Page:Future of England - Peel.djvu/207

Rh of the sky spiritual, wrapt in the snows of eternal thought.

Under the cold disapproving eyes of all these votaries, it is a stiff task for us to wean men to calico and cutlery, and the whole programme of the flesh. For the Mohammedan, in spite of his Aligarh college, cannot easily forget the dictum of Omar that all that agrees with the Koran is superfluous, and all that differs from it is error. The Hindus, though divided so much, yet agree in viewing all things as a curtain ever tremulous with breaths from the unseen. For them, in the phrase of the Adonais, life does no more than to stain the white radiance of eternity. Last of all, the Buddhists remember how the Master said that they should be free from the passions which, like a net, encompass men; and how he wrought out the great Renunciation; and how he straitly charged them to overcome this world's "thirst," by aid of the four Meditations, and the five moral Powers, and the seven kinds of Wisdom, and the noble eightfold Path; and how, dying, he enjoined them to go in that way for ever, of which the gate is purity, and its goal is love.

Yet, even so, in this interminable exhaustless East, into the mazes of which we have somehow stumbled, we have to turn another corner still. After all, the Moslem, in spite of his fatalism, can cry out when he is hurt like other people. The Hindu himself is growing as fond of money as the denizens of Park Lane or Capel Court, can