The news of the holy shrine spread throughout the land, and pilgrims thronged to visit it: Ali became rich, built a fine “Kubbeh” (Dome), and was envied by all the Sheiks.
Mohammed, hearing of the new shrine, and finding his own eclipsed by it, made a pilgrimage to it himself, in hopes of finding out the source of its great repute. Finding Ali in charge, he asked, in a whisper, if he would tell him the name of the Saint whose tomb he kept charge of. “I will,” replied Ali, “on condition that you tell me the name of your Saint.” Mohammed consented, and Ali then whispered, “God alone is great! This is the tomb of the donkey I stole from you.”
“Mashallah!” cried Mohammed, “and my ‘wely’ is the tomb of that donkey’s father!” Methinks Palestine has not a monopoly of the long-eared and long-suffering race, either living or dead!
But we have changed all that; as we have a good many other things. Saints and their shrines are out of fashion. “It is an age of seeing, not believing,” we say complacently; and we laugh with superior wisdom at the follies of our forefathers, and the relics they went so far to adore—relics which, like the fabled frog, by trying to swell themselves to greater and still greater dimensions, ended in growing a little too extensive for their ultimate good. Saints, like sinners, can only have two legs apiece, we all know; but the saints of our ancestors, if their relics spoke truly, must have been saintly centipedes: of making new limbs there was no end, and, as their numbers increased, reverence waned, till hey!—the bubble of credulity burst at last, as did the frog!
But if the heavenly profitability was cut off by this collapse of superstition, or eclipse of faith—call it which you will—the habit of pleasurable moving remained; stronger by the force of repeated custom throughout all past times: we keep the shell, but we cunningly substitute a new kernel in the place of the exploded core of heretofore.
We go a pilgrimage still, but your modern spirit is now the pilgrim of Health, Pleasure, Science, Art, and such-like—all high-sounding names to conjure by; and the world, that old time-server, ever seeking to accommodate itself to the new ways of its inhabitants, is ever supplying us with a new Spa, a new “old master,” or masterpiece, a newly dug-up ruin, or hieroglyph, or Dark Continent, or—for even the humblest “tripper” is not forgotten—a new Mudport-on-Sea.
The shrines of our forefathers’ worship have crept back into favour by hiding themselves in the voluminous draperies of History or Art. Our appetite for shows is omnivorous, and we don’t object to a shrine if it has a Gothic moulding sufficiently “cute,” or a Byzantine roof, or some other attraction—are we not pilgrims of Art?—though if called upon to define our roof or moulding many of us might be considerably nonplussed, taking refuge in describing one as a “thing with a round top,” and the other as “a sort of stone trimming, don’t you know.”
I remember once reading a child’s tale—I have forgotten where, for it was many years ago—but the drift of the story was too good to forget. It was about a small pig who lived with his mother in a stye which possessed but a limited front yard. Piggy had the pilgrim spirit, and sighed to escape to pastures new, to see what lay beyond his little wall. One day his chance came—he escaped somehow, and made a pilgrimage round the farmyard, where the strange things he saw either frightened him dreadfully, or were utterly unintelligible to his piggish mind. He was so frightened by the roaring of a bull that he fled with great precipitation home, where he gave a glowing account of his travels to his mother.
“pilgrims of art.”