That all these
Idols and Formulas were nothing, miserable bits of wood; that there was
One God in and over all; and we must leave all idols, and look to Him.
That God is great; and that there is nothing else great! He is the
Reality. Wooden Idols are not real; He is real. He made us at first,
sustains us yet; we and all things are but the shadow of Him; a
transitory garment veiling the Eternal Splendor. "_Allah akbar_," God is
great;--and then also "_Islam_," that we must _submit_ to God. That our
whole strength lies in resigned submission to Him, whatsoever He do to
us. For this world, and for the other! The thing He sends to us, were it
death and worse than death, shall be good, shall be best; we resign
ourselves to God.--"If this be _Islam_," says Goethe, "do we not all
live in _Islam_?" Yes, all of us that have any moral life; we all live
so. It has ever been held the highest wisdom for a man not merely to
submit to Necessity,--Necessity will make him submit,--but to know and
believe well that the stern thing which Necessity had ordered was the
wisest, the best, the thing wanted there. To cease his frantic
pretension of scanning this great God's-World in his small fraction of a
brain; to know that it _had_ verily, though deep beyond his soundings, a
Just Law, that the soul of it was Good;--that his part in it was to
conform to the Law of the Whole, and in devout silence follow that; not
questioning it, obeying it as unquestionable.
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