Anyhow with the failure of Zionism would fall the last and best attempt at a rationalistic theory of the Jew.  We should be left facing a mystery which no other rationalism has ever come so near to providing within rational cause and cure.  Whatever we do, we shall not return to that insular innocence and comfortable unconsciousness of Christendom, in which the Victorian agnostics could suppose that the Semitic problem was a brief medieval insanity.  In this as in greater things, even if we lost our faith we could not recover our agnosticism.  We can never recover agnosticism, any more than any other kind of ignorance.  We know that there is a Jewish problem; we only hope that there is a Jewish solution.  If there is not, there is no other.  We cannot believe again that the Jew is an Englishman with certain theological theories, any more than we can believe again any other part of the optimistic materialism whose temple is the Albert Memorial.  A scheme of guilds may be attempted and may be a failure; but never again can we respect mere Capitalism for its success.  An attack may be made on political corruption, and it may be a failure; but never again can we believe that our politics are not corrupt.  And so Zionism may be attempted and may be a failure; but never again can we ourselves be at ease in Zion.  Or rather, I should say, if the Jew cannot be at ease in Zion we can never again persuade ourselves that he is at ease out of Zion.  We can only salute as it passes that restless and mysterious figure, knowing at last that there must be in him something mystical as well as mysterious; that whether in the sense of the sorrows of Christ or of the sorrows of Cain, he must pass by, for he belongs to God.

CONCLUSION

To have worn a large scallop shell in my hat in the streets of London might have been deemed ostentatious, to say nothing of carrying a staff like a long pole; and wearing sandals might have proclaimed rather that I had not come from Jerusalem but from Letchworth, which some identify with the New Jerusalem descending out of heaven from God.  Lacking such attributes, I passed through South England as one who might have come from Ramsgate or from anywhere; and the only symbol left to me of my pilgrimage was a cheap ring of metal coloured like copper and brass.  For on it was written in Greek characters the word “Jerusalem,” and though it may be less valuable than a brass nail, I do not think you can buy it in the Strand.  All those enormous and everlasting things, all those gates of bronze and mosaics of purple and peacock colouring, all those chapels of gold and columns of crimson marble, had all shrivelled up and dwindled down to that one small thread of red metal round my finger.  I could not help having a feeling, like Aladdin, that if I rubbed the ring perhaps all those towers would rise again.  And there was a sort of feeling of truth in the fancy after all.  We