"_Allah akbar_," God is
great;--and then also "_Islam_," that we must _submit_ to God. That our
whole strength lies in resigned submission to Him, whatsoever He do to
us. For this world, and for the other! The thing He sends to us, were it
death and worse than death, shall be good, shall be best; we resign
ourselves to God.--"If this be _Islam_," says Goethe, "do we not all
live in _Islam_?" Yes, all of us that have any moral life; we all live
so. It has ever been held the highest wisdom for a man not merely to
submit to Necessity,--Necessity will make him submit,--but to know and
believe well that the stern thing which Necessity had ordered was the
wisest, the best, the thing wanted there. To cease his frantic
pretension of scanning this great God's-World in his small fraction of a
brain; to know that it _had_ verily, though deep beyond his soundings, a
Just Law, that the soul of it was Good;--that his part in it was to
conform to the Law of the Whole, and in devout silence follow that; not
questioning it, obeying it as unquestionable.

I say, this is yet the only true morality known. A man is right and
invincible, virtuous and on the road towards sure conquest, precisely
while he joins himself to the great deep Law of the World, in spite of
all superficial laws, temporary appearances, profit-and-loss
calculations; he is victorious while he cooeperates with that great
central Law, not victorious otherwise:--and surely his first chance of
cooeperating with it, or getting into the course of it, is to know with
his whole soul that it _is_; that it is good, and alone good! This is
the soul of Islam; it is properly the soul of Christianity;--for Islam
is definable as a confused form of Christianity; had Christianity not
been, neither had it been. Christianity also commands us, before all, to
be resigned to God. We are to take no counsel with flesh-and-blood; give
ear to no vain cavils, vain sorrows and wishes: to know that we know
nothing; that the worst and crudest to our eyes is not what it seems;
that we have to receive whatsoever befalls us as sent from God above,
and say, It is good and wise, God is great! "Though He slay me, yet will
I trust in Him." Islam means in its way Denial of Self, Annihilation of
Self. This is yet the highest Wisdom that Heaven has revealed to our
Earth.

Such light had come, as it could, to illuminate the darkness of this
wild Arab soul. A confused dazzling splendor as of life and Heaven, i