The New JerusalemChesterton, G. K. (Gilbert Keith)
Religion
The New Jerusalem
Chesterton, G. K. (Gilbert Keith)
Jerusalem; Jews -- Restoration; Palestine
Therefore my immediate impression of the walls and gates was
not contradicted by my consciousness of what came before and
what came after that medieval period. It remained primarily
a thing of walls and gates; a thing which the modern world
does not perhaps understand so well as the medieval world.
There is involved in it all that idea of definition which those who do
not like it are fond of describing as dogma. A wall is like rule;
and the gates are like the exceptions that prove the rule.
The man making it has to decide where his rule will run
and where his exception shall stand. He cannot have a city
that is all gates any more than a house that is all windows;
nor is it possible to have a law that consists entirely of liberties.
The ancient races and religions that contended for this city agreed
with each other in this, when they differed about everything else.
It was true of practically all of them that when they built a city they
built a citadel. That is, whatever strange thing they may have made,
they regarded it as something to be defined and to be defended.
And from this standpoint the holy city was a happy city;
it had no suburbs. That is to say, there are all sorts
of buildings outside the wall; but they are outside the wall.
Everybody is conscious of being inside or outside a boundary; but it
is the whole character of the true suburbs which grow round our great
industrial towns that they grow, as it were, unconsciously and blindly,
like grass that covers up a boundary line traced on the earth.
This indefinite expansion is controlled neither by the soul of the city
from within, nor by the resistance of the lands round about. It destroys
at once the dignity of a town and the freedom of a countryside.
The citizens are too new and numerous for citizenship; yet they
never learn what there is to be learned of the ancient traditions
of agriculture. The first sight of the sharp outline of Jerusalem
is like a memory of the older types of limitation and liberty.
Happy is the city that has a wall; and happier still if it
is a precipice.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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