The New JerusalemChesterton, G. K. (Gilbert Keith)
Religion
The New Jerusalem
Chesterton, G. K. (Gilbert Keith)
Jerusalem; Jews -- Restoration; Palestine
think of the formalities about Black Rod or the Bar of the House.
They would be far less ritualistic than we are, if they cared
as little for the Mass as we do for the Mace. Hence it is
necessary for us to realise that these rude and simple worshippers,
of all the different forms of worship, really would be bewildered
by the ritual dances and elaborate ceremonial antics of John Bull,
as by the superstitious forms and almost supernatural incantations
of most of what we call plain English.
Now I take it we retain enough realism and common sense not to
wish to transfer these complicated conventions and compromises
to a land of such ruthless logic and such rending divisions.
We may hope to reproduce our laws, we do not want to reproduce our
legal fictions. We do not want to insist on everybody referring
to Mr. Peter or Mr. Paul, as the honourable member for Waddy Walleh;
because a retiring Parliamentarian has to become Steward
of the Chiltern Hundreds, we shall not insist on a retiring
Palestinian official becoming Steward of the Moabitic Hundreds.
But yet in much more subtle and more dangerous ways we are making
that very mistake. We are transferring the fictions and even the
hypocrisies of our own insular institutions from a place where they
can be tolerated to a place where they will be torn in pieces.
I have confined myself hitherto to descriptions and not to criticisms,
to stating the elements of the problem rather than attempting
as yet to solve it; because I think the danger is rather that we
shall underrate the difficulties than overdo the description;
that we shall too easily deny the problem rather than that we shall
too severely criticise the solution. But I would conclude this chapter
with one practical criticism which seems to me to follow directly
from all that is said here of our legal fictions and local anomalies.
One thing at least has been done by our own Government, which is entirely
according to the ritual or routine of our own Parliament. It is a
parliament of Pooh Bah, where anybody may be Lord High Everything Else.
It is a parliament of Alice in Wonderland, where the name of a thing is
different from what it is called, and even from what its name is called.
It is death and destruction to send out these fictions into a
foreign daylight, where they will be seen as things and not theories.
And knowing all this, I cannot conceive the reason, or even
the meaning, of sending out Sir Herbert Samuel as the British
representative in Palestine.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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