St. Martin and St. Patrick, St. Columba and St. Augustine were teaching or had taught in Western Europe. Mahometanism rapidly degenerated. The first
caliphs stood far above Saladin. The descent from Saladin to a modern Moslem despot is like a fall over a precipice. All established things, nations, constitutions, all established things which have life in them, have also the seeds of death. They grow, they have their day of usefulness, they decay and pass away, 'lest one good custom should corrupt the world.'
But the light which there was in the Moslem creed was real. It taught the omnipotence and omnipresence of one eternal Spirit, the Maker and Euler of all things, by whose everlasting purpose all things were, and whose will all things must obey ; and this central truth, to which later experience and broader knowledge can add nothing, it has taught so clearly and so simply that in Islam there has been no room for heresy, and scarcely for schism.
The Koran has been accused of countenancing sensual vice. Eather it bridled and brought within limits a sensuality which before was unbounded. It forbade and has absolutely extinguished, wherever Islam is professed, the bestial drunkenness which is the disgrace of our Christian English and Scottish towns. Even now, after centuries of decay, the Mussulman probably governs his life by the Koran more accurately than most Christians obey the Sermon on the Mount or the Ten Commandments. In our own India, where the Moslem creed retains its relative superiority to the superstitions of the native
