dies; and yet in all, I say, there is a soul which never dies; which in new and ever-nobler embodiment lives immortal as man himself!  It is the way with Nature.  The genuine essence of Truth never dies.  That it be genuine, a voice from the great Deep of Nature, there is the point at Nature’s judgment-seat.  What we call pure or impure, is not with her the final question.  Not how much chaff is in you; but whether you have any wheat.  Pure?  I might say to many a man:  Yes, you are pure; pure enough; but you are chaff,—­insincere hypothesis, hearsay, formality; you never were in contact with the great heart of the Universe at all; you are properly neither pure nor impure; you are nothing, Nature has no business with you.

Mohammed’s Creed we called a kind of Christianity; and really, if we look at the wild rapt earnestness with which it was believed and laid to heart, I should say a better kind than that of those miserable Syrian Sects, with their vain janglings about Homoiousion and Homoousion, the head full of worthless noise, the heart empty and dead!  The truth of it is imbedded in portentous error and falsehood; but the truth of it makes it be believed, not the falsehood:  it succeeded by its truth.  A bastard kind of Christianity, but a living kind; with a heartlife in it; not dead, chopping barren logic merely!  Out of all that rubbish of Arab idolatries, argumentative theologies, traditions, subtleties, rumors and hypotheses of Greeks and Jews, with their idle wiredrawings, this wild man of the Desert, with his wild sincere heart, earnest as death and life, with his great flashing natural eyesight, had seen into the kernel of the matter.  Idolatry is nothing:  these Wooden Idols of yours, “ye rub them with oil and wax, and the flies stick on them,”—­these are wood, I tell you!  They can do nothing for you; they are an impotent blasphemous pretence; a horror and abomination, if ye knew them.  God alone is; God alone has power; He made us, He can kill us and keep us alive:  “Allah akbar, God is great.”  Understand that His will is the best for you; that howsoever sore to flesh-and-blood, you will find it the wisest, best:  you are bound to take it so; in this world and in the next, you have no other thing that you can do!

And now if the wild idolatrous men did believe this, and with their fiery hearts lay hold of it to do it, in what form soever it came to them, I say it was well worthy of being believed.  In one form or the other, I say it is still the one thing worthy of being believed by all men.  Man does hereby become the high-priest of this Temple of a World.  He is in harmony with the Decrees of the Author of this World; cooperating with them, not vainly withstanding them:  I know, to this day, no better definition of Duty than that same.  All that is right includes itself in this of cooperating with the real Tendency of the World:  you succeed by this (the World’s Tendency will succeed), you are good,