to everything, it would undoubtedly be quite possible to tell the tale of the Crusades, correctly enough in detail, and in such a way as entirely to justify the Moslems and condemn the Crusaders.  But any such real record of the Moslem case would have very little to do with any questions of tolerance or intolerance, or any modern ideas about religious liberty and equality.  As the modern world does not know what it means itself by religious liberty and equality, as the moderns have not thought out any logical theory of toleration at all (for their vague generalisations can always be upset by twenty tests from Thugs to Christian Science) it would obviously be unreasonable to expect the moderns to understand the much clearer philosophy of the Moslems.  But some rough suggestion of what was really involved may be found convenient in this case.

Islam was not originally a movement directed against Christianity at all.  It did not face westwards, so to speak; it faced eastwards towards the idolatries of Asia.  But Mahomet believed that these idols could be fought more successfully with a simpler kind of creed; one might almost say with a simpler kind of Christianity.  For he included many things which we in the West commonly suppose not only to be peculiar to Christianity but to be peculiar to Catholicism.  Many things have been rejected by Protestantism that are not rejected by Mahometanism.  Thus the Moslems believe in Purgatory, and they give at least a sort of dignity to the Mother of Christ.  About such things as these they have little of the bitterness that rankles in the Jews and is said sometimes to become hideously vitriolic.  While I was in Palestine a distinguished Moslem said to a Christian resident:  “We also, as well as you, honour the Mother of Christ.  Never do we speak of her but we call her the Lady Miriam.  I dare not tell you what the Jews call her.”

The real mistake of the Moslems is something much more modern in its application than any particular or passing persecution of Christians as such.  It lay in the very fact that they did think they had a simpler and saner sort of Christianity, as do many modern Christians.  They thought it could be made universal merely by being made uninteresting.  Now a man preaching what he thinks is a platitude is far more intolerant than a man preaching what he admits is a paradox.  It was exactly because it seemed self-evident, to Moslems as to Bolshevists, that their simple creed was suited to everybody, that they wished in that particular sweeping fashion to impose it on everybody.  It was because Islam was broad that Moslems were narrow.  And because it was not a hard religion it was a heavy rule.  Because it was without a self-correcting complexity, it allowed of those simple and masculine but mostly rather dangerous appetites that show themselves in a chieftain or a lord.  As it had the simplest sort of religion, monotheism, so it had the simplest sort of government, monarchy.  There was exactly