Christ has done for us, while guiding them, as it were, into his footsteps, one presents to them new motives for admiring, for adoring his infinite goodness, for loving and practising his religion, and for attaching themselves to him as to the only Saviour.
Once more, then, I went to Palestine, only to adore, to weep, and to pray. I purposed not to measure the sacred monuments with the compasses of incredulity: plenty of travellers have taken that task upon themselves. Most of them hurry through Palestine with such speed, that their imagination is obliged to supply what has escaped their fugitive observation. In spite, however, of that spirit of the age, which makes them write with such levity of monuments so venerable, their hearts are not unmoved. Religion will assert her rights. Their hearts have throbbed while they were ascending Calvary; when they beheld the ensanguined rock on which the Saviour of the world yielded his last breath to reconcile Earth with Heaven; when they visited that sacred tomb, which his victorious foot has overstepped. But this emotion of heart soon subsided: the mind took up the pen which pride presented to it.
I wrote these letters amid the scorching sands of the desert, on the tops of arid mountains, on board a ship tossed by the waves, beneath a tent, upon a dromedary, in a grotto, stretched in a cell upon a bed of pain; but I think that I have never lost sight of the presence