by opposing causes of another order. Shall it be deemed utterly incredible that the very same regions which heretofore have poured their ruinous torrents over southern Europe and Asia, may again do so? Must it not be admitted as more than barely possible, that the decay of the commercial and military greatness of England and France-the only European nations that now efficiently sustain the civilization of the world, would, were it to take place, quickly be followed by a Scythian inundation, such as would leave (in this hemisphere at least) hardly a vestige of intelligence and none of liberty?

Now certainly in this sense it must not be affirmed that the Saracenic conquests were only natural expansions of a superabundant power; for an eruption from the same quarter has happened but once in the history of the world; nor does it appear that it would have happened at all apart from the religious impulse whence actually it sprang. Had not the Merchant of Mecca penetrated the seventh heaven, and brought down thence a spark which set the ambition of Arabian bosoms in a blaze, the very name of Saracen-with all the splendours that surround it, had hardly found a place on the page of history. Without Mohammed the Bedoween horsemen had probably continued, age after age, to sweep their native deserts—a terror only to traders and pilgrims.

This being admitted, and while it is fully

granted that the motive generated by the new religion was the proper incentive of Mohammedan warfare-the support of its fortitude, the spring of its courage, and the reason of its success; it is nevertheless true that a race so prince-like and so bold as that which occupied the Arabian wilderness, when once put in movement, and made to feel its actual and its relative strength, would necessarily conquer as it did conquer, and spread itself abroad where nothing existed that could match its force. The countries to the north, to the east, and to the west, lay as a rich inheritance of which the actual possessors had lost their title by extreme degeneracy, and which seemed to ask to be seized upon by men worthy to enjoy it. The Saracenic conquests, as we assume (though not in the same sense as those of the northern barbarians) partook of a physical quality, and if in the main, conquests of proselytism, were also the natural out-bursts of national energy over a surface which superstition and luxury had already, and long before vanquished.

But leaving this ground, there is good room to inquire whether the project of bringing or of driving the much corrupted nations by force and terror into the path of truth, might not, to an ardent spirit, seem in the age of Mohammed both lawful and noble.

Possessed of the first elements of theology (who shall say in what manner obtained?) and standing

in the position which he occupied, surrounded at hand by polytheism, and, more remotely, by the ruins of three fallen religious systems, was it strange that Mohammed should have deemed the sword an instrument of necessary severity, and the only instrument which could be trusted to for efficaciously reforming the world? In listening to the apology' which the Prophet himself offers for the use of arms as a means of conversion, the belief at least is suggested that he had mused in a comprehensive manner upon the religious history and the actual state of mankind, and had deliberately come to the persuasion that the interests of the True God in this benighted world were utterly hopeless, unless at length they might be promoted and restored by the terrors of war.2 Mohammed

It is by no means always easy (especially through the medium of a translation) to follow the chain of the Prophet's reasonings or meditations; and the difficulty is increased by that ambiguity under which, from evident motives of policy, he skreened his real meaning when he had to speak of the Jewish and Christian economies, the votaries of which he aimed if possible to conciliate. Notwithstanding these obscurities, some such mode of thinking as that assumed above for Mohammed, makes itself dimly apparent in many passages of the Koran; among others, the 42d and the four following chapters may be referred to. An under-tone of apology, in which, without compromising his authority as the apostle of God, he excuses his measures as founder of a religion, runs through the rambling incoherencies of Mohammed.

2

"And if God did not repel the violence of some men by others, verily monasteries, and churches, and synagogues, and the temples of the Moslems, wherein the name of God is frequently commemorated, would be utterly demolished. And God will certainly assist him who shall be on his side: for God is strong and mighty."Koran, chap. 22.

perhaps had convinced himself that so worthy and holy a purpose would well excuse any means that might bring it about. Christian doctors have entertained the same principle, and have made a worse use of it; for assuredly we must hold the fabrication of miracles to be a worse immorality than the use of force employed because the pretension to miracles was scorned: and again, are not the judicial murders perpetrated by Spiritual despots more horrid than the open carnage of the field?

Looking round upon the world, such as it was in the seventh century, what appeared to have been the result of the several successive endeavours to reclaim the nations from their inveterate superstitions, and their idolatries? Not to insist upon the then decayed state of the religion of Zoroaster, Mohammed saw his countrymen, as well as many of the more luxurious people of Asia, deep sunk in the follies of polytheism. And some of these nations had fallen back far from the position they once occupied.3—

-The theology and institutions of Moses, after struggling to exist on a single and narrow spot through a long course of ages, were then to be discerned only here and there in fragments, scattered over the world, like the broken

3 "Say, Go through the earth, and see what hath been the end of those who have been before you; the greater part of them were idolaters."-Koran, chap. 30.

embellishments and gilded carvings of a sumptuous palace, which some lawless rout has overthrown and pillaged-strewing the earth with shining atoms of the spoil. Did it indeed then appear as if Jehovah, the God of Abraham, had any purpose in reserve for converting the world by the agency of the Jewish people? Rather it seemed that the obdurate and infatuated race was, in every religious sense, thrown aside and forgotten as a broken instrument.1

-Even a mind much more enlightened than that of Mohammed (as we are accustomed to think of him) might, while looking at christendom in the seventh century, have come to the conclusion that the fate of the religion of Christ, after an experiment on a large scale, carried on through six hundred years, forbade it to be any longer hoped that the mild means of mere instruction would permanently avail to support truth in the world. A pure theology and a pure morality, sanctioned by miracles, had, as a system, apparently spent itself;had become worse than impotent; had covered the territories of ancient civilization with the noxious growth of superstition, so that idolatries-more degrading than the ancient polytheism, because men not divinities were the objects of it, had taken full possession as well

• "The likeness of those who were charged with the observance of the law (the Jews) and then observed it not, is as the likeness of an ass laden with books."-Koran, chap. 62.