His curse is on all this, for it is unlike Himself. He will have
you righteous men, after the pattern of your forefather Abraham. Be
that, and arise, body, soul, and spirit, out of your savagery and
brutishness. Then you shall be able to trample under font the
profligate idolaters, to sweep the Greek tyrants from the land which
they have been oppressing for centuries, and to recover the East for its
rightful heirs, the children of Abraham." Was this not, in every sense,
a message from God? I must deny the philosophy of Clement and
Augustine, I must deny my own conscience, my own reason, I must outrage
my own moral sense, and confess that I have no immutable standard of
right, that I know no eternal source of right, if I deny it to have been
one; if I deny what seems to me the palpable historic fact, that those
wild Koreish had in them a reason and a conscience, which could awaken
to that message, and perceive its boundless beauty, its boundless
importance, and that they did accept that message, and lived by it in
proportion as they received it fully, such lives as no men in those
times, and few in after times, have been able to live. If I feel, as I
do feel, that Abubekr, Omar, Abu Obeidah, and Amrou, were better men
than I am, I must throw away all that Philo--all that a Higher
authority--has taught me: or I must attribute their lofty virtues to
the one source of all in man which is not selfishness, and fancy, and
fury, and blindness as of the beasts which perish.
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