The explanation is to be found in the law of reaction and relapse.  Reaction is going back to a lower ground, to pick up something which has been dropped, forgotten, left behind, in the progress of man.  The condition of progress is that nothing shall be lost.  The lower truth must be preserved in the higher truth; the lower life taken up into the higher life.  Now Christianity, in going forward, had accepted from the Indo-Germanic races that sense of God in nature, as well as God above nature, which has always been native with those races.  It took up natural religion into monotheism.  But in taking it up, it went so far as to lose something of the true unity of God.  Its doctrine of the Trinity, at least in its Oriental forms, lost the pure personal monotheism of Judaism.  No doubt the doctrine of the Trinity embodies a great truth, but it has been carried too far.  So Mohammedanism came, as a protest against this tendency to plurality in the godhead, as a demand for a purely personal God It is the Unitarianism of the East.  It was a new assertion of the simple unity of God, against polytheism and against idolatry.

The merits and demerits, the good and evil, of Mohammedanism are to be found in this, its central idea concerning God.  It has taught submission, obedience, patience; but it has fostered a wilful individualism.  It has made social life lower.  Its governments are not governments.  Its virtues are stoical.  It makes life barren and empty.  It encourages a savage pride and cruelty.  It makes men tyrants or slaves, women puppets, religion the submission to an infinite despotism.  Time is that it came to an end.  Its work is done.  It is a hard, cold, cruel, empty faith, which should give way to the purer forms of a higher civilization.

No doubt, Mohammedanism was needed when it came, and has done good service in its time.  But its time is almost passed.  In Europe it is an anachronism and an anomaly, depending for its daily existence on the support received from Christian powers, jealous of Russian advance on Constantinople.  It will be a blessing to mankind to have the capital of Russia on the Bosphorus.  A recent writer on Turkey thus speaks:—­

“The military strength of Mohammedanism was in its steady and remorseless bigotry.  Socially, it won by the lofty ideality of its precepts, without pain or satiety.  It accorded well, too, with the isolate and primitive character of the municipalities scattered over Asia.  Resignation to God—­a motto well according with Eastern indolence—­was borne upon its banners, while in the profusion of delight hereafter was promised an element of endurance and courage.  It had, too, one strikingly Arabic characteristic,—­simplicity.

    “One God the Arabian prophet preached to man;
      One God the Orient still
    Adores, through many a realm of mighty span,—­
      God of power and will.

    “A God that, shrouded in his lonely light,
      Rests utterly apart
    From all the vast creations of his might,
      From nature, man, and art.