to “Charley’s Aunt.”  None of these things seek to establish a complete philosophy such as Aquinas founded on Aristotle.  The only two modern men who attempted it were Comte and Herbert Spencer.  Spencer, I think, was too small a man to do it at all; and Comte was a great enough man to show how difficult it is to do it in modern times.  None of these movements can do anything but move; they have not discovered where to rest.

And this fact brings us back to the man of the desert, who moves and does not rest; but who has many superiorities to the restless races of the industrial city.  Men who have been in the Manchester movement in 1860 and the Fabian movement in 1880 cannot sneer at a religious mood that lasted for eight hundred years.  And those who tolerate the degraded homelessness of the slums cannot despise the much more dignified homelessness of the desert.  Nevertheless, the thing is a homelessness and not a home; and there runs through it all the note of the nomad.  The Moslem takes literally, as he takes everything, the truth that here we have no abiding city.  He can see no meaning in the mysticism of materialism, the sacramental idea that a French poet expressed so nobly, when he said that our earthly city is the body of the city of God.  He has no true notion of building a house, or in our Western sense of recognising the kindred points of heaven and home.  Even the exception to this rule is an exception at once terrible and touching.  There is one house that the Moslem does build like a house and even a home, often with walls and roof and door; as square as a cottage, as solid as a fort.  And that is his grave.  A Moslem cemetery is literally like a little village.  It is a village, as the saying goes, that one would not care to walk through at night.  There is something singularly creepy about so strange a street of houses, each with a door that might be opened by a dead man.  But in a less fanciful sense, there is about it something profoundly pathetic and human.  Here indeed is the sailor home from sea, in the only port he will consent to call his home; here at last the nomad confesses the common need of men.  But even about this there broods the presence of the desert and its dry bones of reason.  He will accept nothing between a tent and a tomb.

The philosophy of the desert can only begin over again.  It cannot grow; it cannot have what Protestants call progress and Catholics call development.  There is death and hell in the desert when it does begin over again.  There is always the possibility that a new prophet will rediscover the old truth; will find again written on the red sands the secret of the obvious.  But it will always be the same secret, for which thousands of these simple and serious and splendidly valiant men will die.  The highest message of Mahomet is a piece of divine tautology.  The very cry that God is God is a repetition of words, like the repetitions of wide sands and rolling skies.