't keep up with Kabir]

Kabir's answer would have been that Sanine ought to try that world
before judging it, and had better begin by just loving people a little.
More love, and more willingness to deal with his poor fellow-creatures,
instead of flinging them off in impatience--that would have been Kabir's
prescription. And, as a fact, it might really have been an eye-opener
for Sanine.

Of the two, however, I preferred Sanine to Kabir. The trouble with Kabir
was, he wouldn't let you alone. He wanted everybody to be as religious
as he was: it would make them so happy, he thought. This made him rather
screechy.

He sang some songs, however, that moved me. Like many a modern, I'm not
religious; that is, I've no creed; but I don't feel quite positive that
this army of planets just happened, and that man's evolution from
blindness to thought was an accident and that nowhere is any
Intelligence vaster than mine.

Therefore, I'm always hoping to win some real spiritual insight. It has
come to other men without dogma (I can't accept dogmas) and so, I keep
thinking, it may some day come to me, too. I never really expect it next
week, though. It's always far off. It might come, for instance, I think,
in the hour of death. And here is the song Kabir sang to all men who
think that:

"_O Friend! hope for Him whilst you
live, know whilst you live, understand
whilst you live; for in life deliverance
abides._

"_If your bonds be not broken whilst
living, what hope of deliverance in death?_

"_It is but an empty dream, that the soul
shall have union with Him because it has
passed from the body:_

"_If He is found now, He is found then._

"_If not, we do but go to dwell in the
City of Death._

"_If you have union now, you shall have
it hereafter._"

* * * * *

Both Sanine and Kabir should have read Tarkington's novel, The Turmoil,
which is all about the rush and hustle-bustle of life in America. It
would have made them see what great contrasts exist in this world. Kabir
thought too much about religion. Sanine, of sex. Nobody in The Turmoil
was especially troubled with either. Some went to church, maybe, and
sprinkled a little religion here and there on their lives; but none
deeply felt it, or woke up in the morning thinking about it, or allowed
it to have much say when they made their decisions. And as to sex,
though there were lov