My many years of intimate and sympathetic contact with the more varied, more intelligent life of the West has not tended in the least to lessen my reverence for religion nor to lower my regard for culture. Culture gives strength and symmetry to religious thought, and religion gives life and beauty to culture. And just as I believe that men should pray without ceasing, so also do I believe that they should strive to make their religious faith ever more free and more intelligent.
Yet the history of the Orient compels me to believe that the soil out of which scriptures spring is that whose life is the active sympathy of religion, regardless of the degree of acquired knowledge. When the depths of human nature are thoroughly saturated with this sympathy, then it is prepared both to receive and to give those thoughts of which scriptures are made. Industry and commerce have their good uses. But an industrial and { 86} commercialistic atmosphere is not conducive to the production of sacred books. Where the chief interests of life center in external things, religion is bound to become only one and perhaps a minor concern in life.
The Oriental has always lived in a world of spiritual mysteries. Fearful or confident, superstitious or rational, to him God has been all and in all. "The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether. In keeping of them there is great reward."[4] The son of the East has been richly rewarded. He is the religious teacher of all mankind. Through him all scriptures have come into being. All the great, living religions of the world originated in Asia; and the three greatest of them--Judaism, Christianity, and Mohammedanism--have come into the world through the Semitic race in that little country called Syria. The perpetual yearning of the Oriental for spiritual dreams and visions has had its rewards. He sowed bountifully, he reaped bountifully.
Note the Syrian's daily language: it is essentially Biblical. He has no _secular_ language. The only real break between his scriptures and the vocabulary of his daily life is that which exists between the classical and the vernacular. When you ask a Syrian about his business he will not answer, "We are doing well at present," but "_Allah mûn 'aim_" (God is giving bounteously). To one starting on a journey the phrase is not "Take good care of yourself," but "Go, in the keeping and protection of God." By example and precept we were trained from infancy in this manner of speech. Coming into a house, the visitor salutes by saying, "God grant you good morning," or "The peace of God come upon you." So it is written in the tenth chapter of Matthew, "And as ye enter into the house, salute it. And if the house be worthy, let your peace come upon it; but if it be not worthy, let your peace return unto you."