modern complaint that in a place like Jerusalem the Christian groups do not always regard each other with Christian feelings.  It is said that they fight each other; but at least they meet each other.  In a great industrial city like London or Liverpool, how often do they even meet each other?  In a large town men live in small cliques, which are much narrower than classes; but in this small town they live at least by large contacts, even if they are conflicts.  Nor is it really true, in the daily humours of human life, that they are only conflicts.  I have heard an eminent English clergyman from Cambridge bargaining for a brass lamp with a Syrian of the Greek Church, and asking the advice of a Franciscan friar who was standing smiling in the same shop.  I have met the same representative of the Church of England, at a luncheon party with the wildest Zionist Jews, and with the Grand Mufti, the head of the Moslem religion.  Suppose the same Englishman had been, as he might well have been, an eloquent and popular vicar in Chelsea or Hampstead.  How often would he have met a Franciscan or a Zionist?  Not once in a year.  How often would he have met a Moslem or a Greek Syrian?  Not once in a lifetime.  Even if he were a bigot, he would be bound in Jerusalem to become a more interesting kind of bigot.  Even if his opinions were narrow, his experiences would be wide.  He is not, as a fact, a bigot, nor, as a fact, are the other people bigots, but at the worst they could not be unconscious bigots.  They could not live in such uncorrected complacency as is possible to a larger social set in a larger social system.  They could not be quite so ignorant as a broad-minded person in a big suburb.  Indeed there is something fine and distinguished about the very delicacy, and even irony, of their diplomatic relations.  There is something of chivalry in the courtesy of their armed truce, and it is a great school of manners that includes such differences in morals.

This is an aspect of the interest of Jerusalem which can easily be neglected and is not easy to describe.  The normal life there is intensely exciting, not because the factions fight, but rather because they do not fight.  Of the abnormal crisis when they did fight, and the abnormal motives that made them fight, I shall have something to say later on.  But it was true for a great part of the time that what was picturesque and thrilling was not the war but the peace.  The sensation of being in this little town is rather like that of being at a great international congress.  It is like that moving and glittering social satire, in which diplomatists can join in a waltz who may soon be joining in a war.  For the religious and political parties have yet another point in common with separate nations; that even within this narrow space the complicated curve of their frontiers is really more or less fixed, and certainly not particularly fluctuating.  Persecution is impossible and conversion