The New JerusalemChesterton, G. K. (Gilbert Keith)
Religion
The New Jerusalem
Chesterton, G. K. (Gilbert Keith)
Jerusalem; Jews -- Restoration; Palestine
He would not be hanging fantastic
lamps on a pillar peculiar to the Armenians, or peering into
the gilded cage that contains the brown Madonna of the Copts.
He would not be the dupe of such degenerate fables; God forbid.
He would not be grovelling at such grotesque shrines; no indeed.
He would be many hundred yards away, decorously bowing towards
a more distant city; where, above the only formal and official
open place in Jerusalem, the mighty mosaics of the Mosque of Omar
proclaim across the valleys the victory and the glory of Mahomet.
That is the real lesson that the enlightened traveller should learn;
the lesson about himself. That is the test that should really be put
to those who say that the Christianity of Jerusalem is degraded.
After a thousand years of Turkish tyranny, the religion of a London
fashionable preacher would not be degraded. It would be destroyed.
It would not be there at all, to be jeered at by every prosperous tourist
out of a _train de luxe_. It is worth while to pause upon the point;
for nothing has been so wholly missed in our modern religious
ideals as the ideal of tenacity. Fashion is called progress.
Every new fashion is called a new faith. Every faith is a faith
which offers everything except faithfulness. It was never so necessary
to insist that most of the really vital and valuable ideas in the world,
including Christianity, would never have survived at all if they
had not survived their own death, even in the sense of dying daily.
The ideal was out of date almost from the first day;
that is why it is eternal; for whatever is dated is doomed.
As for our own society, if it proceeds at its present rate of progress
and improvement, no trace or memory of it will be left at all.
Some think that this would be an improvement in itself. We have come
to live morally, as the Japs live literally, in houses of paper.
But they are pavilions made of the morning papers, which have to be
burned on the appearance of the evening editions. Well, a thousand
years hence the Japs may be ruling in Jerusalem; the modern Japs who
no longer live in paper houses, but in sweated factories and slums.
They and the Chinese (that much more dignified and democratic people)
seem to be about the only people of importance who have not yet
ruled Jerusalem. But though we may think the Christian chapels
as thin as Japanese tea-houses, they will still be Christian;
though we may think the sacred lamps as cheap as Chinese lanterns,
they will still be burning before a crucified creator of the world.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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