The strength of belief
comes from that which is believed in; if you separate it from that, it
becomes a mere self-opinion, a sensation of positiveness; and what sort
of strength that will give, history will tell us in the tragedies of the
Jews who opposed Titus, of the rabble who followed Walter the Penniless
to the Crusades, of the Munster Anabaptists, and many another sad page
of human folly. It may give the fury of idiots; not the deliberate
might of valiant men. Let us pass this by, then; believing that faith
can only give strength where it is faith in something true and right:
and go on to another answer almost as popular as the last.
We are told that the might of Islam lay in a certain innate force and
savage virtue of the Arab character. If we have discovered this in the
followers of Mohammed, they certainly had not discovered it in
themselves. They spoke of themselves, rightly or wrongly, as men who
had received a divine light, and that light a moral light, to teach them
to love that which was good, and refuse that which was evil; and to that
divine light they stedfastly and honestly attributed every right action
of their lives. Most noble and affecting, in my eyes, is that answer of
Saad's aged envoy to Yezdegird, king of Persia, when he reproached him
with the past savagery and poverty of the Arabs.
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