roneous, and so die and disappear. The body of all Truth dies; and
yet in all, I say, there is a soul which never dies; which in new and
ever-nobler embodiment lives immortal as man himself! It is the way
with Nature. The genuine essence of Truth never dies. That it be
genuine, a voice from the great Deep of Nature, there is the point at
Nature's judgment-seat. What _we_ call pure or impure, is not with her
the final question. Not how much chaff is in you; but whether you have
any wheat. Pure? I might say to many a man: Yes, you are pure; pure
enough; but you are chaff,--insincere hypothesis, hearsay, formality;
you never were in contact with the great heart of the Universe at all;
you are properly neither pure nor impure; you _are_ nothing, Nature
has no business with you.

Mahomet's Creed we called a kind of Christianity; and really, if we
look at the wild rapt earnestness with which it was believed and laid
to heart, I should say a better kind than that of those miserable
Syrian Sects, with their vain janglings about _Homoiousion_ and
_Homoousion_, the head full of worthless noise, the heart empty and
dead! The truth of it is embedded in portentous error and falsehood;
but the truth of it makes it be believed, not the falsehood: it
succeeded by its truth. A bastard kind of Christianity, but a living
kind; with a heart-life in it: not dead, chopping barren logic merely!
Out of all that rubbish of Arab idolatries, argumentative theologies,
traditions, subtleties, rumours and hypotheses of Greeks and Jews,
with their idle wire-drawings, this wild man of the Desert, with his
wild sincere heart, earnest as death and life, with his great flashing
natural eyesight, had seen into the kernel of the matter. Idolatry is
nothing: these Wooden Idols of yours, 'ye rub them with oil and wax,
and the flies stick on them,'--these are wood, I tell you! They can do
nothing for you; they are an impotent blasphemous pretence; a horror
and abomination, if ye knew them. God alone is; God alone has power;
He made us, He can kill us and keep us alive: '_Allah akbar_, God is
great.' Understand that His will is the best for you; that howsoever
sore to flesh-and-blood, you will find it the wisest, best: you are
bound to take it so; in this world and in the next, you have no other
thing that you can do!

And now if the wild idolatrous men did believe this, and with their
fiery hearts laid hold of it to do it, in what form soever it came to
the