us round many corners with alertness and with hope.
But in bald fact religion does not involve perpetual war in the East,
any more than patriotism involves perpetual war in the West.
What it does involve in both cases is a defensive attitude;
a vigilance on the frontiers. There is no war; but there is
an armed peace.

I have already explained the sense in which I say that the Moslems
are unhistoric or even anti-historic. Perhaps it would be near
the truth to say that they are prehistoric. They attach themselves
to the tremendous truisms which men might have realised before they
had any political experience at all; which might have been scratched
with primitive knives of flint upon primitive pots of clay.
Being simple and sincere, they do not escape the need for legends;
I might almost say that, being honest, they do not escape the need
for lies. But their mood is not historic, they do not wish to grapple
with the past; they do not love its complexities; nor do they
understand the enthusiasm for its details and even its doubts.
Now in all this the Moslems of a place like Jerusalem are the very
opposite of the Christians of Jerusalem. The Christianity of Jerusalem is
highly historic, and cannot be understood without historical imagination.
And this is not the strong point perhaps of those among us who generally
record their impressions of the place. As the educated Englishman
does not know the history of England, it would be unreasonable
to expect him to know the history of Moab or of Mesopotamia.
He receives the impression, in visiting the shrines of Jerusalem,
of a number of small sects squabbling about small things.
In short, he has before him a tangle of trivialities, which include
the Roman Empire in the West and in the East, the Catholic Church
in its two great divisions, the Jewish race, the memories of Greece
and Egypt, and the whole Mahometan world in Asia and Africa.
It may be that he regards these as small things; but I should be glad
if he would cast his eye over human history, and tell me what are
the large things. The truth is that the things that meet to-day in
Jerusalem are by far the greatest things that the world has yet seen.
If they are not important nothing on this earth is important,
and certainly not the impressions of those who happen to be bored
by them. But to understand them it is necessary to have something
which is much commoner in Jerusalem than in Oxford or Boston;
that sort of livi