Conversion is the one sort of conquest in which the conquered must rejoice.
In that sense alone it is foolish for us in the West to sneer at those who kill men when a foot is set in a holy place, when we ourselves kill hundreds of thousands when a foot is put across a frontier.

It is absurd for us to despise those who shed blood for a relic when we have shed rivers of blood for a rag.
But above all the Crusade, or, for that matter, the Jehad, is by far the most philosophical sort of fighting, not only in its conception of ending the difference, but in its mere act of recognising the difference, as the deepest kind of difference.
It is to reverse all reason to suggest that a man's politics matter and his religion does not matter.

It is to say he is affected by the town he lives in, but not by the world he lives in.
It is to say that he is altered when he is a fellow-citizen walking under new lamp-posts, but not altered when he is another creature walking under strange stars.

It is exactly as if we were to say that two people ought to live in the same house, but it need not be in the same town.
It is exactly as if we said that so long as the address included York it did not matter whether it was New York; or that so long as a man is in Essex we do not care whether he is in England.
Christendom would have been entirely justified in the abstract in being alarmed or suspicious at the mere rise of a great power that was not Christian.

Nobody nowadays would think it odd to express regret at the rise of a power because it was Militarist or Socialist or even Protectionist.