We are always told that the Turk kept the peace between the Christian sects.  It would be nearer the nerve of vital truth to say that he made the war between the Christian sects.  But it would be nearer still to say that the war is something not made by Turks but made up by infidels.  The tourist visiting the churches is often incredulous about the tall tales told about them; but he is completely credulous about the tallest of all the tales, the tale that is told against them.  He believes in a frantic fraticidal war perpetually waged by Christian against Christian in Jerusalem.  It freshens the free sense of adventure to wander through those crooked and cavernous streets, expecting every minute to see the Armenian Patriarch trying to stick a knife into the Greek Patriarch; just as it would add to the romance of London to linger about Lambeth and Westminster in the hope of seeing the Archbishop of Canterbury locked in a deadly grapple with the President of the Wesleyan Conference.  And if we return to our homes at evening without having actually seen these things with the eye of flesh, the vision has none the less shone on our path, and led us round many corners with alertness and with hope.  But in bald fact religion does not involve perpetual war in the East, any more than patriotism involves perpetual war in the West.  What it does involve in both cases is a defensive attitude; a vigilance on the frontiers.  There is no war; but there is an armed peace.

I have already explained the sense in which I say that the Moslems are unhistoric or even anti-historic.  Perhaps it would be near the truth to say that they are prehistoric.  They attach themselves to the tremendous truisms which men might have realised before they had any political experience at all; which might have been scratched with primitive knives of flint upon primitive pots of clay.  Being simple and sincere, they do not escape the need for legends; I might almost say that, being honest, they do not escape the need for lies.  But their mood is not historic, they do not wish to grapple with the past; they do not love its complexities; nor do they understand the enthusiasm for its details and even its doubts.  Now in all this the Moslems of a place like Jerusalem are the very opposite of the Christians of Jerusalem.  The Christianity of Jerusalem is highly historic, and cannot be understood without historical imagination.  And this is not the strong point perhaps of those among us who generally record their impressions of the place.  As the educated Englishman does not know the history of England, it would be unreasonable to expect him to know the history of Moab or of Mesopotamia.  He receives the impression, in visiting the shrines of Jerusalem, of a number of small sects squabbling about small things.  In short, he has before him a tangle of trivialities, which include the Roman Empire in the West and in the East, the Catholic Church in its two great divisions,