Neither in considering its future is it easy for a candid English mind to escape the admission that, for all purposes of argument, the Mohammedan creed must be treated as no vain superstition but a true religion, true inasmuch as it is a form of the worship of that one true God in whom Europe, in spite of her modern reason, still believes.  As such it is entitled to whatever credit we may give true religions of prolonged vitality; and while admitting the eternal truth of Christianity for ourselves, we may be tempted to believe that in the Arabian mind, if in no other, Islam too will prove eternal.

In its simplest form Islam was but an emphatic renewal of the immemorial creed of the Semites, and as long as a pure Semitic race is left in the world, the revelation of Mecca may be expected to remain a necessary link in their tradition.  No modern arguments of science are ever likely to affect the belief of Arabia that God has at sundry times and in sundry places spoken to man by the mouth of his prophets; and among these prophets Mohammed will always be the most conspicuous because the most distinctly national.  Also the law of Islam—­I am not speaking merely of the Sheriat as we now see it—­will always remain their law because it is the codification of their custom, and its political organization their political organization because it is founded on a practice coeval with their history.

Lastly, Semitic thought is a strong leaven which everywhere pervades the minds of nations, aliens though they be, who have once admitted it; and it will not easily be cast out.  We have seen in Europe, even in England, a land never brought physically into contact with Arabia, how long Arabian thought, filtered as it was through France and Spain to our shores, has dominated our ideas.  Chivalry, a notion purely Bedouin, is hardly yet extinct among us.  Romance, the offspring of pre-Islamic Arabia, is still a common motive of our action, and our poets express it still, to the neglect of classic models, in the rhymed verse of Yemen.  The mass of our people still pray to the God of Abraham, and turn eastwards towards that land which is Arabia’s half-sister, the Holy Land of the Jews.

If then we, who are mere aliens, find it impossible to escape this subtle influence, what must it be for those races wholly or half Arabian who have for centuries been impregnated with Islam, the quintessence of Arabian thought?  Who shall fix the term of its power, and say that it cannot renew itself and live?  “Send forth,” says a famous English writer, who was also a famous English statesman, “a great thought, as you have done before, from Mount Sinai, from the villages of Galilee, from the deserts of Arabia, and you may again remodel all men’s institutions, change their principles of action, and breathe a new spirit into the scope of their existence.”

But I must not lose myself in generalities or forget that it is for practical Englishmen that I am writing.  To be precise, I see two ways in which it is probable that Islam will attempt to renew her spiritual life, and two distinct lines of thought which according to external circumstances she may be expected to follow—­the first a violent and hardly a permanent one, the second the true solution of her destiny.