immemorial history, and
receives no help in its campaign of warfare from the traditional glories
of long lines of warrior kings. Chief of all, it lacks the inspiration of
the matchless Jewish Scriptures and Sacred Books, depending for
instruction upon a document confined to the revelation of one man's
personality and view of life.

Still the narrowness of the Mahomedan system provoked its power; its
rapid rush to the heights Of dominion was born of the straitening of its
impulse into the channel of conquest and the forcible imposition of its
faith.

Of Christianity Mahomet knew far less than of Judaism. He went to the
Christian doctrines as they were known in heterodox Syria, far off from
the main stream of Christian life and teaching. He went to them with a
prejudiced mind, full of anger against their exponents for declaring the
Messiah to be the Son of God. The whole idea of the Incarnation and the
dogma of the Trinity were thoroughly abhorrent to him, and the only
conception he entertains as to the personality of Jesus is that of a
Prophet even as he is himself, the receiver of divine inspiration, but
having no connection in essence with God, whom he conceived pre-eminently
as the one supreme Being, indivisible in nature. Certainly he knew far
less of the Christian than of the Jewish Scriptures, and necessarily less
of the inner meaning of the Christian faith, still in fluid state,
unconsidered of its profoundest future exponents. His mind was assuredly
not attuned to the reception of its more revolutionary ideas. Very little
compassion and no tenderness breathe from the pages of the Kuran, and
from a religion whose Founder had laboured to bring just those two
elements into the thorny ways of the world, Mahomet could only turn away
baffled and uncomprehending. The doctrine of the non-resistance to evil,
and indeed all the wisdom of the Sermon on the Mount, he passed by
unseeing.

It is useless and indeed unfair to attempt the comparison of Mahomedanism
with Christianity, seeing that without the preliminary culture of Greece
and Rome modern Christian doctrines would not exist in their present
form, and of the former Mahomet had no cognisance. He stands altogether
apart from the Christian system, finding no affinity in its doctrines or
practices, scorning its monasticism no less than its conception of the
Trinity. His position in history lies between the warriors and the
saints, at the head of the Prophets, who wen