Page:Orthodox Eastern Church (Fortescue).djvu/60

26 would soon appear again on the great day to judge the living and the dead. The eyes of the whole Christian world were turned towards the land still fragrant with the memory of that sacred presence, to the streets hallowed by his blessed footprints, to the hill outside the city that had been the one great Altar. And very soon they began to come from all sides to see the holy places for themselves. In the 4th century, Egeria, a Spanish lady, wrote a careful diary of all the rites she had seen at Jerusalem when she went on a pilgrimage thither; in St. Jerome's time (331–420) pilgrims came to the Holy Land even from distant Britain.

Jerusalem was naturally the first, as well as the chief, place to which people made pilgrimage. And when they were there they found themselves under the jurisdiction of the successor of St. James; they eagerly watched the rites of his diocese; it was no ordinary bishop whose Palm Sunday procession entered the gates of the real Jerusalem, whose Easter Mass was said over the Holy Sepulchre itself. So we find that the Bishop of Aelia Capitolina, very naturally, receives a sort of honorary primacy, a distinctive place due to the unique dignity of his Church, yet without any disarrangement of the order of the hierarchy. So the Fathers of Nicæa (325) in their 7th Canon: "Since custom and ancient tradition had obtained that the bishop in Aelia be honoured, let him have the succession of honour, saving, however, the domestic rights of the Metropolis ."

The "succession of honour" means a place of honour, apparently next after the Patriarchs; nevertheless the Metropolitan (of Cæsarea, Pal.) is to keep his rights over the Bishop of Aelia.

But these bishops were not content with their "succession of honour"; they wanted to be independent of Cæsarea, even of the great Patriarch at Antioch.

When the Council of Ephesus met (431) the See of Jerusalem