its starting, is precisely in a _minority of one_. In one
man's head alone, there it dwells as yet. One man alone of the whole
world believes it; there is one man against all men. That _he_ take a
sword, and try to propagate with that, will do little for him. You
must first get your sword! On the whole, a thing will propagate itself
as it can. We do not find, of the Christian Religion either, that it
always disdained the sword, when once it had got one. Charlemagne's
conversion of the Saxons was not by preaching. I care little about the
sword: I will allow a thing to struggle for itself in this world, with
any sword or tongue or implement it has, or can lay hold of. We will
let it preach, and pamphleteer, and fight, and to the uttermost bestir
itself, and do, beak and claws, whatsoever is in it; very sure that it
will, in the long-run, conquer nothing which does not deserve to be
conquered. What is better than itself, it cannot put away, but only
what is worse. In this great Duel, Nature herself is umpire, and can
do no wrong: the thing which is deepest-rooted in Nature, what we call
_truest_, that thing and not the other will be found growing at last.

Here however, in reference to much that there is in Mahomet and his
success, we are to remember what an umpire Nature is; what a
greatness, composure of depth and tolerance there is in her. You take
wheat to cast into the Earth's bosom: your wheat may be mixed with
chaff, chopped straw, barn-sweepings, dust and all imaginable rubbish;
no matter: you cast it into the kind just Earth; she grows the
wheat,--the whole rubbish she silently absorbs, shrouds _it_ in, says
nothing of the rubbish. The yellow wheat is growing there; the good
Earth is silent about all the rest,--has silently turned all the rest
to some benefit too, and makes no complaint about it! So everywhere in
Nature! She is true and not a lie; and yet so great, and just, and
motherly in her truth. She requires of a thing only that it _be_
genuine of heart; she will protect it if so; will not, if not so.
There is a soul of truth in all the things she ever gave harbour to.
Alas, is not this the history of all highest Truth that comes or ever
came into the world? The _body_ of them all is imperfection, an
element of light _in_ darkness: to us they have to come embodied in
mere Logic, in some merely _scientific_ Theorem of the Universe; which
_cannot_ be complete; which cannot but be found, one day, incomplete,
er