missed in our modern religious ideals as the ideal of tenacity.  Fashion is called progress.  Every new fashion is called a new faith.  Every faith is a faith which offers everything except faithfulness.  It was never so necessary to insist that most of the really vital and valuable ideas in the world, including Christianity, would never have survived at all if they had not survived their own death, even in the sense of dying daily.  The ideal was out of date almost from the first day; that is why it is eternal; for whatever is dated is doomed.  As for our own society, if it proceeds at its present rate of progress and improvement, no trace or memory of it will be left at all.  Some think that this would be an improvement in itself.  We have come to live morally, as the Japs live literally, in houses of paper.  But they are pavilions made of the morning papers, which have to be burned on the appearance of the evening editions.  Well, a thousand years hence the Japs may be ruling in Jerusalem; the modern Japs who no longer live in paper houses, but in sweated factories and slums.  They and the Chinese (that much more dignified and democratic people) seem to be about the only people of importance who have not yet ruled Jerusalem.  But though we may think the Christian chapels as thin as Japanese tea-houses, they will still be Christian; though we may think the sacred lamps as cheap as Chinese lanterns, they will still be burning before a crucified creator of the world.

But besides this need of making strange cults the test not of themselves but ourselves, the sights of Jerusalem also illustrate the other suggestion about the philosophy of sight-seeing.  It is true, as I have suggested, that after all the Sphinx is larger than I am; and on the same principle the painted saints are saintlier than I am, and the patient pilgrims more constant than I am.  But it is also true, as in the lesser matter before mentioned, that even those who think the Sphinx small generally do not notice the small things about it.  They do not even discover what is interesting about their own disappointment.  And similarly even those who are truly irritated by the unfamiliar fashions of worship in a place like Jerusalem, do not know how to discover what is interesting in the very existence of what is irritating.  For instance, they talk of Byzantine decay or barbaric delusion, and they generally go away with an impression that the ritual and symbolism is something dating from the Dark Ages.  But if they would really note the details of their surroundings, or even of their sensations, they would observe a rather curious fact about such ornament of such places as the Church of the Holy Sepulchre as may really be counted unworthy of them.  They would realise that what they would most instinctively reject as superstitious does not date from what they would regard as the ages of superstition.  There really are bad pictures but they are not barbaric pictures; they are florid pictures in the last faded realism