THE Spirit of Avicenna: Great is Allah: even I, alas, could not deceive him. By every promise of faith and canon of the law, I should now find myself in The Paradise of the Prophet, reclining on silken cushions and sipping delicious sherbets; the fresh sweet sound of bubbling fountains should comfort me; I should be soothed by the scent of great sleeping flowers, their petals like amethysts and rubies and sapphires and liquid opals. I should be charmed by the sight of peacocks spreading their fans; and the nightingales in the thicket of ilex should sing to me like my own heart. Some tender young maid, wide-eyed and nimble as a gazelle, should be not far from me; her hair should be lightly touching my cheek; my hand should be wandering over her bosom. From the impregnable safety of my happiness I should be looking abroad through all the heavens and surveying the earth; the maxims of the wise should be on my lips and in my soul the joy of understanding. Walking upon the bastions of Paradise, my arm linked in that of a friend, of him that my soul trusts utterly, I should be repeating the words of the poets, and he in answer, without haste or error, should be composing for me tenderer and more beautiful verses of his own; and we should be marvelling and sighing together at the ineffable greatness of God and the teeming splendour of the earth. Yes, legally, I should have been saved. Was I not exactitude itself in every religious duty? Did I ever allow myself the least licence, on the ground that I was a philosopher, unless I had a text to justify me? Did I blasphemously lay my assurance of salvation in my own merits or in the letter of the law, rather than in the complacency of the Compassionate and the Merciful One, who having made us can forgive and understand? Ah, if ever Allah could be deceived, certainly I should have deceived him. But the Omniscient looked into my secret heart, and perceived that I was no believer, and that whilst my lips invoked his name and that of the Prophet,
Page:The Dial (Volume 76).djvu/320
