It may be taken that whatever form truth takes among men will be the more perfect in proportion as the men who receive that form are more fully men.  The whole of truth can never be comprehended by anything finite; and truth as it appears to this species or to that is most true when the type which receives it is the healthiest and the most normal of its own kind.  The truth as it is to men is most true when the men who receive it are the healthiest and the most normal of men.  We in Europe are the healthiest and most normal of our kind.  It is to us that the world must look for its headship; we have the harbours, the continual presence of the sea through all our polities; we have that high differentiation between the various parts of our unity which makes the whole of Europe so marvellous an organism; we alone change without suffering decay.  To the truth as Europe accepts it I cannot but bow down; for if that is not the truth, then the truth is not to be found upon earth.  But there conies upon us perpetually that “wind of Africa”; and it disturbs us.  As I lay that day, a year ago, upon the crest of the mountain, my whole mind was possessed with the influence of such a gale.

Day after day, after day, the silent men of the Desert go forward across its monotonous horizons; their mouths are flanked with those two deep lines of patience and of sorrow which you may note to-day in all the ghettoes of Europe; their smile, when they smile, is restrained by a sort of ironic strength in the muscles of the face.  Their eyes are more bright than should be eyes of happy men; they are, as it were, inured to sterility; there is nothing in them of that repose which we Westerners acquire from a continual contemplation of deep pastures and of innumerable leaves; they are at war, not only among themselves, but against the good earth; in a silent and powerful way they are also afraid.

You may note that their morals are an angry series of unexplained commands, and that their worship does not include that fringe of half-reasonable, wholly pleasant things which the true worship of a true God must surely contain.  All is as clear-cut as their rocks, and as unfruitful as their dry valleys, and as dreadful as their brazen sky; “thou shalt not” this, that, and the other.  Their God is jealous; he is vengeful; he is (awfully present and real to them!) a vision of that demon of which we in our happier countries make a quaint legend.  He catches men out and trips them up; he has but little relation to the Father of Christian men, who made the downs of South England and the high clouds above them.

The good uses of the world are forgotten in the Desert, or fiercely denied.  Love is impure; so are birth, and death, and eating, and every other necessary part in the life of a man.  And yet, though all these things are impure, there is no lustration.  We also feel in a genial manner that this merry body of ours requires apology; but those others to south of us have no toleration in their attitude; they are awfully afraid.