Go back not to the Mishna, and the Prophets; but to the barbarous Torah. Science and method are as demoded here as ethics. Blood and corporal anguish are obsessive symbols. Justice is a matter of plagues and trumpetings. Yet is God present. These old fathers would be abstract save for the dwelling in them of a universal principle, called Jehovah. It is He who moves these semi-savage tales. Hunger for a common experience which, being both true and beautiful, is divine, informs the acts of these men, directs their faltering passage. In the suicidal will of the Buddhist, in the Dionysian dance of the Greek, in the metaphysic of Paul or of Plotinus, dwells ever variant this single purpose: the will to fuse (though it be to fuse with loss) man’s personal act and his experience of the universal. This is religion. It is not in the religious mechanics of Mohammed. The Prophet invites Heraclius, emperor of Rome, to join or to acknowledge him. He is denied, of course. But Islam is a “carry-all.” It assimilates Mary and Jesus quite as it has garbled the Talmud. It places Mohammed at the top of an agglomeration unified by him from the whirling chaos of the east. Energy, thus drawn from a hundred confusions, thrusts in a hundred directions. * * * * * If classic Islam is not essentially a religion, it is an Idea. An Idea in motion. Its motion is horizontal; and its premiss of departure is success. The follower of the Prophet cannot lose. At the worst comes death: death in holy warfare means beatitude and houris. But Mohammed does not lean too heavily on so dim a guerdon. He has genius in the arts of diplomacy and war. He fights innumerable battles, and nearly always he wins. When he does lose, he turns defeat into a strategic triumph. In his first lean years as a Prophet, he has garnered a rare capital for a religious leader: that capital is material success. He loans out his prestige at a usurer’s rates. It is clear, soon enough, that to follow Mohammed means victory in arms, means booty, means fresh women. Health in Islam became a state of profitable war. From the mobile chaos of the desert was created this intent mobility of advance. Islam was a perpetual raid. Its health meant war: and war meant expedition, conquest, ultimate death. The contrary of war, of health, of Islam--was then the dwelling in the present life, and was Peace.