the Moslem type of religion.  But even the oriental type of ornament, admirable as it often is, is to the ornament of a gothic cathedral what a fossil forest is to a forest full of birds.  In short, the man of the desert tends to simplify too much, and to take his first truth for the last truth.  And as it is with religion so it is with morality.  He who believes in the existence of God believes in the equality of man.  And it has been one of the merits of the Moslem faith that it felt men as men, and was not incapable of welcoming men of many different races.  But here again it was so hard and crude that its very equality was like a desert rather than a field.  Its very humanity was inhuman.

But though this human sentiment is rather rudimentary it is very real.  When a man in the desert meets another man, he is really a man; the proverbial two-legged fowl without feathers.  He is an absolute and elementary shape, like the palm-tree or the pyramid.  The discoverer does not pause to consider through what gradations he may have been evolved from a camel.  When the man is a mere dot in the distance, the other man does not shout at him and ask whether he had a university education, or whether he is quite sure he is purely Teutonic and not Celtic or Iberian.  A man is a man; and a man is a very important thing.  One thing redeems the Moslem morality which can be set over against a mountain of crimes; a considerable deposit of common sense.  And the first fact of common sense is the common bond of men.  There is indeed in the Moslem character also a deep and most dangerous potentiality of fanaticism of the menace of which something may be said later.  Fanaticism sounds like the flat contrary of common sense; yet curiously enough they are both sides of the same thing.  The fanatic of the desert is dangerous precisely because he does take his faith as a fact, and not even as a truth in our more transcendental sense.  When he does take up a mystical idea he takes it as he takes the man or the palm-tree; that is, quite literally.  When he does distinguish somebody not as a man but as a Moslem, then he divides the Moslem from the non-Moslem exactly as he divides the man from the camel.  But even then he recognises the equality of men in the sense of the equality of Moslems.  He does not, for instance, complicate his conscience with any sham science about races.  In this he has something like an intellectual advantage over the Jew, who is generally so much his intellectual superior; and even in some ways his spiritual superior.  The Jew has far more moral imagination and sympathy with the subtler ideals of the soul.  For instance, it is said that many Jews disbelieve in a future life; but if they did believe in a future life, it would be something more worthy of the genius of Isaiah and Spinoza.  The Moslem Paradise is a very Earthly Paradise.  But with all their fine apprehensions, the Jews suffer from one heavy calamity; that of being