Machine summary:
And since it astonished me to find such sincere· faith established in the hearts of the people of a city to whom no Prophet had been sent nor Book revealed; when prayer was over I turned and addressed the head of the household, saying to him, " It is evident that you worship ; but whom ?" " We worship God," he replied, '' creator of this universe and its sustainer.
" · At this I began to think of those learned theologians of ours who spend their lives over the niceties of ritual purity, who discuss the degrees of pollution involved by women's periods and irregularities and by men's clear and turbid secretions, and distinguish between a greater pollu• tion and a lesser ; and I thought of the philosophers who make their eyes bloodshot sitting up all night over the question of the essentiality or non-essentiality of qualities, and over atoms and accidents, over originated things and pre-existent, and over the closed circle of circumstance and the endless chain of cause and effect ; and I thought of the self-appointed mystics who set their private fantasy above God and controvert Hislaws, forbidding what He allows and allowing what He forbids ; and I said to myself, " Would God those erudite doctors understood the meaning and purpose of religion as well as these simple people whose tongue boggles at the commonplaces of theology and who, if you spoke to them of dogma, would suppose you meant some kind of a dog.