This may be subjective criticism, and it is always unfair to judge the burial-customs of other peoples without intimate knowledge of their origin and inner meaning. In one respect, however, it is certain enough that the Shadow of Death rests upon the land of Syria. That is Fatalism. We have all heard of the fatalism of the East; and strange stones have become familiar, of soldiers selling cartridges to their enemies, of villagers refusing to drain the swamp that was decimating them by its malaria, or even to desist from poisoning their own springs with foul water. “It is Allah!” ends all questioning and checks all energy. Yet the constant recurrence of living instances of fatalism shocks the traveller, however well he was prepared for them. A traveller asked a Mohammedan in Damascus what they had done to the workman who upset his brazier and burned the great mosque. “Oh nothing,” said he, “what should we do?” “I should have thought you might have killed him.” “No,” he replied; “in the West you say when such things happen, ‘It is the devil’; in the East we say, ‘It is God!’” Still more impressive was a conversation with one of the camp-servants during a long ride near Jezreel. He had told the pathetic story of his life--how they had lived comfortably till the father died, leaving no money; then came work, begun too early and with no providence and little hope of success, until it had come to be “eat, drink, sleep, then again, eat, drink, sleep--then die and sleep, no more eat nor drink.” The Syrian character of the present day has been well expressed on its negative side in three traits. These are, want of concentration, want of will-power, and an absolute want of the sense of sin. Of sin they literally do not understand the meaning, the substitute for conscience being a dread of the opinion of friends and of the public. They do not think about the problem of evil as in any sense a practical problem. “The Lord said unto Ahriman, I know why I have made thee, but thou knowest not”--that is their philosophy of the moral mystery of things. Conder sums up the situation in striking words: “Christian villages thrive and grow, while the Moslem ones fall into decay; and this difference, though due perhaps in part to the foreign protection which the native Christians enjoy, is yet unmistakably connected with the listlessness of those who believe that no exertions of their own can make them richer or better, that an iron destiny decides all things, without reference to any personal quality higher than that of submission to fate, and that God will help those who have lost the will to help themselves.”[46]