y the case of those who held that our
civilisation was dying and that it was too late to make any further
efforts:

The future belongs to those who can find a real answer to that real
case. . . . The omens and the auguries are against us. There is no
answer but one; that omens and auguries are heathen things; and that
we are not heathens. . . . We are not lost unless we lose
ourselves. . . . Great Alfred, in the darkness of the Ninth Century,
when the Danes were beating at the door, wrote down on his copy of
Boethius his denial of the doctrine of fate. We, who have been
brought up to see all the signs of the times pointing to improvement,
may live to see all the signs in heaven and earth pointing the other
way. If we go on it must be in another name than that of the Goddess
of Fortune.

It was that other Name, in which he had so long believed, that he
realised with the freshness of novelty on this journey to Jerusalem.
He made in the Holy City and in the fields of Palestine a new
discovery of Christ and of the Christian Thing. As he looked over the
Dead Sea and almost physically realised what evil meant, he heard the
voice of the divine Deliverer saying to the demons: "Go forth and
trouble him not any more." In the cave at Bethlehem he realised the
"little local infancy" whereby the creator of the world had chosen to
redeem the world. All through the book there are glimpses of what he
tells more fully in _The Everlasting Man_. Between the two books all
that he had seen and thought in Palestine lay in his mind, and grew
there, and fructified for our understanding. But he had seen it all
in that first vision.

Jerusalem first impressed Chesterton as a mediaeval city and from its
turrets he could readily picture Godfrey de Bouillon, Richard the
Lion-Hearted and Saint Louis of France. Through the Crusades he views
what was meant by Christendom and sets over against it at once the
greatness and the barrenness of Islam:

The Moslem had one thought, and that a most vital one; the
greatness of God which levels all men. But the Moslem had not one
thought to rub against another, because he really had not another. It
is the friction of two spiritual things, of tradition and invention,
or of substance and symbol, from which the mind takes fire. The
Creeds condemned as complex have something like the secret of sex;
they can breed thoughts.

Today we of Christendom have fal