ternation by observing in their own ranks the contamination of
modernist ideas. The brilliant development of the system of Islam followed
the establishment of its material power; so the rapid decline of that
political power which we are witnessing makes the question urgent, whether
Islam has a spiritual essence able to survive the fall of such a material
support. It is certainly not the canonists who will detect the kernel;
"verily we are God's and verily to Him do we return," they cry in helpless
amazement, and their consolation is in the old prayer: "And lay not on us,
O our Lord, that for which we have no strength, but blot out our sins and
forgive us and have mercy upon us. Thou art our Master; grant us then to
conquer the Unbelievers!"

IV

ISLAM AND MODERN THOUGHT

One of the most powerful factors of religious life in its higher forms is
the need of man to find in this world of changing things an imperishable
essence, to separate the eternal from the temporal and then to attach
himself to the former. Where the possibility of this operation is despaired
of, there may arise a pessimism, which finds no path of liberation from the
painful vicissitudes of life other than the annihilation of individuality.
A firm belief in a sphere of life freed from the category of time, together
with the conviction that the poetic images of that superior world current
among mankind are images and nothing else, is likely to give rise to
definitions of the Absolute by purely negative attributes and to mental
efforts having for their object the absorption of individual existence
in the indescribable infinite. Generally speaking, a high development of
intellectual life, especially an intimate acquaintance with different
religious systems, is not favourable to the continuance of elaborate
conceptions of things eternal; it will rather increase the tendency to
deprive the idea of the Transcendent of all colour and definiteness.

The naive ideas concerning the other world in the clear-cut form outlined
for them by previous generations are most likely to remain unchanged in a
religious community where intellectual intercourse is chiefly limited to
that between members of the community. There the belief is fostered that
things most appreciated and cherished in this fading world by mankind will
have an enduring existence in a world to come, and that the best of the
changing phenomena of life are eternal and will continue free from that