CHANCEL OF THE CHURCH OF ST. HELENA. 
This once magnificent building was formed on the model of the Roman Basilica, and 
resembles the Church of St. Paul at Rome. The Nave is divided into aisles by forty 
pillars of yellow marble, of the Corinthian order. Above those pillars extends a series of 
scriptural subjects in Mosaic, of an elaborate kind, but now much dilapidated. A 
temporary screen divides the Nave from the Chancel and Transepts. An antique 
and gorgeous screen separates the people from the Altar. This view was taken when 
the priests and pilgrims were waiting for the “Holy Fire” to be brought from Jerusalem. 
The Latin and Armenian Chapels are in the two transepts. A door under the 
platform on which the people stand opens upon a flight of steps leading to the Grotto of 
the Nativity. The principal entrance of this noble pile was once wide and lofty, but 
the doorway has been repeatedly filled up with brickwork, until it has become so 
low, that, to enter, the head must be stooped nearly to the knees; a sufficient evidence 
of the alarms under which the worship has from time to time been carried on, and 
of the general perils and vexations which beset the Christians in former periods of the 
power of Islamism. 
The original magnificence of this building may be estimated from the costliness 
of its columns, each shaft being a single piece two feet and a half in diameter, and 
the columns eighteen feet in height, including the capital. The distance of the intercolum- 
niations is seven feet; that of the rows, thirty. But the roof which they were to 
support was either partially destroyed, or never completed, for the only roof now is 
a wooden one; a humiliation which the monks, with their usual ingenuity, palliate 
by affirming that it is of the cedar of Lebanon. They apologise for the want of size 
in their lamps, by saying that the larger are brought only on great occasions from 
Jerusalem where they are deposited, from fear of their being stolen by the Greeks. 1 
The Turkish domination will now probably become more humanised; but it has hitherto 
been exercised over these institutions with the usual corruption and severity of Islamism; 
the old privileges of the Convent were regularly sold to the highest bidder, and the 
Greeks, being the most opulent, have made themselves masters of the largest share. 
The whole site of the Greek convent is regarded with peculiar reverence by the 
pilgrims, and relics are exhibited, which meet with a constant sale. As this village 
was the probable scene of the “Massacre of the Innocents” by Herod, some of the 
relics are referred to that event. A withered hand is shown as belonging to one of 
the infants; and an Altar stands over a pit, into which tradition says that their bodies were 
thrown. A rude picture hung above the Altar gives a startling delineation of the various 
1 Roberts’s Journal. G. Robinson, i. 151. 
