len below ourselves but yet we have
something left of the power to create whether it be a theology or a
civilisation. Talking to an old Arab in the desert, Chesterton heard
him say that in all these years of Turkish rule the Turks had never
given to the people a cup of cold water. And as the old man spoke he
heard the clank of pipes and he knew that it was the English soldiers
who were bringing water through the desert to Jerusalem.

A chapter on Zionism discusses with sympathy to both parties the
difficulties of the Jewish settlement in Palestine. In Palestine he
found his Jewish friend and co-worker on the _New Witness_, Dr. Eder,
who had gone there ardent in the cause of Zionism; and Chesterton
himself remained convinced that some system akin to Zionism was the
only possible solution of this enormous problem--possibly a system of
Jewish cantons in various countries. But he was equally convinced
that the English government was destroying the chances of success for
Zionism by sending Jews as governors in England's name to that or any
other Eastern country.

Even in this book there is struck at times a note of the doom he
feared was overhanging us. He heard "Islam crying from the turret and
Israel wailing from the wall," and yet he seemed too to hear a voice
from all the peoples of Jerusalem "bidding us weep not for them, who
have faith and clarity and a purpose, but weep for ourselves and for
our children." In his fighting articles he had asserted the supremacy
of the human will over fate: in this book he sees how that will must
be renewed, purified and made once more mighty by the same power that
built the ancient civilisation of Christendom.

Jerusalem gave to Chesterton the fuller realisation of two great
facts. First he saw that the supernatural was needed not only to
conquer the powers of evil but even to restore the good things that
should be natural to man. As he put it in the later book, "Nature may
not have the name of Isis; Isis may not be really looking for Osiris.
But it is true that Nature is really looking for something. Nature is
always looking for the supernatural." Yet man, even strengthened by
the supernatural, cannot suffice for the fight, without a leader who
is more than man. In the land of Christ's childhood, His teaching and
His suffering, there came to Gilbert Chesterton "a vision more vivid
than a man walking unveiled upon the mountains, seen of men and
seeing; a visible God."

All visions