The New JerusalemChesterton, G. K. (Gilbert Keith)
Religion
The New Jerusalem
Chesterton, G. K. (Gilbert Keith)
Jerusalem; Jews -- Restoration; Palestine
The gap remains like a gash, a sort of wound in the walls; but it
only strengthens by contrast the general sense of their continuity.
Save this one angle where the nineteenth century has entered,
the vague impression of the thirteenth or fourteenth century rather
deepens than dies away. It is supported more than many would suppose
even by the figures that appear in the gateways or pass in procession
under the walls. The brown Franciscans and the white Dominicans
would alone give some colour to a memory of the Latin kingdom
of Jerusalem; and there are other examples and effects which are
less easily imagined in the West. Thus as I look down the street,
I see coming out from under an archway a woman wearing a high white
head-dress very like those we have all seen in a hundred pictures
of tournaments or hunting parties, or the Canterbury Pilgrimage
or the Court of Louis XI. She is as white as a woman of the North;
and it is not, I think, entirely fanciful to trace a certain
freedom and dignity in her movement, which is quite different
at least from the shuffling walk of the shrouded Moslem women.
She is a woman of Bethlehem, where a tradition, it is said, still claims
as a heroic heritage the blood of the Latin knights of the cross.
This is, of course, but one aspect of the city; but it is one
which may be early noted, yet one which is generally neglected.
As I have said, I had expected many things of Jerusalem,
but I had not expected this. I had expected to be disappointed
with it as a place utterly profaned and fallen below its mission.
I had expected to be awed by it; indeed I had expected to be frightened
of it, as a place dedicated and even doomed by its mission.
But I had never fancied that it would be possible to be fond of it;
as one might be fond of a little walled town among the orchards
of Normandy or the hop-fields of Kent.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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