God-whether Jews or Christians, might purchase by tribute the liberty to go unhurt and at leisure on their own path to perdition. 10 So long as the doctrine of the Divine Unity were but acknowledged, errors of profession were tolerated; and if the tribute laid upon conscience was heavy, it did not exceed the measure customary with Asiatic conquerors. The lenity thus shewn by Mohammed to the followers of Moses and of Christ, places his conduct in contrast with that of most zealots, whose rule has been to spend their indulgence upon whoever stood most remote in faith from their standard; while all the stress of their inexorable spite was made to press upon the sectarists of the next shade. Let the Arabian prophet be called Heresiarch and Impostor;yes, but a Reformer too. He kindled from side to side of the eastern world an extraordinary abhorrence of idol worship, and actually cleansed the plains of Asia from the long settled impurities of polytheism. Did he overthrow Christianity in Syria, in Africa, in Spain? - no, Superstition only; for Christianity had died away from those countries long before.

A respect for man, for nature-for God, a respect not characteristic of the frenzied zealot, was shewn in the injunction so strictly laid upon the Moslem armies-Not to destroy the

fruits of the earth-not to disturb the labours of the husbandman-not to cut down the grateful palm or the olive-not to poison or to stop the wells-to spare the old and the youngthe mother and her babes, and in a word, to abridge war, as far as might be done, of its horrors. In reading these military orders, and in following the march of the caliphs who received them, it is impossible to exclude from the mind the recollection of wars waged by Christian-most Christian kings, not against distant and equal foes, but upon their own unoffending and helpless subjects-wars which left nothing behind them but smoking ruins and a blood-sodden wilderness. Call Mohammed fanatic or impostor; but language wants term-or if it might afford one, the rule of Christian propriety forbids it to be used, which should fitly designate the Philips, the Ferdinands, the Louises of our modern European nistory.

The Caliphs possessed an incalculable advantage, as compared (for example) with the Leaders of the Crusades, in not being the tools or agents of a sacerdotal class; but in uniting in their single persons every office that naturally commands the submission of mankind. The combination of the regal or patriarchal, the military, and the sacred functions, in one office, whatever inconveniences it may have entailed, yet served to attemper and

to invigorate each. The same venerated personage-now calmly administering justice as civil chief-now fired with valour and at the head of armies; and now-strange spectacle, in the pulpit, enforcing the principles and duties of religion, would be likely, in recollection of his alternate characters, to exercise the first office with at once a religious impartiality and a martial firmness-the second with humanity, and the third with a liberality of feeling larger than belongs to the mere ecclesiastic, and borrowed from the sentiments proper to the king and the captain. At the same time the people would be apt to look-to their civil Chief with a religious affection, to their General with the confidence of faith, and to their Teacher as to one whose words carried all the authority which Heaven and earth together can confer.

If Christianity be not answerable, as certainly it is not, for the arrogance and the crimes of princes and prelates bearing Christian titles; so neither should we call in question the religious system of Mohammed on account of the horrors and devastations that attended the Tartar conquests of a later period. This rule of equity kept in view, we have to look simply to the Koran and to the general conduct of its early promulgators.

-And after every due extenuation has been admitted, nothing can be said but that the martial zeal of the Moslem was an egregious

fanaticism.

The rise and the characteristics of this vehement impulse is a proper object of curiosity.

In not generating a pure and universal philanthropy Mohammedism was not worse than other false religions;--and in this respect it was not better. Notwithstanding its just praise of teaching, and teaching with much clearness and energy, the great and first principle of Theology, it quite failed of producing that unrestrained good-will to man which is the natural consequence of love to God. To profess to love God, while on any pretext we entertain a rancorous contempt of our fellow men, is the most enormous of all inconsistencies. No ingenuity of the theologian can make it seem reasonable that those, however depraved in faith or manners, toward whom the Universal Parent, as Creator and Preserver, is shewing kindness, and whom He loads daily with his benefits, should be regarded by the true worshippers of God with a bitterness which God himself does not display. Men who like ourselves are inhaling the vital air-are enjoying animal existence are receiving nourishment from food-are sleeping and are waking refreshed from their beds, such, whatever may be their errors or their crimes, are manifestly not yet shut out from the pale of the Divine Indulgence:-GOD has not yet cursed them:-how then can we dare anticipate His wrath? The

feeling that would prompt us so to do, or the dogmas that would justify such a feeling, must be hideously false and wrong. Yet this capital flaw attached from the first to the religion of the Prophet.

A knowledge of God is found to avail little apart from a knowledge of ourselves, and unless some genuine emotions of contrition have broken down the pride of the heart, the abstract truth of the Divine Unity and perfections seems only to inflame our arrogance, and to prepare us to be inexorable and cruel. So it was in the system of Mohammed; it had no true philanthropy, because it had no humiliation, no tenderness and penitence-no method of propitiation."

The Koran does indeed teach and inspire a profound reverence toward God; and it has actually produced among its adherents in an eminent degree, that prostration of the soul in the presence of the Supreme Being which becomes all rational creatures. But at this point

"The phrase "God will favour the true believers and forgive their sins," very often occurs in the Koran. But the doctrine of pardon, and the feelings connected with it, are nowhere expanded or defined, Final salvation turns entirely upon personal merit; see chap. 23. At the last day, "they whose balances shall be heavy with good works, shall be happy: but they whose balances shall be light, are those who shall lose their souls, and shall remain in hell for ever." Repentance, in the sense of the Koran, means turning from idolatry to the true faith, see chap. 9. Or if, as in chap. 4, the word be used in a broader sense, yet is the range allowed to contrition very limited. Nothing like a system of propitiation is contained in Mohammed's theology.