It is one of the arguments against war that are really human, and therefore are never used by humanitarians.
The curse of war is that it does lead to more international imitation; while in peace and freedom men can afford to have national variety.
But some things in this country were certainly copied from the Christian invaders, and even if they are not Christian they are in many ways strangely European.

The wall and gates which now stand, whatever stood before them and whatever comes after them, carry a memory of those men from the West who came here upon that wild adventure, who climbed this rock and clung to it so perilously from the victory of Godfrey to the victory of Saladin; and that is why this momentary Eastern exile reminded me so strangely of the hill of Rye and of home.
I do not forget, of course, that all these visible walls and towers are but the battlements and pinnacles of a buried city, or of many buried cities.

I do not forget that such buildings have foundations that are to us almost like fossils; the gigantic fossils of some other geological epoch.

Something may be said later of those lost empires whose very masterpieces are to us like petrified monsters.
From this height, after long histories unrecorded, fell the forgotten idol of the Jebusites, on that day when David's javelin-men scaled the citadel and carried through it, in darkness behind his coloured curtains, the god whose image had never been made by man.
Here was waged that endless war between the graven gods of the plain and the invisible god of the mountain; from here the hosts carrying the sacred fish of the Philistines were driven back to the sea from which their worship came.

Those who worshipped on this hill had come out of bondage in Egypt and went into bondage in Babylon; small as was their country, there passed before them almost the whole pageant of the old pagan world.