phantoms, they fill the earth with mourning, bloodshed, and misery; and at the end are farther off from the true object of man's existence than when they started upon their career. That object is to lose all consciousness of individual existence-to sink in the ocean of Divine Life, as a breaking bubble is merged into the stream on the surface of which it has for a moment arisen. For those who devote themselves to this end there is gradually created a new heaven and a new earth. The sorrowful things about them cease to give pain; and the beautiful become informed with a diviner beauty. The spread of this Pantheistic spirit has been and is the source of incalculable evil throughout the Muhammadan world. The true function of religion is to vivify and illuminate all the ordinary relations of life with light from a higher world. The weakness to which religious minds are peculiarly prone is to suppose that this world of working life is an atmosphere too gross and impure for them to live in. They crave for better bread than can be made from wheat. They attempt to fashion a world for themselves, where nothing shall soil the purity of the soul or disturb the serenity of their thoughts. The divorce thus effected between the religious life and the worldly life is disastrous to both. The ordinary relations of men become emptied of all Divine significance. They are considered as the symbols of bondage to the world or to an evil deity. The religious spirit dwindles down to a selfish desire to acquire a felicity from which the children of this world are hopelessly excluded. Pre eminently has this been the result of Muhammadan mysticism. It has dug a deep gulf between those who can know God and those who must wander in darkness, feeding upon the husks of rites and ceremonies. It has affirmed with emphasis that only by a complete renunciation of the world is it possible to attain the true end of man's existence. Thus all the best and purest natures-the men who might have put a soul in the decaying Church of Islam-have been drawn off from their proper task, to wander about in deserts and solitary places, or expend their lives in idle and profitless passivity, disguised under the title of "spiritual contemplation." But this has only been a part of the evil. The logical result of Pantheism is the destruction of a moral law. If God be all in all, and man's apparent individuality a delusion of the perceptive faculty, there exists no will which can act, no conscience which can reprove or applaud. The individual is but a momentary seeming; he comes and goes like "the snowflake on the river, a moment seen, then gone for ever." To reproach such an ephemeral creature for being the slave of its passions, is to chide the thistledown for yielding to the violence of the wind. Muhammadans have not been slow to discover these consequences. Thousands of reckless and profligate spirits have entered the Orders of the Durweshes, to enjoy the licence thereby obtained. Their affectation of piety is simply a cloak for the practice of sensuality; their emancipation from the ritual of Islam involves a liberation also from its moral restraints. And thus a movement, animated at its outset by a high and lofty purpose, has degenerated into a fruitful source of ill. The stream which ought to have expanded into a fertilising river has become a vast swamp, exhaling vapours charged with disease and death. IN "Islam under the Arabs," I have described the character attributed to the Koran by Muhammadan divines in the following passage:-" According to Muhammadan divines, the Koran is in itself the greatest of all miracles. In most cases, they say, miracles have not occurred at one and the same time with the revelations committed to the Prophet. They have been intended to confirm and bear witness to the revelations, and have in consequence been subsequent to the Divine message. But the Koran is a miracle and revelation in one." "It is otherwise with regard to the Pentateuch, the Evangel, and other Divine books; they are revelations received under the form of ideas. When the writers of these books returned from the ecstatic state to the normal human condition, they clothed the revelations they had received in their own language. And, consequently, in the style of these books there is nothing miraculous. But not so in the case of the Koran. The actual text of the Koran came to the Prophet through the ear, as is shown by the following, among other passages: 'Move not thy tongue in haste to follow and master this For we will see to the collecting and the recital of it; But when we have recited it, then follow thou the recital, "These verses were communicated to the Prophet to quiet the anxiety he manifested to fix by constant repetition the words of the Koran in his memory. There are many other like passages which clearly show that the Koran was made known to the Prophet under the form of a reading delivered in a high voice; and thus every line of the Koran is a miraculous revelation of Divine eloquence surpassing the power of men." (Pp. 291, 292.) The notion even, of theology, as a science, was of course wholly absent from the minds of the earliest followers of the Prophet. They, naturally enough, supposed there could be no disputes regarding the meaning of a revelation couched in the speech familiar to them all. Their primary anxiety was not to understand the Koran aright, but to repeat it with the correct pronunciation. How had the Archangel pronounced these words when reciting them to the Prophet? His pronunciation must, of necessity, be the manner in which Arabic was spoken in the presence of the Almighty; and, consequently, the type and exemplar according to which the Koran was to be recited. Now the only man who was acquainted with |