We must imagine monuments on the wrong sites, and the antiquities of one county emptied out on top of another.
And we must imagine through all this the thin but tough threads of tradition everywhere tangled and yet everywhere unbroken.
We must picture a new map made out of the broken fragments of the old map; and yet with every one remembering the old map and ignoring the new.
In short we must try to imagine, or rather we must try to hope, that our own memories would be as long and our own loyalties as steady as the memories and loyalties of the little crowd in Jerusalem; and hope, or pray, that we could only be as rigid, as rabid and as bigoted as are these benighted people.
Then perhaps we might preserve all our distinctions of truth and falsehood in a chaos of time and space.
We have to conceive that the Tomb of Napoleon is in the middle of Stratford-on-Avon, and that the Nelson Column is erected on the field of Bannockburn; that Westminster Abbey has taken wings and flown away to the most romantic situation on the Rhine, and that the wooden "Victory" is stranded, like the Ark on Ararat, on the top of the Hill of Tara; that the pilgrims to the shrine of Lourdes have to look for it in the Island of Runnymede, and that the only existing German statue of Bismarck is to be found in the Pantheon at Paris.

This intolerable topsy-turvydom is no exaggeration of the way in which stories cut across each other and sites are imposed on each other in the historic chaos of the Holy City.
Now we in the West are very lucky in having our nations normally distributed into their native lands; so that good patriots can talk about themselves without perpetually annoying their neighbours.
Some of the pacifists tell us that national frontiers and divisions are evil because they exasperate us to war.

It would be far truer to say that national frontiers and divisions keep us at peace.
It would be far truer to say that we can always love each other so long as we do not see each other.

But the people of Jerusalem are doomed to have difference without division.
They are driven to set pillar against pillar in the same temple, while we can set city against city across the plains of the world.
While for us a church rises from its foundations as naturally as a flower springs from a flower-bed, they have to bless the soil and curse the stones that stand on it.

While the land we love is solid under our feet to the earth's centre, they have to see all they love and hate lying in strata like alternate night and day, as incompatible and as inseparable.