The Christianity of Jerusalem is highly historic, and cannot be understood without historical imagination.
And this is not the strong point perhaps of those among us who generally record their impressions of the place.

As the educated Englishman does not know the history of England, it would be unreasonable to expect him to know the history of Moab or of Mesopotamia.
He receives the impression, in visiting the shrines of Jerusalem, of a number of small sects squabbling about small things.
In short, he has before him a tangle of trivialities, which include the Roman Empire in the West and in the East, the Catholic Church in its two great divisions, the Jewish race, the memories of Greece and Egypt, and the whole Mahometan world in Asia and Africa.
It may be that he regards these as small things; but I should be glad if he would cast his eye over human history, and tell me what are the large things.

The truth is that the things that meet to-day in Jerusalem are by far the greatest things that the world has yet seen.
If they are not important nothing on this earth is important, and certainly not the impressions of those who happen to be bored by them.

But to understand them it is necessary to have something which is much commoner in Jerusalem than in Oxford or Boston; that sort of living 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.