It may be áluddínRúmíquestioned that if the earthly object of Love was a mere passing shadow of God, the man who loved that object was equally insignificant. And again, how can God be the All-One when, according to the Súfí thesis, He divided Himself into creation? The part is not equal to the whole. These questions are easily answered. The stars shine in the sky, and on the bosom of the sea without diminution. Let the sea pass away, and the star-shadows pass away too; but the stars are still there. So when the world shall pass away it will only be the fading of innumerable shadows we call Humanity. God will still be there, and we shall still be there because we came alone from Him. There was a Voice that sounded in men and women, in mountains and in seas, in the beasts of the jungle and the swinging of the stars. It was the Voice of Love, the great beckoning in the Hereafter to which all things must go. That Voice to the Súfí was God calling His lovers into one chamber, one mighty love-feast. Jámí has expressed the finality of Love in the following lines:
Gaze, till Gazing out of Gazing Grew to BEING Her I gaze on, She and I no more, but in One Undivided Being blended. All that is not One must ever Suffer with the Wound of Absence; And whoever in Love's City Enters, finds but Room for One, And but in ONENESS Union.
The Rev. Professor W. R. Inge, in _Christian Mysticism_, has brought a good deal of adverse criticism to bear upon Súfíism. He remarks: "The Súfís, or Mohammedan Mystics, use erotic language very freely, and appear, like true Asiatics, to have attempted to give a sacramental or symbolic character to the indulgence of their passions." The same writer accuses Emerson of "playing with pantheistic Mysticism of the Oriental type," and goes on to compare him with the Persian Súfís on account of his self-deification. This critic, in his desire to defame the Súfís, states that they are among the most shocking and blasphemous of the mystics, because they believe that state is present with them even in their earthly life. This, however, is no teaching of the Súfís, and, rightly considered, we cannot even except the sayings of Bayázíd already referred to, because here he undoubtedly denies all claim to human personality, admitting God only. _Self_-deification is no teaching of the Súfís. As the Buddhist's belief in Nirvana was a state only to be reached by degrees, after much striving and severe discipline, so was the fusion of the Beloved and His lover a belief and a beautiful hope far out on the spiritual horizon. Hadj Khan, in his interesting book _With the Pilgrims to Mecca_, briefly touches upon this sect and mentions "seven stages" in the spiritual growth of the Súfí, and not an arrogant proclamation of Deity and man being coequal in the earthly existence. The gradually ascending scale of the Súfí's heaven is another point in favour of this argument. "For the love that thou would'st find demands the sacrifice of self to the end that the heart may be filled with the passion to stand within the Holy of Holies, in which alone the mysteries of the True Beloved can be revealed unto thee." The average Súfí was a poet. All that was beautiful was God to him. He tried to be nearer the Beautiful every day, and thus his soul swept on from flower to flower, higher and higher, until he was absorbed into the Divine.