for an empty-minded man; that he has not one thought to rub against another while he waits for a train.  The Moslem had one thought, and that a most vital one; the greatness of God which levels all men.  But the Moslem had not one thought to rub against another, because he really had not another.  It is the friction of two spiritual things, of tradition and invention, or of substance and symbol, from which the mind takes fire.  The creeds condemned as complex have something like the secret of sex; they can breed thoughts.

An idealistic intellectual remarked recently that there were a great many things in the creed for which he had no use.  He might just as well have said that there were a great many things in the Encyclopedia Britannica for which he had no use.  It would probably have occurred to him that the work in question was meant for humanity and not for him.  But even in the case of the Encyclopedia, it will often be found a stimulating exercise to read two articles on two widely different subjects and note where they touch.  In fact there is really a great deal to be said for the man in Pickwick who read first about China and then about metaphysics and combined his information.  But however this may be in the famous case of Chinese metaphysics, it is this which is chiefly lacking in Arabian metaphysics.  They suffer, as I have said of the palm-tree in the desert, from a lack of the vitality that comes from complexity, and of the complexity that comes from comparison.  They suffer from having been in a single movement in a single direction; from having begun as a mood and ended rather as a mode, that is a mere custom or fashion.  But any modern Christian thus criticising the Moslem movement will do well to criticise himself and his world at the same time.  For in truth most modern things are mere movements in the same sense as the Moslem movement.  They are at best fashions, in which one thing is exaggerated because it has been neglected.  They are at worst mere monomanias, in which everything is neglected that one thing may be exaggerated.  Good or bad, they are alike movements which in their nature can only move for a certain distance and then stop.  Feminism, for instance, is in its nature a movement, and one that must stop somewhere.  But the Suffragettes no more established a philosophy of the sexes by their feminism than the Arabs did by their anti-feminism.  A woman can find her home on the hustings even less than in the harem; but such movements do not really attempt to find a final home for anybody or anything.  Bolshevism is a movement; and in my opinion a very natural and just movement considered as a revolt against the crude cruelty of Capitalism.  But when we find the Bolshevists making a rule that the drama “must encourage the proletarian spirit,” it is obvious that those who say so are not only maniacs but, what is more to the point here, are monomaniacs.  Imagine having to apply that principle, let us say,