Mahomet's Creed we called a kind of Christianity; and really, if we look at
the wild rapt earnestness with which it was believed and laid to heart, I
should say a better kind than that of those miserable Syrian Sects, with
their vain janglings about _Homoiousion_ and _Homoousion_, the head full of
worthless noise, the heart empty and dead! The truth of it is embedded in
portentous error and falsehood; but the truth of it makes it be believed,
not the falsehood: it succeeded by its truth. A bastard kind of
Christianity, but a living kind; with a heart-life in it; not dead,
chopping barren logic merely! Out of all that rubbish of Arab idolatries,
argumentative theologies, traditions, subtleties, rumors and hypotheses of
Greeks and Jews, with their idle wire-drawings, this wild man of the
Desert, with his wild sincere heart, earnest as death and life, with his
great flashing natural eyesight, had seen into the kernel of the matter.
Idolatry is nothing: these Wooden Idols of yours, "ye rub them with oil
and wax, and the flies stick on them,"--these are wood, I tell you! They
can do nothing for you; they are an impotent blasphemous presence; a horror
and abomination, if ye knew them. God alone is; God alone has power; He
made us, He can kill us and keep us alive: "_Allah akbar_, God is great."
Understand that His will is the best for you; that howsoever sore to flesh
and blood, you will find it the wisest, best: you are bound to take it so;
in this world and in the next, you have no other thing that you can do!

And now if the wild idolatrous men did believe this, and with their fiery
hearts lay hold of it to do it, in what form soever it came to them, I say
it was well worthy of being believed. In one form or the other, I say it
is still the one thing worthy of being believed by all men. Man does
hereby become the high-priest of this Temple of a World. He is in harmony
with the Decrees of the Author of this World; cooperating with them, not
vainly withstanding them: I know, to this day, no better definition of