Short forms, composed of as few ideas as a piece of granite is of ingredients, and as inelastic and inexpansive, and those forms incessantly repeated, could not affect us in the way of prayer; but they mightily affect the Oriental. They are both the frame in which his mind and life are set, and the spring upon which they are wound up. In short, and in truth, these ideas are the seminal germs which fecundate, legitimately, the moral capabilities of his nature, which, if unquickened by their contact, either will become aborted; or, by having been brought into contact with other illegitimate ideas, will give birth to abnormal, and more or less pernicious developments. CHAPTER XXXVIII. PILGRIMAGE. He hath forsaken his wife and children, and betaken himself to a pilgrim’s life.—BUNYAN’S _Pilgrim’s Progress_. The pilgrimage to Meccah occupies a large place in the thoughts, and is the great event in the life of every true believer; and where the faith is so elementary, so much reduced to the very simplest expression of belief, all are believers. The great event of the year at Cairo, is the return of the caravan of pilgrims from Meccah. The whole city is moved. Many go out to welcome back the happy saints. At no other time are men, or women, so demonstrative. In these days, no Christian people, except the lower classes in Russia, have the ideas which produce these emotions. No others are, speaking of the bulk of the people generally, in the pilgrim condition of mind. There was, however, a time when, in this matter, we were all alike. The pilgrim staff and shell were then as common, and as much valued, in England as elsewhere. We now ask how these ideas came to exist in men’s minds? An equally pertinent question is how they became extinct? The answer to either will be the answer to both. A little vivisection, which may be practised on the mind of the modern Arab, will reveal to us the secret. On dissecting it we find that it is in that state in which the distinction between things moral and spiritual on the one side, and things physical on the other, has not yet been made. These two classes of ideas are in his mind in a state of intimate fluid commixture. There is a vast difference here between the mind of the Arab and that of the European, excepting of course from the latter a large part of the Greek communion, and some small fractions of the most behindhand of the Latin. With us these two classes of ideas have become disentangled, and have separated themselves from each other. Each has crystallized into its own proper form, and retired into its own proper domain. Hence it is that the idea of the value of pilgrimages still holds its ground amongst them, but has disappeared from amongst us.