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Updated: May 28, 2025
As might be expected, this wholesale muzzling of the press has not only reduced the Mohammedan majority to a condition of internal ferment, but has seriously alienated the hitherto loyal Copts.
The little chapel, capable of accommodating about six people at a time, contains some pictures and forty-three silver lamps, the property of the Copts, Armenians, Greek and Roman Catholics. A priest stands on guard, so that no damage may be done to any part of the place. The Greek chapel, the largest, and to my notion the finest that I saw, is just in front of the sepulcher.
Pilgrims sometimes bring the goods for their burial robes here and measure them by this stone. Some large candles stand by it, and above it are eight fine lamps, belonging to the Greek and Roman Catholics, the Copts, and Armenians. Not far away is a small stone, which I understood was called the place where the women watched the preparation by Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus.
Over it hang some fifty gold and silver lamps, which are kept always burning, and the place is otherwise scandalized by trumpery, gewgaws, and tawdry ornamentation. It has been proven conclusively that they can not worship together around the grave of the Saviour of the World in peace. The chapel of the Syrians is not handsome; that of the Copts is the humblest of them all.
In the high wooden lattices there are narrow doors, and in the division which contains the altar the door is concealed by a curtain embroidered with a large cross. The Mohammedans who created the mosques showed marvellous taste. Copts are often lacking in taste, as they have proved here and there in Abu Sargah.
They told me that almost all of their members were from among the Copts, who are the descendants from the early Christians of Egypt, who have been comparatively isolated and separated from the Christian world for many centuries, and when they told them that the Western Christians used fermented wine, or "shop wine," as they called it, they were horrified at the idea, and would not partake of it; so they steeped or soaked raisins in water, and then pressed the juice from them and used that, as has been done by the Orthodox Jews when they could not obtain pure unfermented wine.
O King of the age, I came to this thy country with merchandise and Destiny stayed me here with you: but my place of birth was Cairo, in Egypt, where I also was brought up, for I am one of the Copts and my father was a broker before me. When I came to man's estate he departed this life and I succeeded to his business.
Mohammed Aly having demanded 15,000 purses from the Copts employed in the finances of Egypt, they divided the sum among themselves; and Moallem Felteos, an old man, who had been in former times a chief financier, was assessed at twelve hundred purses, or about 18,000l. sterling: this he refused to pay, alleging his poverty; but, after long parleys, at last offered to give two hundred purses.
They are almost too low in the scale of humanity to be fit for slaves. Mr Baker gained much information about the slave trade of this part of the world. Most of those engaged in this nefarious traffic are Syrians, Copts, Turks, Circassians, and some few Europeans.
Or so it seems to-day, when the passion of Christianity against Hathor has spent itself and died. Now Christians come to seek what Christian Copts destroyed; wander through the deserted courts, desirous of looking upon the faces that have long since been hacked to pieces. A more benign spirit informs our world, but, alas! Hathor has been sacrificed to deviltries of old.
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