The Palestinians never buy grain by the sack, for they want to see just how much they are getting. The merchant shakes the full measure, then heaps up the top with his hands. This is the Biblical “good measure pressed down, shaken together and running over”
Indeed, the fights among the warring Christians have sometimes been so bad that the Mohammedan soldiers here had to use whips to keep them in order. I have seen Moslem soldiers in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre at Easter time whipping the quarrelling Greeks, Armenians, and Copts in order to separate them. It is not an uncommon thing for blood to pollute the Holy Sepulchre on festal days.
Conditions are especially bad at Easter time when the thousands belonging to the different sects go marching about singing their fanatical songs and denouncing each other. One of their cries is: “This is the tomb of our Lord.” Another is: “Oh, Jews! Jews! your feasts are the feasts of pigs.”
As they go the Greeks jostle the Armenians and the Abyssinians bump against the Latins. Not long since the followers of one sect set fire to some rich hangings that had been placed in a grotto of the church by the followers of another sect. The fire spread, the church was filled with smoke, and it narrowly escaped being burned.
The Greeks of Palestine claim that they have the right to all the churches, convents, and monasteries belonging to their church in the Holy Land. They demand that the money changers, as they call the foreign priests, be whipped out of the temple, and that the gifts of the pilgrims be applied to the building of hospitals, old-age homes, and schools for their children. This movement is not confined to Jerusalem, but extends throughout Palestine and has the approval of the best element of the communities.
Until recent years we have had so few Greek Christians in the United States that it is hard for us to appreciate what the Greek Church means. It is one of the strong churches of the world. It has altogether about one hundred and twenty million members, or one fifth of all the Christians on earth, and more than two thirds as many as all the Protestants. I have before me the latest statistics of religious denominations. There are in the world two hundred million Roman Catholics, about one hundred and sixty million Protestants, one hundred and twenty million Greek Christians—five hundred thousand who belong to the Church of Abyssinia—and about seven hundred thousand Armenians. The sum total of Christians is less than six hundred million, and less than one third of the population of the world.
On the other hand, there are three hundred and ten million who worship Confucius, two hundred and fifteen million Hindus, two hundred and thirty million Mohammedans, and one hundred and forty-seven million Buddhists.