The Equinox (Volume I, Number X)

THE KEY OF THE MYSTERIES glory of having proclaimed the unity of God among the idolatrous Arabs. There are pure and sublime pages in the Qur'an. In reading those pages, one may say with the children of Ishmael, “There is no other God but God, and Mohammed is his prophet.” There are three thrones in heaven for the three prophets of the nations; but, at the end of time, Mohammed will be replaced by Elias. The Mussulmans do not reproach the Christians; they insult them. They call them infidels and “giaours,” that is to say, dogs. We have nothing to reply to them. One must not refute the Turks and the Arabs; one must instruct and civilize them. Remain dissident Christians, that is to say, those who, having broken the bond of unity, declare themselves strangers to the charity of the Church. Greek orthodoxy, that twin of the Roman Church which has not grown greater since its separation, which counts no longer in religion, which, since Photius, has not inspired a single eloquence, is a church become entirely temporal, whose priesthood is no more than a function regulated by the imperial policy of the Tsar of All the Russias; a curious mummy of the primitive Church, still coloured and gilded with all its legends and all its rites, which its popes no longer understand; the shadow of a living church, but one which insisted on stopping when that church moved on, and which is now no more than its bloated-out and headless silhouette. Then, the Protestants, those eternal regulators of anarchy, 85