The peasants took many pictures of the sacred places of Jerusalem, and Jerusalem ikons, back with them to their little houses in Russia, there to put them in the East corners of their rooms. They will henceforth light lamps and candles before these pictures. The candle before the picture is, as we know, man's life being lived in front of the vision of Jerusalem; man's ordinary daily life in the presence of the heavenly city.
We realise life itself as the pilgrimage of pilgrimages. Life contains many pilgrimages to Jerusalem, just as it contains many flowerings of spring to summer, just as it contains many feasts of Communion and not merely one. Some of the pilgrims actually go as many as ten times to that Jerusalem in Palestine. But there are Jerusalems in other places if they only knew, and pilgrimages in other modes. It is possible to go back and live the pilgrimage in another way, and to find another Jerusalem. Life has its depths: we will go down into them. We may forget the vision there, but as a true pilgrim once said, "We shall always live again to see our golden hour of victory." That is the true pilgrim's faith. He will reach Jerusalem again and again. He may forget, but he will always remember again; he will always rise again to the light of memory. Deep in the depths of this dark universe our little daily sun is shining, but up above there is another Sun. At times throughout our life we rise to the surface, and for a minute catch a glimpse of that Sun's light: at each of these times we shall have attained unto Jerusalem and have completed a pilgrimage within the pilgrimage. There is light on the faces of those living heroically: it is the light of the vision of Jerusalem.
VII
THE MESSAGE FROM THE HERMIT
The question remains, "Who is the tramp?" Who is the walking person seen from the vantage ground of these pages? He is necessarily a masked figure; he wears the disguise of one who has escaped, and also of one who is a conspirator. He is not the dilettante literary person gone tramping, nor the pauper vagabond who writes sonnets, though either of these rôles may be part of his disguise. He is not merely something negligible or accidental or ornamental, he is something real and true, the product of his time, at once a phenomenon and a portent.
He is the walking hermit, the world-forsaker, but he is above all things a rebel and a prophet, and he stands in very distinct relation to the life of his time.
The great fact of the human world to-day is the tremendous commercial machine which is grinding out at a marvellous acceleration the smaller and meaner sort of man, the middle class, the average man, "the damned, compact, liberal majority," to use the words of Ibsen, and the world daily becomes "more Chinese". The rocks are fraying one another down to desert sand, and mankind becomes a new Sahara.
But over and against the commercial machine stand the rebels, the defiers of it, those who wish to limit its power, to redeem some of the slaves, and to rebuild the temples which it has broken down.
Commercialism is at present the great enemy of the individual man. One already reads in leading articles such phrases as "our commercial, national, and imperial welfare"—commercial first, national second, imperial third, and spiritual nowhere.
Commercialism has already subdued the Church of Christ in Western Europe, it has disorganised the forces of art, and it tends to deny the living sources of religion, art, and life.