violent simplification,
which turned out to be an over-simplification. Stevenson has somewhere
one of his perfectly picked phrases for an empty-minded man;
that he has not one thought to rub against another while he waits
for a train. The Moslem had one thought, and that a most vital one;
the greatness of God which levels all men. But the Moslem had not one
thought to rub against another, because he really had not another.
It is the friction of two spiritual things, of tradition and invention,
or of substance and symbol, from which the mind takes fire.
The creeds condemned as complex have something like the secret of sex;
they can breed thoughts.

An idealistic intellectual remarked recently that there were
a great many things in the creed for which he had no use.
He might just as well have said that there were a great many
things in the _Encyclopedia Britannica_ for which he had no use.
It would probably have occurred to him that the work in question
was meant for humanity and not for him. But even in the case
of the _Encyclopedia_, it will often be found a stimulating
exercise to read two articles on two widely different subjects
and note where they touch. In fact there is really a great deal
to be said for the man in _Pickwick_ who read first about China
and then about metaphysics and combined his information.
But however this may be in the famous case of Chinese metaphysics,
it is this which is chiefly lacking in Arabian metaphysics.
They suffer, as I have said of the palm-tree in the desert,
from a lack of the vitality that comes from complexity,
and of the complexity that comes from comparison. They suffer
from having been in a single movement in a single direction;
from having begun as a mood and ended rather as a mode,
that is a mere custom or fashion. But any modern Christian thus
criticising the Moslem movement will do well to criticise himself
and his world at the same time. For in truth most modern things
are mere movements in the same sense as the Moslem movement.
They are at best fashions, in which one thing is exaggerated
because it has been neglected. They are at worst mere monomanias,
in which everything is neglected that one thing may be exaggerated.
Good or bad, they are alike movements which in their nature can only
move for a certain distance and then stop. Feminism, for instance,
is in its nature a movement, and one that must stop somewhere.
But the Suffragettes no more established a p