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 is not at all common.
The very able Anglo-Catholic leader, to whom I have already referred, uttered to me a paradox that was a very practical truth.
He said he felt exasperated with the Christian sects, not for their fanaticism but for their lack of fanaticism.
He meant their lack of any fervour and even of any hope, of converting each other to their respective religions.
An Armenian may be quite as proud of the Armenian Church as a Frenchman of the French nation, yet he may no more expect to make a Moslem an Armenian than the Frenchman expects to make an Englishman a Frenchman.
If, as we are told, the quarrels could be condemned as merely theological, this would certainly be the very reverse of logical.
But as I say, we get much nearer to them by calling them national; and the leaders of the great religions feel much more like the ambassadors of great nations.