ic_ Theorem
of the Universe; which _cannot_ be complete; which cannot but be found,
one day, incomplete, erroneous, and so die and disappear. The body of
all Truth dies; and yet in all, I say, there is a soul which never dies;
which in new and ever-nobler embodiment lives immortal as man himself!
It is the way with Nature. The genuine essence of Truth never dies. That
it be genuine, a voice from the great Deep of Nature, there is the point
at Nature's judgment-seat. What _we_ call pure or impure, is not with
her the final question. Not how much chaff is in you; but whether you
have any wheat. Pure? I might say to many a man: Yes, you are pure; pure
enough; but you are chaff,--insincere hypothesis, hearsay, formality;
you never were in contact with the great heart of the Universe at all;
you are properly neither pure nor impure; you _are_ nothing, Nature has
no business with you.

Mahomet's Creed we called a kind of Christianity; and really, if we
look at the wild rapt earnestness with which it was believed and laid
to heart, I should say a better kind than that of those miserable Syrian
Sects, with their vain janglings about _Homoiousion_ and _Homoousion_,
the head full of worthless noise, the heart empty and dead! The truth
of it is embedded in portentous error and falsehood; but the truth of
it makes it be believed, not the falsehood: it succeeded by its truth.
A bastard kind of Christianity, but a living kind; with a heart-life in
it; not dead, chopping barren logic merely! Out of all that rubbish
of Arab idolatries, argumentative theologies, traditions, subtleties,
rumors and hypotheses of Greeks and Jews, with their idle wire-drawings,
this wild man of the Desert, with his wild sincere heart, earnest as
death and life, with his great flashing natural eyesight, had seen into
the kernel of the matter. Idolatry is nothing: these Wooden Idols
of yours, "ye rub them with oil and wax, and the flies stick on
them,"--these are wood, I tell you! They can do nothing for you; they
are an impotent blasphemous presence; a horror and abomination, if ye
knew them. God alone is; God alone has power; He made us, He can kill
us and keep us alive: "_Allah akbar_, God is great." Understand that His
will is the best for you; that howsoever sore to flesh and blood, you
will find it the wisest, best: you are bound to take it so; in this
world and in the next, you have no other thing that you can do!

And now if the wild idolatrous men d