ty (unknown in religious societies,
Moslem as well as Christian) the detestable denial of all dignity
to the poor. I am not speaking now of moral but of artistic things;
of the concrete arts and crafts used in popular worship.
Well, my imaginary pilgrim would walk past Kensington Gardens till
his sight was blasted by a prodigy. He would either fall on his
knees as before a shrine, or cover his face as from a sacrilege.
He would have seen the Albert Memorial. There is nothing so conspicuous
in Jerusalem. There is nothing so gilded and gaudy in Jerusalem.
Above all, there is nothing in Jerusalem that is on so large
a scale and at the same time in so gay and glittering a style.
My simple Eastern Christian would almost certainly be driven to
cry aloud, "To what superhuman God was this enormous temple erected?
I hope it is Christ; but I fear it is Antichrist." Such, he would think,
might well be the great and golden image of the Prince of the World,
set up in this great open space to receive the heathen prayers
and heathen sacrifices of a lost humanity. I fancy he would feel
a desire to be at home again amid the humble shrines of Zion.
I really cannot imagine _what_ he would feel, if he were told
that the gilded idol was neither a god nor a demon, but a petty
German prince who had some slight influence in turning us into
the tools of Prussia.

Now I myself, I cheerfully admit, feel that enormity in Kensington Gardens
as something quite natural. I feel it so because I have been
brought up, so to speak, under its shadow; and stared at the graven
images of Raphael and Shakespeare almost before I knew their names;
and long before I saw anything funny in their figures being carved,
on a smaller scale, under the feet of Prince Albert.
I even took a certain childish pleasure in the gilding of
the canopy and spire, as if in the golden palace of what was,
to Peter Pan and all children, something of a fairy garden.
So do the Christians of Jerusalem take pleasure, and possibly
a childish pleasure, in the gilding of a better palace,
besides a nobler garden, ornamented with a somewhat worthier aim.
But the point is that the people of Kensington, whatever they might
think about the Holy Sepulchre, do not think anything at all about
the Albert Memorial. They are quite unconscious of how strange
a thing it is; and that simply because they are used to it.
The religious groups in Jerusalem are also accustomed to their
coloured back