He cannot, in this life, go beyond that, and very few reach that exalted stage. Thus arose a "system of Pantheism, which represents joy and sorrow, good and evil, pleasure and pain as manifestations of one changeless essence." Religion, as made known by an outward revelation, is, to the few who reach this stage, a thing of the past. Even its restraints are not needed. The soul that is united to God can do no evil. The poet Khusrau says: "Love is the object of my worship, what need have I of Islam?" Death ensues and with it the last stage is reached. (8) It is Fana--extinction. The seeker after all his search, the traveller after all his wearisome journey passes behind the veil and finds--nothing! As the traveller proceeds from stage to stage, the restraints of an objective revelation and of an outward system are less and less heeded. "The {94} religion of the mystic consists in his immediate communication with God, and when once this has been established, the value of ecclesiastical forms, and of the historical part of religion, becomes doubtful." What law can bind the soul in union with God, what outward system impose any trammels on one who, in the "Ecstasy," has received from Him, who is the Truth, the direct revelation of His own glorious nature? Moral laws and ceremonial observances have only an allegorical signification. Creeds are but fetters cunningly devised to limit the flight of the soul; all that is objective in religion is a restraint to the reason of the initiated.[84] Pantheistic in creed, and too often Antinomian in practice, Sufiism possesses no regenerative power in Islam. "It is not a substantive religion such as shapes the life of races or of nations, it is a state of opinion." No Muslim State makes a national profession of Sufiism. In spite of all its dogmatic utterances, in spite of much that is sublime in its idea of the search after light and truth, Sufiism ends in utter negation of all separate existence. The pantheism of the Sufis, this esoteric doctrine of Islam, as a moral doctrine leads to the same conclusions as materialism, "the negation of human liberty, the indifference to actions and the legitimacy of all temporal enjoyments."