"I don't know," Michael said. "It isn't fair to judge—the Western mind can't. Their ideas are beautiful and in obeying the laws laid down by the Koran they do beautiful and kindly acts; at the same time, their minds to us seem terribly polluted. Their religion doesn't appear to elevate their general aims or thoughts of life."
"But isn't it the same with the greater portion of Christians, with many of what we call religious people?" Millicent laughed. "I know it is with myself, Mike. I go to church and say my prayers and I think I believe in all the tenets of the Church and in the Bible—at least, I'd be frightened to not believe—and yet it doesn't make me feel a bit better. I don't really want to be good. I want to eat my cake on this earth and have it in heaven as well. All the nicest plums with you, Mike!"
Michael laughed. Millicent was always so frank upon the subject of her own worthlessness.
"We don't know what these people would be like if they had no Koran to curb them," Millicent said. "It may do more than you think. It's a strong bearing-rein."
"That's true. The Egyptians are, I suppose, about the most sensual of all Easterns—the women are considered so, at any rate, by Lane, and he knew them intimately."
Millicent laughed. "I'm sure they are, speaking generally—that's to say, I suppose you meet exceptions here and there, as in all other countries."
"The Prophet had his work cut out," Michael said. "And the world doesn't give him half the credit he deserves. The rules he laid down in the Koran are the only laws a Moslem really observes or reverences. His own soul teaches him nothing; it has been buried far too long by the laws imposed upon it; his superman is non-existent. The natural man blindly obeys the Prophet's teachings in the hope of the material rewards which will be his when he dies. The future life has always meant a great deal to the Egyptian peoples; their existence on earth has since time immemorial only been looked upon as an apprenticeship for the fuller existence. The very fact that their earthly homes, even the Pharaoh's palaces, were only built of sun-baked bricks made of mud, shows that they carried out in practice the saying in the Bible about having no abiding cities here. Their tombs were their lasting cities and they were built to endure throughout all eternity."
"Anyhow, they are delightfully picturesque people in their devotions," Millicent said. "I feel almost as pious when I watch a Moslem praying before sunset as I do when a boy's voice is reaching up to heaven in one of our Gothic cathedrals at home. I think I'm at my best then, Mike, only no one is ever present to test me."
Michael knew exactly what Millicent meant. The emotional side of religion excited her senses. She imagined, when she was listening to a boy's treble soaring up into the lofty heights of an English minster, that her soul was soaring with it, that she was deriving spiritual benefit from the service. He could picture her kneeling with folded hands, the polished nails conspicuously bright, and eyes upraised, listening to the boy's clear, pure voice, her whole being in a satisfied sensuous ecstasy.
He knew that this state of ecstasy was about as far as Millicent's religion ever carried her. She was afraid to give up the flesh-pots of this world in case she found life without them too dull to be supportable. She enjoyed her state of being so thoroughly that she had no wish to change it. Her religion and church-going were, she considered, sufficient to ensure her a place in heaven. It was her way of paying her future-life insurance policy, as were her many liberal gifts to charities.