latin churches in Palestine. From their point of view, which is shared by the great majority of the pilgrims to the Holy Land, it is a momentous innovation which bas been made by Sultan Abdul Hamid in permitting the erection of a Protestant chapel ab Bethlehem.