to
submit to Necessity,--Necessity will make him submit,--but to know and
believe well that the stern thing which Necessity had ordered was
the wisest, the best, the thing wanted there. To cease his frantic
pretension of scanning this great God's-World in his small fraction of a
brain; to know that it _had_ verily, though deep beyond his soundings,
a Just Law, that the soul of it was Good;--that his part in it was to
conform to the Law of the Whole, and in devout silence follow that; not
questioning it, obeying it as unquestionable.

I say, this is yet the only true morality known. A man is right and
invincible, virtuous and on the road towards sure conquest, precisely
while he joins himself to the great deep Law of the World, in spite
of all superficial laws, temporary appearances, profit-and-loss
calculations; he is victorious while he co-operates with that great
central Law, not victorious otherwise:--and surely his first chance of
co-operating with it, or getting into the course of it, is to know with
his whole soul that it is; that it is good, and alone good! This is the
soul of Islam; it is properly the soul of Christianity;--for Islam is
definable as a confused form of Christianity; had Christianity not been,
neither had it been. Christianity also commands us, before all, to be
resigned to God. We are to take no counsel with flesh and blood; give
ear to no vain cavils, vain sorrows and wishes: to know that we know
nothing; that the worst and cruelest to our eyes is not what it seems;
that we have to receive whatsoever befalls us as sent from God above,
and say, It is good and wise, God is great! "Though He slay me, yet will
I trust in Him." Islam means in its way Denial of Self, Annihilation
of Self. This is yet the highest Wisdom that Heaven has revealed to our
Earth.

Such light had come, as it could, to illuminate the darkness of this
wild Arab soul. A confused dazzling splendor as of life and Heaven, in
the great darkness which threatened to be death: he called it revelation
and the angel Gabriel;--who of us yet can know what to call it? It
is the "inspiration of the Almighty" that giveth us understanding. To
_know_; to get into the truth of anything, is ever a mystic act,--of
which the best Logics can but babble on the surface. "Is not Belief the
true god-announcing Miracle?" says Novalis.--That Mahomet's whole soul,
set in flame with this grand Truth vouchsafed him, should feel as if
it were important an