What contrast to the Jew in these brother Semites! Their mobility of steel to the chemic mobility of Judah! The Idea of Islam has indeed for matrix the unrest, physical and spiritual, of the Roman world. Peoples stirred, because the great People were broken. The interior displacement acted like suction on the peripheries of Rome. Dreams of power, opiate creeds went through the windy world, creating new currents, creating and moving new masses. Araby was drawn, so: and awoke. But this Idea of the Arab could not have lived so well within the womb of the world had it been alien to the Arab soul. In the Arab, as in all desert people, worked the impulse of expansion. Here Arab and Jew are one. Who has seen the desert understands: this indomitable urge born of the sand-sea, to be moving, to pass horizons, to be moving forever. The desert impulse in the Hebrew was sublimated. Not his body, but his god should pass horizons! When the Jews’ body migrated, Jehovah became static. Only when the body took deep roots--in Palestine, in Spain, in the Talmud at worst (in America perhaps tomorrow)--could the transfigured Jewish God pass the horizons. But the balance held: as the Jews’ spirit spread, their body remained an atom. With the Arabs, it was the body that expanded. Before the Prophet, it had expanded impotently in civil conflict. Mohammed brought this energy to order. But even he knew of no principle of expansion higher than the raid and the empire. Arabia expanded. Persia, Abyssinia, India, Egypt, the Sahara, Spain became parts of Islam that was Araby in motion. The Jew discovered that to spread in the spirit was to be immobile in the life. Not so the Arab. The Jew learned that only an unmoving and an unmoved God could pass horizons. But in Islam, to expand still meant to move. The law of balance between inner and outer energy was not transcended. The Idea of Islam became all body: all moving, conquering body. Here went the Moslem energy. The energy that dwelt in that hid precinct of creative thought was sapped to a low ebb. In the person of Mohammed, there was energy both for conquest and for the subtler dominance of law and wisdom. He elected that the ideas, the forms, the rituals, the experience, and truth which he created should suffice for all time for his peoples. All their powers might hence be transformed into the stupendous business of outward conquest.