The New JerusalemChesterton, G. K. (Gilbert Keith)
Religion
The New Jerusalem
Chesterton, G. K. (Gilbert Keith)
Jerusalem; Jews -- Restoration; Palestine
Immediately above this little garden, overshadowing and almost
overhanging it, is a gorgeous gilded building with golden domes
and minarets glittering in the sun, and filling a splendid situation
with almost shameless splendour; the Russian church built over
the upper part of the garden, belonging to the Orthodox-Greeks.
Here again many Western travellers will be troubled; and will think
that golden building much too like a fairy palace in a pantomime.
But here again I shall differ from them, though perhaps less strongly.
It may be that the pleasure is childish rather than childlike;
but I can imagine a child clapping his hands at the mere sight
of those great domes like bubbles of gold against the blue sky.
It is a little like Aladdin's Palace, but it has a place in art
as Aladdin has a place in literature; especially since it is
oriental literature. Those wise missionaries in China who were not
afraid to depict the Twelve Apostles in the costume of Chinamen
might have built such a church in a land of glittering mosques.
And as it is said that the Russian has in him something of the child
and something of the oriental, such a style may be quite sincere,
and have even a certain simplicity in its splendour.
It is genuine of its kind; it was built for those who like it;
and those who do not like it can look at something else. This sort
of thing may be called tawdry, but it is not what I call meretricious.
What I call really meretricious can be found yet higher on the hill;
towering to the sky and dominating all the valleys.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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