The New JerusalemChesterton, G. K. (Gilbert Keith)
Religion
The New Jerusalem
Chesterton, G. K. (Gilbert Keith)
Jerusalem; Jews -- Restoration; Palestine
And this fact brings us back to the man of the desert, who moves
and does not rest; but who has many superiorities to the restless
races of the industrial city. Men who have been in the Manchester
movement in 1860 and the Fabian movement in 1880 cannot sneer
at a religious mood that lasted for eight hundred years.
And those who tolerate the degraded homelessness of the slums
cannot despise the much more dignified homelessness of the desert.
Nevertheless, the thing is a homelessness and not a home; and there
runs through it all the note of the nomad. The Moslem takes literally,
as he takes everything, the truth that here we have no abiding city.
He can see no meaning in the mysticism of materialism,
the sacramental idea that a French poet expressed so nobly,
when he said that our earthly city is the body of the city of God.
He has no true notion of building a house, or in our Western
sense of recognising the kindred points of heaven and home.
Even the exception to this rule is an exception at once terrible
and touching. There is one house that the Moslem does build
like a house and even a home, often with walls and roof and door;
as square as a cottage, as solid as a fort. And that is his grave.
A Moslem cemetery is literally like a little village. It is a village,
as the saying goes, that one would not care to walk through at night.
There is something singularly creepy about so strange a street
of houses, each with a door that might be opened by a dead man.
But in a less fanciful sense, there is about it something profoundly
pathetic and human. Here indeed is the sailor home from sea,
in the only port he will consent to call his home; here at last
the nomad confesses the common need of men. But even about this
there broods the presence of the desert and its dry bones of reason.
He will accept nothing between a tent and a tomb.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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