made
flesh and of His being afterwards made wood or stone. A study of the
questions smouldering in the track of the prairie fire of the Christian
conversion favours the suggestion that this fanaticism against art or
mythology was at once a development and a reaction from that conversion,
a sort of minority report of the Hebraists. In this sense Islam was
something like a Christian heresy. The early heresies had been full of
mad reversals and evasions of the Incarnation, rescuing their Jesus from
the reality of his body even at the expense of the sincerity of his
soul. And the Greek Iconoclasts had poured into Italy, breaking the
popular statues and denouncing the idolatry of the Pope, until routed,
in a style sufficiently symbolic, by the sword of the father of
Charlemagne. It was all these disappointed negations that took fire from
the genius of Mahomet, and launched out of the burning lands a cavalry
charge that nearly conquered the world. And if it be suggested that a
note on such Oriental origins is rather remote from a history of
England, the answer is that this book may, alas! contain many
digressions, but that this is not a digression. It is quite peculiarly
necessary to keep in mind that this Semite god haunted Christianity like
a ghost; to remember it in every European corner, but especially in our
corner. If any one doubts the necessity, let him take a walk to all the
parish churches in England within a radius of thirty miles, and ask why
this stone virgin is headless or that coloured glass is gone. He will
soon learn that it was lately, and in his own lanes and homesteads, that
the ecstasy of the deserts returned, and his bleak northern island was
filled with the fury of the Iconoclasts.

It was an element in this sublime and yet sinister simplicity of Islam
that it knew no boundaries. Its very home was homeless. For it was born
in a sandy waste among nomads, and it went everywhere because it came
from nowhere. But in the Saracens of the early Middle Ages this nomadic
quality in Islam was masked by a high civilization, more scientific if
less creatively artistic than that of contemporary Christendom. The
Moslem monotheism was, or appeared to be, the more rationalist religion
of the two. This rootless refinement was characteristically advanced in
abstract things, of which a memory remains in the very name of algebra.
In comparison the Christian civilization was still largely instinctive,
but its instincts were