reward for mere belief, and a penalty for simple unbelief;
rewards and punishments being, by the way, very disproportionate.
Thus they reduce everything to the scale of a somewhat unrefined
egotism; and their demoralizing effects become clearer to every
progressive age.

Haji Abdu seeks Truth only, truth as far as man, in the present
phase of his development, is able to comprehend it. He disdains
to associate utility, like Bacon (Nov. Org. I. Aph. 124), the
High Priest of the English Creed, _le gros bon sens_, with the
_lumen siccum ac purum notionum verarum_. He seems to see the
injury inflicted upon the sum of thought by the _a posteriori_
superstition, the worship of "facts," and the deification of
synthesis. Lastly, came the reckless way in which Locke "freed
philosophy from the incubus of innate ideas." Like Luther and the
leaders of the great French Revolution, he broke with the Past;
and he threw overboard the whole cargo of human tradition. The
result has been an immense movement of the mind which we love to
call Progress, when it has often been retrograde; together with a
mighty development of egotism resulting from the pampered
sentiment of personality.

The Haji regrets the excessive importance attached to a possible
future state: he looks upon this as a psychical stimulant, a day
dream, whose revulsion and reaction disorder waking life. The
condition may appear humble and prosaic to those exalted by the
fumes of Fancy, by a spiritual dram-drinking, which, like the
physical, is the pursuit of an ideal happiness. But he is too
wise to affirm or to deny the existence of another world. For
life beyond the grave there is no consensus of mankind, no