I have heard an eminent English clergyman from Cambridge bargaining for a brass lamp with a Syrian of the Greek Church, and asking the advice of a Franciscan friar who was standing smiling in the same shop.

I have met the same representative of the Church of England, at a luncheon party with the wildest Zionist Jews, and with the Grand Mufti, the head of the Moslem religion.
Suppose the same Englishman had been, as he might well have been, an eloquent and popular vicar in Chelsea or Hampstead.

How often would he have met a Franciscan or a Zionist?
Not once in a year.
How often would he have met a Moslem or a Greek Syrian?
Not once in a lifetime.

Even if he were a bigot, he would be bound in Jerusalem to become a more interesting kind of bigot.
Even if his opinions were narrow, his experiences would be wide.
He is not, as a fact, a bigot, nor, as a fact, are the other people bigots, but at the worst they could not be unconscious bigots.
They could not live in such uncorrected complacency as is possible to a larger social set in a larger social system.

They could not be quite so ignorant as a broad-minded person in a big suburb.
Indeed there is something fine and distinguished about the very delicacy, and even irony, of their diplomatic relations.