ll her."

The real mistake of the Moslems is something much more modern in its
application than any particular or passing persecution of Christians
as such. It lay in the very fact that they did think they had a
simpler and saner sort of Christianity, as do many modern Christians.
They thought it could be made universal merely by being
made uninteresting. Now a man preaching what he thinks is a platitude
is far more intolerant than a man preaching what he admits is a paradox.
It was exactly because it seemed self-evident, to Moslems as
to Bolshevists, that their simple creed was suited to everybody,
that they wished in that particular sweeping fashion to impose it
on everybody. It was because Islam was broad that Moslems were narrow.
And because it was not a hard religion it was a heavy rule.
Because it was without a self-correcting complexity, it allowed
of those simple and masculine but mostly rather dangerous
appetites that show themselves in a chieftain or a lord.
As it had the simplest sort of religion, monotheism, so it had
the simplest sort of government, monarchy. There was exactly
the same direct spirit in its despotism as in its deism.
The Code, the Common Law, the give and take of charters
and chivalric vows, did not grow in that golden desert.
The great sun was in the sky and the great Saladin was in his tent,
and he must be obeyed unless he were assassinated. Those who
complain of our creeds as elaborate often forget that the elaborate
Western creeds have produced the elaborate Western constitutions;
and that they are elaborate because they are emancipated.
And the real moral of the relations of the two great religions is
something much more subtle and sincere than any mere atrocity tales
against Turks. It is the same as the moral of the Christian refusal
of a Pagan Pantheon in which Christ should rank with Ammon and Apollo.
Twice the Christian Church refused what seemed like a handsome
offer of a large latitudinarian sort; once to include Christ as a
god and once to include him as a prophet; once by the admission
of all idols and once by the abandonment of all idols.
Twice the Church took the risk and twice the Church survived alone
and succeeded alone, filling the world with her own children;
and leaving her rivals in a desert, where the idols were dead
and the iconoclasts were dying.

But all this history has been hidden by a prejudice more
general than the particular case of Saracens and Crusa