because they did not believe what they said. From this notion I shall
appeal to another doctrine of the very same men who put it forth, and
ask them, Can any man be strong by believing a lie? Have you not told
us, nobly enough, that every lie is by its nature rotten, doomed to
death, certain to prove its own impotence, and be shattered to atoms the
moment you try to use it, to bring it into rude actual contact with
fact, and Nature, and the eternal laws? Faith to be strong must be
faith in something which is not one's self; faith in something eternal,
something objective, something true, which would exist just as much
though we and all the world disbelieved it. The strength of belief
comes from that which is believed in; if you separate it from that, it
becomes a mere self-opinion, a sensation of positiveness; and what sort
of strength that will give, history will tell us in the tragedies of the
Jews who opposed Titus, of the rabble who followed Walter the Penniless
to the Crusades, of the Munster Anabaptists, and many another sad page
of human folly. It may give the fury of idiots; not the deliberate
might of valiant men. Let us pass this by, then; believing that faith
can only give strength where it is faith in something true and right:
and go on to another answer almost as popular as the last.

We are told that the might of Islam lay in a certain innate force and
savage virtue of the Arab character. If we have discovered this in the
followers of Mohammed, they certainly had not discovered it in
themselves. They spoke of themselves, rightly or wrongly, as men who
had received a divine light, and that light a moral light, to teach them
to love that which was good, and refuse that which was evil; and to that
divine light they stedfastly and honestly attributed every right action
of their lives. Most noble and affecting, in my eyes, is that answer of
Saad's aged envoy to Yezdegird, king of Persia, when he reproached him
with the past savagery and poverty of the Arabs. "Whatsoever thou hast