A city that comes down, rather than retreats
the New Jerusalem is always walking away from us
The New Jerusalem is the holy city of Revelation 21:2, seen descending from God; Revelation 21:10 repeats the descent, and 21:15–21 describes a measured city with walls, gates, and precious materials. In the King James Version inspected here, the city is already prepared, like a bride. Chesterton turns this completed destination into a comic fugitive: modern thinkers keep revising the object of their hopes, so even their destination appears to retreat. The contrast is between pursuing an ideal and replacing it, rather than simply between slow and fast political change. Revelation 21:2–4, 10–21, KJV.
The biblical context also gives substance to the otherwise abstract word ‘ideal’: the city accompanies God's dwelling with humanity and the removal of death, sorrow, and pain. Nevertheless, Chesterton's image of people walking toward it is his application, not a quotation of Revelation's account of its arrival. Nor does the biblical passage by itself establish his argument that effective reform requires an unchanging standard. His choice of an elaborately proportioned city anticipates the later requirement in this chapter that the goal be composite as well as fixed: a particular arrangement of goods, rather than an indefinite increase in one quality. Orthodoxy, chapter VII, paragraphs beginning ‘This, then, is our second requirement’ and ‘Twice again’.
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