earn;
the lesson about himself. That is the test that should really be put
to those who say that the Christianity of Jerusalem is degraded.
After a thousand years of Turkish tyranny, the religion of a London
fashionable preacher would not be degraded. It would be destroyed.
It would not be there at all, to be jeered at by every prosperous tourist
out of a _train de luxe_. It is worth while to pause upon the point;
for nothing has been so wholly missed in our modern religious
ideals as the ideal of tenacity. Fashion is called progress.
Every new fashion is called a new faith. Every faith is a faith
which offers everything except faithfulness. It was never so necessary
to insist that most of the really vital and valuable ideas in the world,
including Christianity, would never have survived at all if they
had not survived their own death, even in the sense of dying daily.
The ideal was out of date almost from the first day;
that is why it is eternal; for whatever is dated is doomed.
As for our own society, if it proceeds at its present rate of progress
and improvement, no trace or memory of it will be left at all.
Some think that this would be an improvement in itself. We have come
to live morally, as the Japs live literally, in houses of paper.
But they are pavilions made of the morning papers, which have to be
burned on the appearance of the evening editions. Well, a thousand
years hence the Japs may be ruling in Jerusalem; the modern Japs who
no longer live in paper houses, but in sweated factories and slums.
They and the Chinese (that much more dignified and democratic people)
seem to be about the only people of importance who have not yet
ruled Jerusalem. But though we may think the Christian chapels
as thin as Japanese tea-houses, they will still be Christian;
though we may think the sacred lamps as cheap as Chinese lanterns,
they will still be burning before a crucified creator of the world.

But besides this need of making strange cults the test not of
themselves but ourselves, the sights of Jerusalem also illustrate
the other suggestion about the philosophy of sight-seeing. It is true,
as I have suggested, that after all the Sphinx is larger than I am;
and on the same principle the painted saints are saintlier
than I am, and the patient pilgrims more constant than I am.
But it is also true, as in the lesser matter before mentioned,
that even those who think the Sphinx small generally do not
notice the s