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.