ne is that its divisions in culture,
politics and theology are like its divisions in geology.
The dividing line is horizontal instead of vertical. The frontier
does not run between states but between stratified layers.
The Jew did not appear beside the Canaanite but on top of the Canaanite;
the Greek not beside the Jew but on top of the Jew; the Moslem not
beside the Christian but on top of the Christian. It is not merely
a house divided against itself, but one divided across itself.
It is a house in which the first floor is fighting the second floor,
in which the basement is oppressed from above and attics are besieged
from below. There is a great deal of gunpowder in the cellars;
and people are by no means comfortable even on the roof.
In days of what some call Bolshevism, it may be said that most states
are houses in which the kitchen has declared war on the drawing-room.
But this will give no notion of the toppling pagoda of political
and religious and racial differences, of which the name is Palestine.
To explain that it is necessary to give the traveller's first
impressions more particularly in their order, and before I
return to this view of the society as stratified, I must state
the problem more practically as it presents itself while the society
still seems fragmentary.

We are always told that the Turk kept the peace between
the Christian sects. It would be nearer the nerve of vital
truth to say that he made the war between the Christian sects.
But it would be nearer still to say that the war is something
not made by Turks but made up by infidels. The tourist visiting
the churches is often incredulous about the tall tales told about them;
but he is completely credulous about the tallest of all the tales,
the tale that is told against them. He believes in a frantic fraticidal
war perpetually waged by Christian against Christian in Jerusalem.
It freshens the free sense of adventure to wander through those
crooked and cavernous streets, expecting every minute to see the
Armenian Patriarch trying to stick a knife into the Greek Patriarch;
just as it would add to the romance of London to linger about Lambeth
and Westminster in the hope of seeing the Archbishop of Canterbury locked
in a deadly grapple with the President of the Wesleyan Conference.
And if we return to our homes at evening without having actually seen
these things with the eye of flesh, the vision has none the less shone
on our path, and led