Are we waking, then we are his heralds;
Are we weeping, then his clouds of wrath;
Are we laughing, flashes of his love.
Some among them carried their presumption to a practical extreme which did away with all distinction between good and evil. They declared the sins of the Sufi dearer to God than the obedience of other men, and his impiety more acceptable than their faith.[[200]]
Two extracts more will suffice to show the mode in which this pantheistic mysticism confounds, at its acme, the finite and the infinite. They are from Feridoddin Attar, who died in the second or third decade of the fourteenth century.—
Man, what thou art is hidden from thyself.
Know’st not that morning, mid-day, and the eve,
All are within thee? The ninth heaven art thou;
And from the spheres into this roar of time
Didst fall erewhile. Thou art the brush that painted