wretched selves, but on all around you. It is our common concern, and if you will not submit, in tbe name of our Master we will compel you.'
Any fanatic, it will be said, might use the same language. Is not history full of instances of dreamers or impostors, 'boasting themselves to be somebody,' who for some wild illusion, or for their own ambition, have thrown the world into convulsions? Is not Mahomet himself a signal — the most signal — illustration of it? I should say rather that when men have risen in arms for a false cause the event has proved it by the cause coming to nothing. The world is not so constituted that courage, and strength, and endurance, and organisation, and success long sustained are to be obtained in the service of falsehood. If I could think that, I should lose the most convincing reason for believing that we are governed by a moral power. The moral laws of our being execute themselves through the instrumentality of men ; and in those great movements which determine the moral condition of many nations through many centuries, the stronger side, it seems to me, has uniformly been the better side, and stronger because it has been better.
I am not upholding Mahomet as if he had been a perfect man, or the Koran as a second Bible. The crescent was no sun, nor even a complete moon reigning full-orbed in the night heaven. The light there was in it was but reflected from the sacred books of the Jews and the Arab traditions. The morality of it was defective. The detailed conception of man's duties inferior, far inferior, to what
