s do not, the inference is that evil gets the best
of it sometimes. Now the Moslem slogan is "Allah Akbar" (God is Greatest),
and that seems to me a better battle-cry than, for example, "Gott mit
uns," as God will still be great and invincible to Moslems in their
victory or defeat; but the finite idea presumes, in disaster, that you
and your God have been defeated together. It is not my business to
criticise either conception from a religious point of view, but in
mundane affairs it is the former that will make for fighting force,
especially as we still insist that our God is a jealous God, visiting the
sins of the fathers, etc.: surely this is not a human ideal of justice;
the obvious deduction is that our modern Deity is stronger to punish than
protect--hardly an encouraging attribute.

Whether a religion is the better for an organised priesthood or not is
irrelevant to our subject, but the absence of it in Islam certainly
strengthens the pan-Islamic movement, as each Moslem may consider
himself a standard-bearer of his faith, while we are apt to leave too
much to our priests, thus engendering slackness on our part and
meticulous dogma on theirs; both undermine Christian brotherhood. The
fact that priestly stipends seem to the ordinary layman as in inverse
ratio to the duties performed also widens the breach between clergy and
laity, besides sapping clerical _moral_. This is not the particular
feature of any one sect--the reader can supply cases within his own
experience, but here is one that is probably outside it and showing how
widespread the system is. The rank and file of the Greek Orthodox clergy
are notoriously ill-paid. Yet their monastery at Jerusalem costs
LE.15,000 per annum to maintain and pays LE.40,000 annually in clerical
salaries to archbishops and clergy who control the spiritual affairs of
less than fifteen thousand people. It derives LE.30,000 from its
property in Russia, LE.25,000 from the property of the Holy Sepulchre,
and as much again from visitors and other sources; and this in a region
where the Founder of our faith was content to wander with less certainty
of shelter than the wild creatures of the countryside.

Incidentally, the monastery seems to have been unable to curtail its
expenditure during the War, for it has accumulated debts to the amount
of LE.600,000, most of its sources of income having ceased for the time.
I quote from current newspapers. Blame does not necessarily attach to
t