mission. It is easier
to kindle righteous indignation against abuses when, by abating them, we
further our personal interests; and Mohammed might have been less
zealous in denouncing false gods had his own God been altogether the
true one. But, in the heat of his militancy, he descends so far as to
speak of _God's interests_ which the faithful embrace, and of fighting
in _God's cause_. By these notions, so crudely pre-rational, we are
allowed to interpret and discount the pantheistic sublimities with which
in most places we are regaled; and in order that a morality, too weak to
be human, may not wither altogether in the fierce light of the Absolute,
we are led to humanise the Absolute into a finite force, needing our
support against independent enemies. So complete is the bankruptcy of
that Stoic morality which thinks to live on the worship of That which
Is.

[Sidenote: Moral ambiguity in pantheism.]

As extremes are said to meet, so we may say that a radical position is
often the point of departure for opposite systems. Pantheism, or
religion and morality abdicating in favour of physics, may, in practice,
be interpreted in contrary ways. To be in sympathy with the Whole may
seem to require us to outgrow and discard every part; yet, on the other
hand, there is no obvious reason why Being should love its essence in a
fashion that involves hating every possible form of Being. The
worshipper of Being accordingly assumes now one, now the other, of two
opposite attitudes, according as the society in which he lives is in a
prerational or a post-rational state of culture. Pantheism is
interpreted pre-rationally, as by the early Mohammedans, or by the
Hegelians, when people are not yet acquainted, or not yet disgusted,
with worldliness; the Absolute then seems to lend a mystical sanction to
whatever existences or tendencies happen to be afoot. Morality is
reduced to sanctioning reigning conventions, or reigning passions, on
the authority of the universe. Thus the Moslems, by way of serving
Allah, could extend their conquests and cultivate the arts and pleasures
congenial to a self-sufficing soul, at once indolent and fierce; while
the transcendentalists of our times, by way of accepting their part in
the divine business, have merely added a certain speculative loftiness
to the maxims of some sect or the chauvinism of some nation.

[Sidenote: Under stress, it becomes ascetic and requires a mythology.]

To accept everything,