Here however, in reference to much that there is in Mahomet and his
success, we are to remember what an umpire Nature is; what a greatness,
composure of depth and tolerance there is in her. You take wheat to cast
into the Earth's bosom; your wheat may be mixed with chaff, chopped straw,
barn-sweepings, dust and all imaginable rubbish; no matter: you cast it
into the kind just Earth; she grows the wheat,--the whole rubbish she
silently absorbs, shrouds _it_ in, says nothing of the rubbish. The yellow
wheat is growing there; the good Earth is silent about all the rest,--has
silently turned all the rest to some benefit too, and makes no complaint
about it! So everywhere in Nature! She is true and not a lie; and yet so
great, and just, and motherly in her truth. She requires of a thing only
that it _be_ genuine of heart; she will protect it if so; will not, if not
so. There is a soul of truth in all the things she ever gave harbor to.
Alas, is not this the history of all highest Truth that comes or ever came
into the world? The _body_ of them all is imperfection, an element of
light in darkness: to us they have to come embodied in mere Logic, in some
merely _scientific_ Theorem of the Universe; which _cannot_ be complete;
which cannot but be found, one day, incomplete, erroneous, and so die and
disappear. The body of all Truth dies; and yet in all, I say, there is a
soul which never dies; which in new and ever-nobler embodiment lives
immortal as man himself! It is the way with Nature. The genuine essence
of Truth never dies. That it be genuine, a voice from the great Deep of
Nature, there is the point at Nature's judgment-seat. What _we_ call pure
or impure, is not with her the final question. Not how much chaff is in
you; but whether you have any wheat. Pure? I might say to many a man:
Yes, you are pure; pure enough; but you are chaff,--insincere hypothesis,
hearsay, formality; you never were in contact with the great heart of the
Universe at all; you are properly neither pure nor impure; you _are_
nothing, Nature has no business with you.