give a word to Moses to be translated by St. Paul into a meaning that annuls it, can give a word to Mahomet, that may be evaporated like water in sunshine, without refuting the truth of the original. It is not in character with the highest order of teaching to strain at the facts of historical record, like a pedagogical critic. It is the principles only of the facts that it consecrates; and fables or parables are often for these more serviceable than history. The greatest of Teachers preferred them to history, for they are more dramatic, simpler in form and quicker in coming to their end, and better adapted for popular comprehension. He was not a critic of style and grammar, a weigher of historical evidences, or a judge of historical authorities. He took the book, and the facts as he found them, and extracted the kernel without criticising the character of the shell. Fable to a great teacher is truer than fractional history. And there is not a word which Mahomet has uttered which may not be translated as easily into truth, as the bulls and the goats, the heifers and the lambs of the ritual of Moses, and the atonement they made by shedding their blood for the sins of men. Charity is better than criticism, though criticism is not valueless. Charity covers what critical severity uncovers, the temper and the prejudices of the critic himself.

Nevertheless, though we justify Mahometanism, and regard it in the light of a Divine expedient, an indispensable part of the Drama of Civilisation, we

are far from admitting its literal truth; for of all the aspects of Revelation, the literal meaning is the one beyond which we always look for another. The letter killeth truth-the spirit giveth life to it. But being a Revelation, and a great Providential substitute for a growing evil, there must be something peculiar to Mahometanism which is true and indestructible, whilst the immediate political policy of the Arabian Revelation is at once apparent in the fact, that by means of this, the desolation of the East was completed and maintained; and by its gradual occupation of the scenes of the first two Missions, the Hebrew and the Greek, a free development was thus given to the liberty of the West. The Religion of Mahomet is essentially destructive and unprogressive; for, though it maintained for several generations a barbaric splendour in the East, it was chiefly with the extant materials of the old Empire; and even its science or philosophy was little else than translations from the Greek and Latin classics. Its own is puerile and inefficient, and it has sunk at last into its proper characteristic passivity and indifference, the natural result of an absolute law like that of Moses, which cannot be repealed, and a fatalism that cannot be resisted.

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The first thing that God created" said the Prophet, "was a pen, and when it was created, God said, 'Write,' and the pen said, 'What shall I write?' And God answered, 'Write all that shall ever be created or done in creation.' And the pen wrote it." So

what a man does he must do. And he who is damned was born to be damned, as a horse was born to be a horse. It is the theology of the Stoics. Seneca, in the 5th chapter of his Providentia, says, "Ille ipse omnium conditor et rector scripsit quidem fata, sed sequitur. Semper paret, semel jussit"-"Jupiter wrote the decrees of destiny and he obeys them." It is also the Theology of the Church of Scotland, which teaches that God, "according to the counsel of his will, for his own glory, hath foreordained whatsoever comes to pass ;" and yet it is always finding fault with what comes to pass, as if it did not believe its own creed. The Turks believe it better. It is the most absolute of all creeds. Civilisation balanced it with liberty in the West; and the Empire was divided between liberty and necessity. But that liberty did not proceed from Popery, though Popery teaches the freedom of the will; for this very doctrine of the liberty of the will Popery has made instrumental to tyranny. The liberty of the West arises from the fourfold division of interests of which we shall speak hereafter-the church, the crown, the aristocracy, and the boroughs. These are the four rivers of Eden that water the garden of Western civilisation; whilst in the East the absolute one, like the solitary thumb, embraces all ideas of government, and all institutions, in the supreme and unassociated Law of the Prophet. Had Popery alone domineered in the West, as Mahometanism

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in the East, the development of Liberty would have been an impossibility. But by acting as a check upon the other three agents, and they in their turn re-acting upon it, the most absolute of all the Churches of Christendom was placed in a position so favourable for progress that even its own unbending stiffness was negatively instrumental in promoting it for a season; and it did not fail to render positive and valuable assistance in the steady and the resolute front which it presented to the wanton and the dangerous aggressions of the crowns on the one hand and the coronets on the other. Thus the whole Roman Empire was gradually and finally organised upon the model of a human hand; the absolute Law of Mahomet, in the East, representing the thumb, and the four principles of Western civilisation representing the fingers. This model still exists. It was completed by the taking of Constantinople by the Turks about the time when the four divisional elements had received their full

development in the West.* The Dramatic propriety of this arrangement will more abundantly appear in our delineation of the next scene.

* Constantinople has ever been a falling City. It rose at first without any merits of its own, and it has always been falling for want of them. Its greatness is yet to come, when the Greek nationality is restored. It is the Christian Athens. Its declension is the result of its geographical relationship with the Second Act of the Divine Drama.

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SCENE FIFTH.

THE IDOLMAKERS AND THE IDOLBREAKERS; OR THE NEW GENTILES AND THE NEW JEWS.

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The principle of absolute unity in the object of worship would have died in the East, and in the world, except amongst the Jews, if Mahomet had not appeared to prevent it. A few years before the mission of the Prophet of the Wilderness, Gregory the Great, the Bishop of Rome, for the first time in the records of the Church, permitted the introduction of images into churches, "for the use of idiots and unlearned persons," to whom they were Scripture to the learned." This authority was so unquestionable, that, by his encouragement, images were set up throughout all the West, for both learned and unlearned. But when the Greeks had knowledge of this, they began to dispute the matter with the Latins, and condemned the practice. The entire empire was thus divided into two on the subject of the trinity and multity of the objects of veneration; and as fast as the Popes and Bishops of the West erected sacred statues, the Emperors of the East commanded them to be pulled down. This great struggle was just begun when Mahomet was commissioned from beyond Mount Sinai, in the Greater Desert, to establish the Undivided Unity—the Rock of Ages. The Greeks prepared the way before him, but could not fulfil his office. A large portion of