ot divided.

Jerusalem is a small town of big things; and the average modern
city is a big town full of small things. All the most important
and interesting powers in history are here gathered within the area
of a quiet village; and if they are not always friends, at least they
are necessarily neighbours. This is a point of intellectual interest,
and even intensity, that is far too little realised. It is a matter
of modern complaint that in a place like Jerusalem the Christian
groups do not always regard each other with Christian feelings.
It is said that they fight each other; but at least they meet each other.
In a great industrial city like London or Liverpool, how often do they
even meet each other? In a large town men live in small cliques,
which are much narrower than classes; but in this small town they
live at least by large contacts, even if they are conflicts.
Nor is it really true, in the daily humours of human life, that they
are only conflicts. I have heard an eminent English clergyman from
Cambridge bargaining for a brass lamp with a Syrian of the Greek Church,
and asking the advice of a Franciscan friar who was standing smiling
in the same shop. I have met the same representative of the Church
of England, at a luncheon party with the wildest Zionist Jews,
and with the Grand Mufti, the head of the Moslem religion.
Suppose the same Englishman had been, as he might well have been,
an eloquent and popular vicar in Chelsea or Hampstead. How often
would he have met a Franciscan or a Zionist? Not once in a year.
How often would he have met a Moslem or a Greek Syrian? Not once
in a lifetime. Even if he were a bigot, he would be bound
in Jerusalem to become a more interesting kind of bigot.
Even if his opinions were narrow, his experiences would be wide.
He is not, as a fact, a bigot, nor, as a fact, are the other
people bigots, but at the worst they could not be unconscious bigots.
They could not live in such uncorrected complacency as is possible
to a larger social set in a larger social system. They could not
be quite so ignorant as a broad-minded person in a big suburb.
Indeed there is something fine and distinguished about the very delicacy,
and even irony, of their diplomatic relations. There is something
of chivalry in the courtesy of their armed truce, and it is a great
school of manners that includes such differences in morals.

This is an aspect of the interest of Jerusalem which can easily