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Three friends: the Heart no fear shall know,

The sharp white Sword, the yellow Bow.

Zayd bin Ali boasts, like El-Mutanabbi:—

The wielded Sword-blade knows my hand,

The Spear obeys my lusty arm.

And Ziyád El-Ajam thus writes the epitaph of El-Mughayrah: ‘So died he, after having sought death between the spear-point and the Sword-edge.’

This ‘Pundonor’ presently extended westward. During the knightly ages the ‘good Sword’ of the Paladin and the Chevalier embodied a new faith—the Religion of Honour, the first step towards the religion of humanity. These men once more taught the sublime truth, the splendid doctrine known to the Stoics and the Pharisees, but unaccountably neglected in later creeds:—

Do good, for Good is good to do.

Their recklessness of all consequences soared worlds-high above the various egotistic systems which bribe man to do good for a personal and private consideration, to win the world, or to save his soul. Hence Aristotle blamed his contemporaries, the Spartans: ‘They are indeed good men, but they have not the supreme consummate excellence of loving all things worthy, decent and laudable, purely as such and for their own sakes; nor of practising virtue for no other motive but the sole love of her own innate beauty.’ The ‘everlasting Law of Honour binding on all and peculiar to each,’ would have thoroughly satisfied the Stagirite’s highest aspirations.