d
blood for a relic when we have shed rivers of blood for a rag.
But above all the Crusade, or, for that matter, the Jehad,
is by far the most philosophical sort of fighting, not only
in its conception of ending the difference, but in its mere act
of recognising the difference, as the deepest kind of difference.
It is to reverse all reason to suggest that a man's politics matter
and his religion does not matter. It is to say he is affected
by the town he lives in, but not by the world he lives in.
It is to say that he is altered when he is a fellow-citizen walking
under new lamp-posts, but not altered when he is another creature walking
under strange stars. It is exactly as if we were to say that two people
ought to live in the same house, but it need not be in the same town.
It is exactly as if we said that so long as the address included
York it did not matter whether it was New York; or that so long
as a man is in Essex we do not care whether he is in England.

Christendom would have been entirely justified in the abstract
in being alarmed or suspicious at the mere rise of a great power
that was not Christian. Nobody nowadays would think it odd
to express regret at the rise of a power because it was Militarist
or Socialist or even Protectionist. But it is far more natural
to be conscious of a difference, not about the order of battle but
the battle of life; not about our definable enjoyment of possessions,
but about our much more doubtful possession of enjoyment;
not about the fiscal divisions between us and foreigners
but about the spiritual divisions even between us and friends.
These are the things that differ profoundly with differing views
of the ultimate nature of the universe. For the things of our country
are often distant; but the things of our cosmos are always near;
we can shut our doors upon the wheeled traffic of our native town;
but in our own inmost chamber we hear the sound that never ceases;
that wheel which Dante and a popular proverb have dared
to christen as the love that makes the world go round.
For this is the great paradox of life; that there are not only
wheels within wheels, but the larger wheels within the smaller.
When a whole community rests on one conception of life and death
and the origin of things, it is quite entitled to watch the rise
of another community founded on another conception as the rise
of something certain to be different and likely to be hostile.
Indeed, as I hav