vices, and was too untaught to teach.  The account given us by Bertrandon de la Brocquiere in the fifteenth century of the court and habits of the “Grand Turk” is evidently no exaggeration; and it is easy to conceive by the light of it how impossible it must have been for the Arabian Ulema to connect the notion of inspiration in any way with such personages as the Sultans then were.  As a fact the Saut el Hai was not claimed by Selim, nor has it ever been accorded to his descendants.

The want of some voice of authority is, nevertheless, becoming daily more generally felt by orthodox Mohammedans; and it seems to me certain that, in some shape or other, it will before long be restored to general recognition.  Abd el Hamid, whose spiritual ambition I have described, has, quite recently, caused a legal statement of his Caliphal rights to be formally drawn up, and it includes this right of the Saut el Hai;[17] and, though it is improbable that the faithful will, at the eleventh hour of its rule, invest the House of Othman with so sublime a prerogative, it is extremely likely that, when a more legitimate holder of the title shall have been found, he will be conceded all the rights of the sacred office.  Then the legal difficulty will at last be overcome.  The dead hand of the law will be no longer dead, but will be inspired by a living voice and will.

Since we are imagining many things we may imagine this one too,—­that our Caliph of the Koreysh, chosen by the faithful and installed at Mecca, should invite the Ulema of every land to a council at the time of the pilgrimage, and there, appointing a new Mujtahed, should propound to them certain modifications of the Sheriat, as things necessary to the welfare of Islam, and deducible from tradition.  No point of doctrine need in any way be touched, only the law.  The Fakh ed din would need hardly a modification.  The Fakh esh Sheriat would, in certain chapters, have to be rewritten.  Who can doubt that an Omar or an Haroun, were they living at the present day, would authorize such changes, or that the faithful of their day would have accepted them as necessary and legitimate developments of Koranic teaching?

It would be an interesting study to pursue this inquiry further, and to see how it might be worked out in detail.  The crying necessity of civilized Islam is a legal modus vivendi with Europe, and such an adaptation of its law on points where Europe insists as shall suffice to stave off conflict.  It is evident that legal equality must now be accorded to Christians living under Mohammedan law, and that conformity, on the other hand, in certain points to foreign law must be allowed to Moslems living under Christian rule.