A historical instinct made the men of the new Europe try hard
to find a place for everything in the system, however much might
be denied to the individual. Christians might lose everything,
but Christendom, if possible, must not lose anything. The very
nature of Islam, even at its best, was quite different from this.
Nobody supposed, even subconsciously, that Mahomet meant to restore
ancient Babylon as medievalism vaguely sought to restore ancient Rome.
Nobody thought that the builders of the Mosque of Omar had looked
at the Pyramids as the builders of St. Peter's might have looked
at the Parthenon. Islam began at the beginning; it was content with
the idea that it had a great truth; as indeed it had a colossal truth.
It was so huge a truth that it was hard to see it was a half-truth.

Islam was a movement; that is why it has ceased to move.
For a movement can only be a mood. It may be a very necessary movement
arising from a very noble mood, but sooner or later it must find its
level in a larger philosophy, and be balanced against other things.
Islam was a reaction towards simplicity; it was a violent simplification,
which turned out to be an over-simplification. Stevenson has somewhere
one of his perfectly picked phrases for an empty-minded man;
that he has not one thought to rub against another while he waits
for a train. The Moslem had one thought, and that a most vital one;
the greatness of God which levels all men. But the Moslem had not one
thought to rub against another, because he really had not another.
It is the friction of two spiritual things, of tradition and invention,
or of substance and symbol, from which the mind takes fire.
The creeds condemned as complex have something like the secret of sex;
they can breed thoughts.

An idealistic intellectual remarked recently that there were