hindrance and botheration. We are nothing, nothing: God is everything. God is the only reality. And in God alone is my refuge.
That is my story in brief. If I did not like you, I would not have told it, and so freely. Meditate upon it, and on the insignificance and evanescence of human life. The world is a snare, and a bad snare, at that. For it can not hold us long enough in it to learn to like it. It is a cobbler’s snare. The world is full of cobblers, O Khalid. Come away from it; be an ideal craftsman—be an extremist—be a purist—come live with me. Let us join our souls in devotion, and our hearts in love. Come, let us till and cultivate this vineyard together.’
“And taking me by the hand, he shows me a cell furnished with a hair-mat, a masnad (leaning pillow), and a chair.
‘This cell,’ says he, ‘was occupied by the Bishop when he came here for a spiritual exercise of three weeks. It shall be yours if you come; it’s the best cell in the Hermitage. Now, let us visit the chapel.’
I go in with him, and as we are coming out, I ask him childlike for a wafer. He brings the box straightway, begs me to take as much as I desire, and placing his hand on my shoulder, encircles me with one of his benignant glances, saying, ‘Allah illumine thy heart, O Khalid.’
‘Allah hear thy prayer,’ I reply. And we part in tears.”
Here Khalid bursts in ecstasy about the higher spiritual kingdom, and chops a little logic about the I and the not-I, the Reality and the non-Reality.—“God,” says the Hermit. “Thought,” says the Idealist, “that is the only Reality.” And what is Thought, and what is God, and what is Matter, and what is Spirit? They are the mysterious vessels of Life, which are always being filled by Love and emptied by Logic. “The external world,” says the Materialist—“Does not exist,” says the Idealist. “ ’Tis immaterial if it does or not,” says the Hermit. And what if the three are