The New JerusalemChesterton, G. K. (Gilbert Keith)
Religion
The New Jerusalem
Chesterton, G. K. (Gilbert Keith)
Jerusalem; Jews -- Restoration; Palestine
I fancy he would feel
a desire to be at home again amid the humble shrines of Zion.
I really cannot imagine _what_ he would feel, if he were told
that the gilded idol was neither a god nor a demon, but a petty
German prince who had some slight influence in turning us into
the tools of Prussia.
Now I myself, I cheerfully admit, feel that enormity in Kensington Gardens
as something quite natural. I feel it so because I have been
brought up, so to speak, under its shadow; and stared at the graven
images of Raphael and Shakespeare almost before I knew their names;
and long before I saw anything funny in their figures being carved,
on a smaller scale, under the feet of Prince Albert.
I even took a certain childish pleasure in the gilding of
the canopy and spire, as if in the golden palace of what was,
to Peter Pan and all children, something of a fairy garden.
So do the Christians of Jerusalem take pleasure, and possibly
a childish pleasure, in the gilding of a better palace,
besides a nobler garden, ornamented with a somewhat worthier aim.
But the point is that the people of Kensington, whatever they might
think about the Holy Sepulchre, do not think anything at all about
the Albert Memorial. They are quite unconscious of how strange
a thing it is; and that simply because they are used to it.
The religious groups in Jerusalem are also accustomed to their
coloured background; and they are surely none the worse if they still
feel rather more of the meaning of the colours. It may be said that
they retain their childish illusion about _their_ Albert Memorial.
I confess I cannot manage to regard Palestine as a place where a
special curse was laid on those who can become like little children.
And I never could understand why such critics who agree
that the kingdom of heaven is for children, should forbid it
to be the only sort of kingdom that children would really like;
a kingdom with real crowns of gold or even of tinsel.
But that is another question, which I shall discuss in another place;
the point is for the moment that such people would be quite as much
surprised at the place of tinsel in our lives as we are at its place
in theirs. If we are critical of the petty things they do to glorify
great things, they would find quite as much to criticise (as in
Kensington Gardens) in the great things we do to glorify petty things.
And if we wonder at the way in which they seem to gild the lily,
they would wonder quite as much at the way we gild the weed.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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