In short we must try to imagine, or rather we must try to hope,
that our own memories would be as long and our own loyalties
as steady as the memories and loyalties of the little crowd
in Jerusalem; and hope, or pray, that we could only be as rigid,
as rabid and as bigoted as are these benighted people.
Then perhaps we might preserve all our distinctions of truth
and falsehood in a chaos of time and space.

We have to conceive that the Tomb of Napoleon is in the middle
of Stratford-on-Avon, and that the Nelson Column is erected
on the field of Bannockburn; that Westminster Abbey has taken
wings and flown away to the most romantic situation on the Rhine,
and that the wooden "Victory" is stranded, like the Ark on Ararat,
on the top of the Hill of Tara; that the pilgrims to the shrine
of Lourdes have to look for it in the Island of Runnymede,
and that the only existing German statue of Bismarck is to be found
in the Pantheon at Paris. This intolerable topsy-turvydom is no
exaggeration of the way in which stories cut across each other and sites
are imposed on each other in the historic chaos of the Holy City.
Now we in the West are very lucky in having our nations normally
distributed into their native lands; so that good patriots can talk
about themselves without perpetually annoying their neighbours.
Some of the pacifists tell us that national frontiers and divisions
are evil because they exasperate us to war. It would be far truer
to say that national frontiers and divisions keep us at peace.
It would be far truer to say that we can always love each
other so long as we do not see each other. But the people
of Jerusalem are doomed to have difference without division.
They are driven to set pillar against pillar in the same temple,
while we can set city against city across the plains of the world.
While for us a church rises from its foundations as naturally
as a flower springs from a flower-bed, they have to bless the soil
and curse the stones that stand on it. While the land we love
is solid under our feet to the earth's centre, they have to see
all they love and hate lying in strata like alternate night and day,
as incompatible and as inseparable. Their entanglements are tragic,
but they are not trumpery or accidental. Everything has a meaning;
they are loyal to great names as men are loyal to great nations;
they have differences about which they feel bound to dispute to the death;
but in their death they are n