But it is far more natural to be conscious of a difference, not about the order of battle but the battle of life; not about our definable enjoyment of possessions, but about our much more doubtful possession of enjoyment; not about the fiscal divisions between us and foreigners but about the spiritual divisions even between us and friends.
These are the things that differ profoundly with differing views of the ultimate nature of the universe.

For the things of our country are often distant; but the things of our cosmos are always near; we can shut our doors upon the wheeled traffic of our native town; but in our own inmost chamber we hear the sound that never ceases; that wheel which Dante and a popular proverb have dared to christen as the love that makes the world go round.
For this is the great paradox of life; that there are not only wheels within wheels, but the larger wheels within the smaller.
When a whole community rests on one conception of life and death and the origin of things, it is quite entitled to watch the rise of another community founded on another conception as the rise of something certain to be different and likely to be hostile.
Indeed, as I have pointed out touching certain political theories, we already admit this truth in its small and questionable examples.
We only deny the large and obvious examples.
Christendom might quite reasonably have been alarmed if it had not been attacked.

But as a matter of history it had been attacked.
The Crusader would have been quite justified in suspecting the Moslem even if the Moslem had merely been a new stranger; but as a matter of history he was already an old enemy.

The critic of the Crusade talks as if it had sought out some inoffensive tribe or temple in the interior of Thibet, which was never discovered until it was invaded.
They seem entirely to forget that long before the Crusaders had dreamed of riding to Jerusalem, the Moslems had almost ridden into Paris.
They seem to forget that if the Crusaders nearly conquered Palestine, it was but a return upon the Moslems who had nearly conquered Europe.
There was no need for them to argue by an appeal to reason, as I have argued above, that a religious division must make a difference; it had already made a difference.

The difference stared them in the face in the startling transformation of Roman Barbary and of Roman Spain.