But there is another cause of the failure of Islamism, more intimately
connected with those metaphysical questions which we have been hitherto
principally considering.
Among the first Mussulmans, as I have said, there was generally the most
intense belief in each man that he was personally under a divine guide
and teacher. But their creed contained nothing which could keep up that
belief in the minds of succeeding generations. They had destroyed the
good with the evil, and they paid the penalty of their undistinguishing
wrath. In sweeping away the idolatries and fetish worships of the
Syrian Catholics, the Mussulmans had swept away also that doctrine which
alone can deliver men from idolatry and fetish worships--if not outward
and material ones, yet the still more subtle, and therefore more
dangerous idolatries of the intellect. For they had swept away the
belief in the Logos; in a divine teacher of every human soul, who was,
in some mysterious way, the pattern and antitype of human virtue and
wisdom. And more, they had swept away that belief in the incarnation of
the Logos, which alone can make man feel that his divine teacher is one
who can enter into the human duties, sorrows, doubts, of each human
spirit.
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