“A Power that at his pleasure doth create
      To save or to destroy;
    And to eternal pain predestinate,
      As to eternal joy.

“It is the merit and the glory of Mohammed that, beside founding twenty spiritual empires and providing laws for the guidance through centuries of millions of men, he shook the foundations of the faith of heathendom.  Mohammed was the impersonation of two principles that reign in the government of God,—­destruction and salvation.  He would receive nations to his favor if they accepted the faith, and utterly destroy them if they rejected it.  Yet, in the end, the sapless tree must fall.”

M. H. Blerzey,[399] in speaking of Mohammedanism in Northern Africa, says:—­

“At bottom there is little difference between the human sacrifices demanded by fetichism and the contempt of life produced by the Mussulman religion.  Between the social doctrines of these Mohammedan tribes and the sentiments of Christian communities there is an immense abyss.”

And again:—–­

“The military and fanatic despotism of the Arabs has vested during many centuries in the white autochthonic races of North Africa, without any fusion taking place between the conquering element and the conquered, without destroying at all the language and manners of the subject people, and, in a word, without creating anything durable.  The Arab conquest was a triumph of brute force, and nothing further.”

And M. Renan, a person well qualified to judge of the character of this religion by the most extensive and impartial studies, gives this verdict:[400]—­

   “Islamism, following as it did on ground that was none of the best,
   has, on the whole, done as much harm as good to the human race.  It has
   stifled everything by its dry and desolating simplicity.”

Again:—­

“At the present time, the essential condition of a diffused civilization is the destruction of the peculiarly Semitic element, the destruction of the theocratic power of Islamism, consequently the destruction of Islamism itself."[401]

Again:—­

“Islamism is evidently the product of an inferior, and, so to speak, of a meagre combination of human elements.  For this reason its conquests have all been on the average plane of human nature.  The savage races have been incapable of rising to it, and, on the other hand, it has not satisfied people who carried in themselves the seed of a stronger civilization."[402]

Note to the Chapter on Mohammed.

We give in this note further extracts from Mr. Palgrave’s description of the doctrine of Islam.

“This keystone, this master thought, this parent idea, of which all the rest is but the necessary and inevitable deduction, is contained in the phrase far oftener repeated than understood, ‘La Ilah illa Allah,’ ’There is no God but God.’  A literal translation, but much too narrow for the Arab formula, and quite inadequate to render its true force in an Arab mouth or mind.