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and the civilisation of Europe, especially northern Europe.
The immediate difference was obvious enough when the gold and
the gaudy vegetation of so comparatively Asiatic a city were struck
by this strange blast out of the North. It was a queer spectacle
to see a great green palm bowed down under a white load of snow;
and it was a stranger and sadder spectacle to see the people accustomed
to live under such palm-trees bowed down under such unearthly storms.
Yet the very manner in which they bore it is perhaps the first fact
to be noted among all the facts that make up the puzzling problem
of Jerusalem. Odd as it may sound you can see that the true Orientals
are not familiar with snow by the very fact that they accept it.
They accept it as we should accept being swallowed by an earthquake;
because we do not know the answer to an earthquake. The men from the
desert do not know the answer to the snow, it seems to them unanswerable.
But Christians fight with snow in a double sense; they fight with
snow as they fight with snowballs. A Moslem left to himself would
no more play with a snowball than make a toy of a thunderbolt.
And this is really a type of the true problem that was raised
by the very presence of the English soldier in the street,
even if he was only shovelling away the snow.

It would be far from a bad thing, I fancy, if the rights and wrongs
of these Bible countries could occasionally be translated into
Bible language. And I suggest this here, not in the least because it
is a religious language, but merely because it is a simple language.
It may be a good thing, and in many ways it certainly is a good thing,
that the races native to the Near East, to Egypt or Arabia,
should come in contact with Western culture; but it will be
unfortunate if this only means coming in contact with Western
pedantry and even Western hypocrisy. As it is there is only too
much danger that the local complaints against the government may be
exactly like the official explanations of the government; that is,
mere strings of long words with very little meaning involved.
In short, if people are to learn to talk English it will be a refreshing
finishing touch to their culture if they learn to talk plain English.
Of this it would be hard to find a better working model than what may be
called scriptural English. It would be a very good thing for everybody
concerned if any really unjust or unpopular official were described
only in