BETHLEHEM TO-DAY.

Taranaki Daily News, 2 January 1926, Page 17

BETHLEHEM TO-DAY.

SCENE OF FIRST CHRISTMAS. (By Sydn e y D ark.) Bethlehem is an hour’s motor ride from Jerusalem. Thanks io British administration, the roads in Palestine are, on the whole, extremely good, though in that country of strange contrasts the motor is held up every mile or so by lethargic camels, not to be persuaded to move from the middle of the road. The character of Judea makes anything like a complete system of railway communication impossible, and the camel is still largely employed as the patient, if not hectically rapid, means of transport. The railway station at Jerusalem is well outside the walls of the city, and by no means obtrusive, but, somehow, railway trains seem out of place in the Holy Land, oddly indeed more out of place than the motor, and one rejoices that the railway does not touch Bethlehem, just as one rejoices that the British Government has prevented a. Jewish syndicate from running tramways to lhe top of the Mount of Olives. On the road from Jerusalem to Bethlehem the traveller passes the Well of the Magi, where the wise men rested on their way to visit the young Child, and, as one approaches the sacred village, one sees the Field of the Shepherds. THE VILLAGE OF BETHLEHEM. Bethlehem is an entirely Christian village. No Moslem is permitted to live there, and this was the rule during the centuries of Turkish domination. Many •hard things have justifiably been said concerning Turkish rule, but the Turks faithfully carried out the pledge to respect what to Christians are the holiest places on earth. The guardians of the Church of Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem were, and still are, Moslems, who see to it that Greeks and Latins enjoy their established rights of worship, and no Moslems were ever allowed to outrage the Christian traditions of Bethlehem and Nazareth by living in these villages. Bethlehem is a large, prosperous village, strikingly clean by comparison with the Moslem villages, with their higgledy-piggledy, evil-smelling hovels In the streets surrounding the Church of the Nativity are a number of shops in which the visitor may buy rosaries made of mother-of-pearl and of olive kernels. The manufacture of mother-of-pearl ornaments and objects of devotion is Bethlehem’s chief industry, though there are stone quarries in the immediate neighbourhood. The people

are attractive, though not perhaps quite so attractive as the Galileeans, whom I met afterwards in Nazareth and Cana and the lakeside villages. The Palestinian women on the whole are. notably good-looking, and in this respect, as in so many others, the Christians are the superior of the Jloslems. THE HOLY GROTTO. It is to St. Helena, the English mother of Constantine the Great, that the Christian world owes the discovery and •the first careful preservation of the Holy Places. It was St. Helena who caused excavations to be made in Jerusalem on the site where- the Emperor Hadrian had built a temple to Venus, and discovered first the True Cross and afterwards the place on Mount Calvary where it had 'been set up, and the Sepulchre of Our Lord. It was she, too. who at Bethlehem discovered lhe grotto where the Holy Child was born, there being no room for Him and His mother in the inn. Just as the great Basilica of the Holy Sepulchre has been built over the sacred spots in Jerusalem, so the similar Basilica of the Nativity has been built over the grotto where the Lord was born and where the shepherds and the Wise Men from the East bowed down and worshipped Him. It was on a brilliant summer morning that I went first to Bethlehem, escaping with some relief from the glare of the hot sun into the cool calm of the Basilica.' To reach the grotto, which is below the upper end of the great Church, you descend twelve steep irregularly cut steps. THE EXACT PLACE OF BIRTH. The grotto itself is about forty feet long and fifteen feet wide. It is brilliantly lighted and decorated with marble and tapestries. A Moslem sentinel still stands at the foot of the steps for it is still, alas, necessary to prevent the Greeks and the Latins from wrangling in the most sacred of all places. On the right as the pilgrim enters the grotto there is a marble slab in the midst of which is a silver star that marks the exact spot where Our Lori! was born of the Virgin Mary, and it is here that the pilgrim kneels to pray, kissing the marble and placing his rosary and relics for a second or two on the altar. Opposite the star on the other side of the grotto is a small altar where the manger stood in which the Virgin placed her babe, the crib reproduced in thousands of Christian churches all over the world, at every Christmas tide. There was a large number of pilgrims at Bethlehem on the morning that I paid my visit, and it was not possible for each individual to stay more than a short time in the gtotto, but as one went back to The Church by another flight of steps, one instinctively glanced back to recall again that wonderful December night and to think what that Child’s birth has meant to the world, for it was not only the beginning of the new religion that brought a new and a wider hope, but it was also lhe beginning of western civilisation.