'Tis prayer that church-bells chime unto the air;
Yea, Church and Ka'ba, Rosary and Cross,
Are all but divers tongues of world-wide prayer. [a]

[Footnote a: Whinfield's translation of the quatrains of Omar
Khayyam, No. 22 (34).]

So writes a poet (Omar Khayyam) whom Inayat Khan claims as a Sufi,
and who at any rate seems to have had Sufi intervals. Unmixed
spiritual prayer may indeed be uncommon, but we may hope that prayer
with no spiritual elements at all is still more rare. It is the object
of prophets to awaken the consciousness of the people to its spiritual
needs. Of this class of men Inayat Khan speaks thus,--

'The prophetic mission was to bring into the world the Divine Wisdom,
to apportion it to the world according to that world's comprehension,
to adapt it to its degree of mental evolution as well as to dissimilar
countries and periods. It is by this adaptability that the many
religions which have emanated from the same moral principle differ the
one from the other, and it is by this that they exist. In fact, each
prophet had for his mission to prepare the world for the teaching of
the prophet who was to succeed him, and each of them foretold the
coming of his successor down to Mahomet, the last messenger of the
divine Wisdom, and as it were the look-out point in which all the
prophetic cycle was centred. For Mahomet resumed the divine Wisdom in
this proclamation, "Nothing exists, God alone is,"--the final message
whither the whole line of the prophets tended, and where the
boundaries of religions and philosophies took their start. With this
message prophetic interventions are henceforth useless.