In another place, speaking of the importance of controlling the tongue because of the general sensitiveness of human nature, he says:—
In each human spirit is a Christ concealed, To be helped or hindered, to be hurt or healed; If from any human soul you lift the veil You will find a Christ there hidden without fail; Woe, then, to blind tyrants whose vindictive ire, Venting words of fury, sets the world on fire.
But though he speaks with reverence of Christ, he shares the common Mohammedan animus against St. Paul. As a matter of fact St. Paul is rarely mentioned in Mohammedan writings, but Jalaluddin spent most of his life at Iconium, where, probably, owing to the tenacity of Oriental tradition, traces of St. Paul's teaching lingered. In the first book of the Masnavi a curious story is told of an early corrupter of Christianity who wrote letters containing contradictory doctrines to the various leaders of their Church, and brought the religion into confusion. In this case Jalaluddin seems to have neglected the importance of distinguishing between second-hand opinion and first-hand knowledge, on which he elsewhere lays stress:—
Knowledge hath two wings, Opinion hath but one, And opinion soon fails in its orphan flight; The bird with one wing soon droops its head and falls, But give it two wings and it gains its desire. The bird of Opinion flies, rising and falling, On its wing in vain hope of its rest; But when it escapes from Opinion and Knowledge receives it, It gains its two wings and spreads them wide to heaven; On its two wings it flies like Gabriel Without doubt or conjecture, and without speech or voice. Though the whole world should shout beneath it, 'Thou art in the road to God and the perfect faith,' It would not become warmer at their speech, And its lonely soul would not mate with theirs; And though they should shout to it, 'Thou hast lost thy way; And thinkest thyself a mountain and art but a leaf,' It would not lose its convictions from their censure, Nor vex its bosom with their loud reproof; And though sea and land should join in concert, Exclaiming, 'O wanderer, thou hast lost thy road!' Not an atom of doubt would fall into its soul, Nor a shade of sorrow at the scorner's scorn. (Professor Cowell's translation.)
Like all quietists, Jalaluddin dwells on the importance of keeping the mind unclouded by anger and resentment, as in the following little parable:—
One day a lion, looking down a well, Saw what appeared to him a miracle, Another lion's face that upward glared As if the first to try his strength he dared. Furious, the lion took a sudden leap And o'er him closed the placid waters deep. Thou who dost blame injustice in mankind, 'Tis but the image of thine own dark mind; In them reflected clear thy nature is With all its angles and obliquities. Around thyself thyself the noose hast thrown, Like that mad beast precipitate and prone; Face answereth to face, and heart to heart, As in the well that lion's counterpart. 'Back to each other we reflections throw,' So spake Arabia's Prophet long ago; And he, who views men through self's murky glass, Proclaims himself no lion, but an ass.
As Ghazzali had done before him, Jalaluddin sees in the phenomena of sleep a picture of the state of mind which should be cultivated by the true Sufi, "dead to this world and alive to God":—
Every night, O God, from the net of the body Thou releasest our souls and makest them like blank tablets; Every night thou releasest them from their cages And settest them free: none is master or slave. At night the prisoners forget their prisons, At night the monarchs forget their wealth: No sorrow, no care, no profit, no loss, No thought or fear of this man or that. Such is the state of the Sufi in this world, Like the seven sleepers[58] he sleeps open-eyed, Dead to worldly affairs, day and night, Like a pen held in the hand of his Lord.—(Professor Cowell.)