The New JerusalemChesterton, G. K. (Gilbert Keith)
Religion
The New Jerusalem
Chesterton, G. K. (Gilbert Keith)
Jerusalem; Jews -- Restoration; Palestine
This is an age of minorities; of minorities powerful and predominant,
partly through the power of wealth and partly through the idolatry
of education. Their powers appeared in every crisis of the Great War,
when a small group of pacifists and internationalists, a microscopic
minority in every country, were yet constantly figuring as diplomatists
and intermediaries and men on whose attitude great issues might depend.
A man like Mr. Macdonald, not a workman nor a formal or real
representative of workmen, was followed everywhere by the limelight;
while the millions of workmen who worked and fought were out
of focus and therefore looked like a fog. Just as such figures
give a fictitious impression of unity between the crowds fighting
for different flags and frontiers, so there are similar figures
giving a fictitious unity to the crowds following different creeds.
There are already Moslems who are Modernists; there have always
been a ruling class of Jews who are Materialists. Perhaps it
would be true to say about much of the philosophical controversy
in Europe, that many Jews tend to be Materialists, but all tend
to be Monists, though the best in the sense of being Monotheists.
The worst are in a much grosser sense materialists, and have motives
very different from the dry idealism of men like Mr. Macdonald,
which is probably sincere enough in its way. But with whatever motives,
these intermediaries everywhere bridge the chasm between creeds
as they do the chasm between countries. Everywhere they exalt
the minority that is indifferent over the majority that is interested.
Just as they would make an international congress out of the traitors
of all nations, so they would make an ecumenical council out of
the heretics of all religions.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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