The New JerusalemChesterton, G. K. (Gilbert Keith)
Religion
The New Jerusalem
Chesterton, G. K. (Gilbert Keith)
Jerusalem; Jews -- Restoration; Palestine
The truth is that these quarrels are rather about patriotism than
about religion, in the sense of theology. That is, they are just such
heroic passions about the past as we call in the West by the name
of nationalism; but they are conditioned by the extraordinarily
complicated position of the nations, or what corresponds to the nations.
We of the West, if we wish to understand it, must imagine ourselves
as left with all our local loves and family memories unchanged,
but the places affected by them intermingled and tumbled about by some
almost inconceivable convulsion. We must imagine cities and landscapes
to have turned on some unseen pivots, or been shifted about by some
unseen machinery, so that our nearest was furthest and our remotest
enemy our neighbour. We must imagine monuments on the wrong sites,
and the antiquities of one county emptied out on top of another.
And we must imagine through all this the thin but tough threads
of tradition everywhere tangled and yet everywhere unbroken.
We must picture a new map made out of the broken fragments of the old map;
and yet with every one remembering the old map and ignoring the new.
In short we must try to imagine, or rather we must try to hope,
that our own memories would be as long and our own loyalties
as steady as the memories and loyalties of the little crowd
in Jerusalem; and hope, or pray, that we could only be as rigid,
as rabid and as bigoted as are these benighted people.
Then perhaps we might preserve all our distinctions of truth
and falsehood in a chaos of time and space.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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