"Then pass the bowl, my comrades all,
And let the zider vlow."

For this song was caught up by happy men to express the worth
of truly worthy things, of brotherhood and garrulity, and the brief
and kindly leisure of the poor. Of course, the great part of
the more stolid reproaches directed against the Omarite morality
are as false and babyish as such reproaches usually are. One critic,
whose work I have read, had the incredible foolishness to call Omar
an atheist and a materialist. It is almost impossible for an Oriental
to be either; the East understands metaphysics too well for that.
Of course, the real objection which a philosophical Christian
would bring against the religion of Omar, is not that he gives
no place to God, it is that he gives too much place to God.
His is that terrible theism which can imagine nothing else but deity,
and which denies altogether the outlines of human personality
and human will.

"The ball no question makes of Ayes or Noes,
But Here or There as strikes the Player goes;
And He that tossed you down into the field,
He knows about it all--he knows--he knows."

A Christian thinker such as Augustine or Dante would object to this
because it ignores free-will, which is the valour and dignity of the soul.
The quarrel of the highest Christianity with this scepticism is
not in the least that the scepticism denies the existence of God;
it is that it denies the existence of man.