uch a shout
would assault the ear. "Budge's Boots are the Best" simply means
"Give me money"; "Use Seraphic Soap" simply means "Give me money."
It is a complete mistake to suppose that common people make our
towns commonplace, with unsightly things like advertisements.
Most of those whose wares are thus placarded everywhere are very wealthy
gentlemen with coronets and country seats, men who are probably
very particular about the artistic adornment of their own homes.
They disfigure their towns in order to decorate their houses.
To see such men crowding and clamouring for more wealth would
really be a more unworthy sight than a scramble of poor guides;
yet this is what would be conveyed by all the glare of gaudy
advertisement to anybody who saw and understood it for the first time.
Yet for us who are familiar with it all that gaudy advertisement
fades into a background, just as the gaudy oriental patterns
fade into a background for those oriental priests and pilgrims.
Just as the innocent Kensington gentleman is wholly unaware
that his black top hat is relieved against a background,
or encircled as by a halo, of a yellow hoarding about mustard,
so is the poor guide sometimes unaware that his small doings are
dark against the fainter and more fading gold in which are traced
only the humbler haloes of the Twelve Apostles.

But all these misunderstandings are merely convenient illustrations and
introductions, leading up to the great fact of the main misunderstanding.
It is a misunderstanding of the whole history and philosophy
of the position; that is the whole of the story and the whole
moral of the story. The critic of the Christianity of Jerusalem
emphatically manages to miss the point. The lesson he ought to
learn from it is one which the Western and modern man needs most,
and does not even know that he needs. It is the lesson of constancy.
These people may decorate their temples with gold or with tinsel;
but their tinsel has lasted longer than our gold.
They may build things as costly and ugly as the Albert Memorial;
but the thing remains a memorial, a thing of immortal memory.
They do not build it for a passing fashion and then forget it,
or try hard to forget it. They may paint a picture of a saint as gaudy
as any advertisement of a soap; but one saint does not drive out another
saint as one soap drives out another soap. They do not forget their
recent idolatries, as the educated English are now trying to for