Page:Poems of Nature and Life.djvu/231

 THE RANDALL FAMILY 223

From Carlyle, on May 8, 1 840 : —

'"Allah akbar, God is great,' — and then also 'Islam,' That we must sicbmit to God. That our whole strength lies in resigned submission to Him, whatsoever He do to us. For this world, and for the other ! The thing he sends to us, were it death and worse than death, shall be good, shall be best ; we resign ourselves to God. — ' If this be Islam,' says Goethe, * do we not all live in Islam ? ' Yes, all of us that have any moral life ; we all live so. It has ever been held the highest wisdom for a man not merely to submit to Necessity, — Necessity will make him submit, — but to know and believe well that the stern thing which Necessity had ordered was the wisest, the best, the thing wanted there. To cease his frantic pretension of scanning this great God's- World in his small fraction of a brain ; to know that it /lad verily, though deep beyond his soundings, a Just Law, that the soul of it was Good ; — that his part in it was to conform to the Law of the Whole, and in devout silence follow that ; not questioning it, obey- ing it as unquestionable.

" I say, this is yet the only true morality known, . . . We are to take no counsel with flesh and blood ; give ear to no vain cavils, vain sorrows and wishes : to know that we know nothing ; that the worst and the cruelest to our eyes is not what it seems ; that we have to receive whatsoever befalls us as sent from God above, and say, It is good and wise, God is great ! ' Though He slay me, yet will I trust in Him.' Islam means in its way Denial of Self, Annihilation of Self. This is yet the highest Wisdom that Heaven has revealed to our Earth."

From Randall, probably about 1856, at the close of "The Metamorphoses of Longing" : —

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