from comparison. The man looking at the palm-tree does realise
the simple fact that God made it; while the man looking at
the lamp-post in a large modern city can be persuaded by a hundred
sophistical circumlocutions that he made it himself. But the man
in the desert cannot compare the palm-tree with the lamp-post,
or even with all the other trees which may be better worth looking
at than the lamp-post. Hence his religion, though true as far
as it goes, has not the variety and vitality of the churches
that were designed by men walking in the woods and orchards.
I speak here of the Moslem type of religion and not of the oriental type
of ornament, which is much older than the Moslem type of religion.
But even the oriental type of ornament, admirable as it often is,
is to the ornament of a gothic cathedral what a fossil forest is
to a forest full of birds. In short, the man of the desert tends
to simplify too much, and to take his first truth for the last truth.
And as it is with religion so it is with morality. He who believes
in the existence of God believes in the equality of man. And it has
been one of the merits of the Moslem faith that it felt men as men,
and was not incapable of welcoming men of many different races.
But here again it was so hard and crude that its very equality was
like a desert rather than a field. Its very humanity was inhuman.

But though this human sentiment is rather rudimentary it is very real.
When a man in the desert meets another man, he is really
a man; the proverbial two-legged fowl without feathers.
He is an absolute and elementary shape, like the palm-tree
or the pyramid. The discoverer does not pause to consider
through what gradations he may have been evolved from a camel.
When the man is a mere dot in the distance, the other man does
not shout at him and ask whether he had a university education,