ng 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 of the broken fragments of the old map;
and yet with every one remembering the old map and ignoring the new.