The New JerusalemChesterton, G. K. (Gilbert Keith)
Religion
The New Jerusalem
Chesterton, G. K. (Gilbert Keith)
Jerusalem; Jews -- Restoration; Palestine
And of this problem there is a sort of working model in the presence
of the snow in Palestine, especially in the light of the old proverb
about the impossibility of snow in Egypt. Palestine is wilder,
less wealthy and modernised, more religious and therefore more realistic.
The issue between the things only a European can do, and the things
no European has the right to do, is much sharper and clearer
than the confusions of verbosity. On the one hand the things
the English can do are more real things, like clearing away the snow;
for the very reason that the English are not here, so to speak,
building on a French pavement but on the bare rocks of the Eastern wilds,
the contact with Islam and Israel is more simple and direct.
And on the other side the discontents and revolts are more real.
So far from intending to suggest that the Egyptians have no complaints,
I am very far from meaning that they have no wrongs. But curiously
enough the wrongs seem to me more real than the complaints.
The real case against our Egyptian adventure was stated long ago
by Randolph Churchill, when he denounced "a bondholder's war"; it is
in the whole business of collecting debts due to cosmopolitan finance.
But a stranger in Egypt hears little denunciation of cosmopolitan finance,
and a great deal of drivel in the way of cosmopolitan idealism.
When the Palestinians say that usurers menace their land they mean
the land they dig; an old actuality and not a new abstraction.
Their revolt may be right or wrong, but it is real;
and what applies to their revolt applies to their religion.
There may well be doubts about whether Egypt is a nation, but there
is no doubt that Jerusalem is a city, and the nations have come
to its light.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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