In that sense alone it is foolish for us in the West to sneer at those who kill men when a foot is set in a holy place, when we ourselves kill hundreds of thousands when a foot is put across a frontier.  It is absurd for us to despise those who shed blood for a relic when we have shed rivers of blood for a rag.  But above all the Crusade, or, for that matter, the Jehad, is by far the most philosophical sort of fighting, not only in its conception of ending the difference, but in its mere act of recognising the difference, as the deepest kind of difference.  It is to reverse all reason to suggest that a man’s politics matter and his religion does not matter.  It is to say he is affected by the town he lives in, but not by the world he lives in.  It is to say that he is altered when he is a fellow-citizen walking under new lamp-posts, but not altered when he is another creature walking under strange stars.  It is exactly as if we were to say that two people ought to live in the same house, but it need not be in the same town.  It is exactly as if we said that so long as the address included York it did not matter whether it was New York; or that so long as a man is in Essex we do not care whether he is in England.

Christendom would have been entirely justified in the abstract in being alarmed or suspicious at the mere rise of a great power that was not Christian.  Nobody nowadays would think it odd to express regret at the rise of a power because it was Militarist or Socialist or even Protectionist.  But it is far more natural to be conscious of a difference, not about the order of battle but the battle of life; not about our definable enjoyment of possessions, but about our much more doubtful possession of enjoyment; not about the fiscal divisions between us and foreigners but about the spiritual divisions even between us and friends.  These are the things that differ profoundly with differing views of the ultimate nature of the universe.  For the things of our country are often distant; but the things of our cosmos are always near; we can shut our doors upon the wheeled traffic of our native town; but in our own inmost chamber we hear the sound that never ceases; that wheel which Dante and a popular proverb have dared to christen as the love that makes the world go round.  For this is the great paradox of life; that there are not only wheels within wheels, but the larger wheels within the smaller.  When a whole community rests on one conception of life and death and the origin of things, it is quite entitled to watch the rise of another community founded on another conception as the rise of something certain to be different and likely to be hostile.  Indeed, as I have pointed out touching certain political theories, we already admit this truth in its small and questionable examples.  We only deny the large and obvious examples.