History gives us innumerable proofs that such merely selfish
motives are the parents of slavish impotence, of pedantry and conceit,
of pious frauds, often of the most devilish cruelty: but, as far as my
reading extends, of nothing better. Moreover, the Christian Greeks had
much the same hopes on those points as the Mussulmans; and similar
causes should produce similar effects: but those hopes gave them no
strength. Besides, according to the Mussulmans' own account, this was
not their great inspiring idea; and it is absurd to consider the wild
battle-cries of a few imaginative youths, about black-eyed and green-
kerchiefed Houris calling to them from the skies, as representing the
average feelings of a generation of sober and self-restraining men, who
showed themselves actuated by far higher motives.
Another answer, and one very popular now, is that the Mussulmans were
strong, because they believed what they said; and the Greeks weak,
because they did not believe what they said. From this notion I shall
appeal to another doctrine of the very same men who put it forth, and
ask them, Can any man be strong by believing a lie? Have you not told
us, nobly enough, that every lie is by its nature rotten, doomed to
death, certain to prove its own impotence, and be shattered to atoms the
moment you try to use it, to bring it into rude actual contact with
fact, and Nature, and the eternal laws? Faith to be strong must be
faith in something which is not one's self; faith in something eternal,
something objective, something true, which would exist just as much
though we and all the world disbelieved it.
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