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.
Mohammed'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 imbedded 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 heartlife 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 wiredrawings, 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.
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