The New JerusalemChesterton, G. K. (Gilbert Keith)
Religion
The New Jerusalem
Chesterton, G. K. (Gilbert Keith)
Jerusalem; Jews -- Restoration; Palestine
The great Jewish population throughout the world did hail Mr. Balfour's
declaration with something almost of the tribal triumph they might
have shown when the Persian conqueror broke the Babylonian bondage.
It was rather the plutocratic princes of Jewry who long hung back
and hesitated about Zionism. The mass of Mahometans really are
ready to combine against the Zionists as they might have combined
against the Crusades. It is rather the responsible Mahometan
leaders who will naturally be found more moderate and diplomatic.
This popular spirit may take a good or a bad form; and a mob may cry
out many things, right and wrong. But a mob cries out "No Popery";
it does not cry out "Not so much Popery," still less "Only a moderate
admixture of Popery." It shouts "Three cheers for Gladstone,"
it does not shout "A gradual and evolutionary social tendency towards
some ideal similar to that of Gladstone." It would find it quite
a difficult thing to shout; and it would find exactly the same
difficulty with all the advanced formulae about nationalisation
and internationalisation and class-conscious solidarity.
No rabble could roar at the top of its voice the collectivist
formula of "The nationalisation of all the means of production,
distribution, and exchange." The mob of Jerusalem is no
exception to the rule, but rather an extreme example of it.
The mob of Jerusalem has cried some remarkable things in its time;
but they were not pedantic and they were not evasive.
There was a day when it cried a single word; "Crucify." It was
a thing to darken the sun and rend the veil of the temple;
but there was no doubt about what it meant.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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