merge clean and your eternal welfare will be entirely ruined.'
These words pierced me to the heart. (2) Again, as I passed once close
to a man of infamous character, I drew my robes close about me lest they
should touch him. 'O Hasan,' he said, 'why draw thy robes away from
contact with me. Only the Most High knows what will be the end of each.'
(3) Another time I saw a child coming towards me holding a lighted torch
in his hand. 'Where have you brought this light from?' I asked him. He
immediately blew it out, and said to me, 'O Hasan, tell me where it is
gone, and I will tell you whence I fetched it.' (4) One day a beautiful
woman, with her face unveiled, came to me. She had just been quarrelling
with her husband, and no sooner had she met me than she began reporting
his words. 'O woman,' I said, 'first cover thy face and then speak.' 'O
Hasan,' she answered, 'In my excitement I lost reason, and I did not
even know that my face was uncovered. If you had not told me I should
have gone thus into the bazaar. But you who with so great zeal cultivate
the friendship of the Most High, ought you not to curb your eye, so as
not to see whether my face was uncovered or not?' Her words sank deeply
into my heart."

One day Hasan said to his friends, "You are like the companions of the
prophet, on whom be peace." They felt immensely gratified at this, but
he added, "I mean your faces and beards are like theirs, but nothing
else in you. If you had seen them, such was their absorption in divine
things, you would have thought them mad. Had they seen you, they would
not have regarded one of you as a real Moslem. They, in the practice of
the faith, were like horsemen mounted on swift steeds, or like the wind,
or like the bird which cleaves the air; while we progress like men
mounted on donkeys with sores on their backs."

An Arab visiting Hasan Basri asked him for a definition of patience.
Hasan answered, "There are two kinds of patience; one kind consists in
bearing afflictions and calamities bravely and in abstaining from what
the Lord has forbidden, the other kind consists in never lending an ear
to the suggestions of Satan." "As for me," said the Arab, "I have never
seen anyone more retiring from the world and more patient than thyself."
"Alas," answered Hasan, "my renouncement of the world and my patience
count as nothing." "Why dost thou say so?" exclaimed the Arab. "Because,
if I practise renouncement it is only from dread of hel