materialist or a hypocritical free thinker. Still, the voice within
me asked if Shakib were honest in his dealings, if I were honest in
my peddling? Have I not misrepresented my gewgaws as the atheist
misrepresents the truth? 'This is made in the Holy Land,'--'This is
from the Holy Sepulchre'--these lies, O Khalid, are upon you. And
what is the difference between the jewellery you passed off for gold
and the arguments of the atheist-preacher? Are they not both
instruments of deception, both designed to catch the dollar? Yes, you
have been, O Khalid, as mean, as mercenary, as dishonest as those
canting infidels.

"And what are you going to do about it? Will you continue, while in
the quagmires yourself, to point contemptuously at those standing in
the gutter? Will you, in your dishonesty, dare impeach the honesty of
men? Are you not going to make a resolution now, either to keep silent
or to go out of the quagmires and rise to the mountain-heights? Be
pure yourself first, O Khalid; then try to spread this purity around
you at any cost.

"Yes; that is why, when Shakib asked me to go out peddling one day, I
hesitated and finally refused. For atheism, in whose false dry light I
walked a parasang or two, did not only betray itself to me as a sham,
but also turned my mind and soul to the sham I had shouldered for
years. From the peddling-box, therefore, I turned even as I did from
atheism. Praised be Allah, who, in his providential care, seemed to
kick me away from the door of its temple. The sham, although effulgent
and alluring, was as brief as a summer afternoon."

As for the peddling-box, our Scribe will tell of its fate in the
following Chapter.

CHAPTER VII

IN THE TWILIGHT OF AN IDEA

It is Voltaire, we believe, who says something to the effect that
one's mind should be in accordance with one's years. That is why an
academic education nowadays often fails of its purpose. For whether
one's mind runs ahead of one's years, or one's years ahead of one's
mind, the result is much the same; it always goes ill with the mind.
True, knowledge is power; but in order to feel at home with it, we
must be constitutionally qualified. And if we are not, it is likely to
give the soul such a wrenching as to deform it forever. Indeed, how
many of us go through life with a fatal spiritual or intellectual
twist which could have been avoided in our youth, were we a little
less wise. The young _philosophes_, the products of th