the Jewish race, the memories of Greece and Egypt, and the whole Mahometan world in Asia and Africa.  It may be that he regards these as small things; but I should be glad if he would cast his eye over human history, and tell me what are the large things.  The truth is that the things that meet to-day in Jerusalem are by far the greatest things that the world has yet seen.  If they are not important nothing on this earth is important, and certainly not the impressions of those who happen to be bored by them.  But to understand them it is necessary to have something which is much commoner in Jerusalem than in Oxford or Boston; that sort of living history which we call tradition.

For instance, the critic generally begins by dismissing these conflicts with the statement that they are all about small points of theology.  I do not admit that theological points are small points.  Theology is only thought applied to religion; and those who prefer a thoughtless religion need not be so very disdainful of others with a more rationalistic taste.  The old joke that the Greek sects only differed about a single letter is about the lamest and most illogical joke in the world.  An atheist and a theist only differ by a single letter; yet theologians are so subtle as to distinguish definitely between the two.  But though I do not in any case allow that it is idle to be concerned about theology, as a matter of actual fact these quarrels are not chiefly concerned about theology.  They are concerned about history.  They are concerned with the things about which the only human sort of history is concerned; great memories of great men, great battles for great ideas, the love of brave people for beautiful places, and the faith by which the dead are alive.  It is quite true that with this historic sense men inherit heavy responsibilities and revenges, fury and sorrow and shame.  It is also true that without it men die, and nobody even digs their graves.

The truth is that these quarrels are rather about patriotism than about religion, in the sense of theology.  That is, they are just such heroic passions about the past as we call in the West by the name of nationalism; but they are conditioned by the extraordinarily complicated position of the nations, or what corresponds to the nations.  We of the West, if we wish to understand it, must imagine ourselves as left with all our local loves and family memories unchanged, but the places affected by them intermingled and tumbled about by some almost inconceivable convulsion.  We must imagine cities and landscapes to have turned on some unseen pivots, or been shifted about by some unseen machinery, so that our nearest was furthest and our remotest enemy our neighbour.  We must imagine monuments on the wrong sites, and the antiquities of one county emptied out on top of another.  And we must imagine through all this the thin but tough threads of tradition everywhere tangled and yet everywhere unbroken.  We must picture a new map made out