Page:The invasion of the Crimea vol. 1.djvu/93

 BETWEEN THE CZAR AND THE SULTAN. 51 as lie could betwixt the angry Churches. His chap. in great difficulty was to avert the rage which the ' Greeks would be likely to feel when they came to know that the firman was not to be read ; and the nature of his little stratagem showed that, although he was a benighted Moslem, he had some insight into the great ruling principle of ecclesiastical questions. His plan was to inflict a bitter disap- pointment upon the Latins in the presence of the Greek priesthood, for he imagined that in their delight at witnessing the mortification of their rivals, the Greeks might be made to overlook the great question of the public reading of the firman. So, as soon as the ceremonial visits had been ex- changed, Afif Bey, with a suite of the local Effendis, met the three Patriarchs, Greek, Latin, and Ar- menian, in the Church of the Resurrection, just in front of the Holy Sepulchre itself, and under the great dome, and there he 'made an oration ' upon the desire of His Majesty the Sultan to ' gratify all classes of his subjects ; ' and when M. Easily and the Greek Patriarch and the Russian Archimandrite were becoming impatient for the public reading of the firman which w r as to give to their Church the whole of the Christian sanc- tuaries of Jerusalem, the Bey invited all the dis- putants to meet him in the Church of the Virgin near Gethsemane. There he read an order of the Sultan for permitting the Latins to celebrate a mass once a-year; but then, to the great joy of the Greeks, and to the horror of their rivals, he went on to read words commanding that the altar