very deed,
Nothing; is a visual and factual Manifestation of God's power and
presence,--a shadow hung out by Him on the bosom of the void Infinite;
nothing more. The mountains, he says, these great rock-mountains, they
shall dissipate themselves "like clouds;" melt into the Blue as clouds
do, and not be! He figures the Earth, in the Arab fashion, Sale tells
us, as an immense Plain or flat Plate of ground, the mountains are
set on that to _steady_ it. At the Last Day they shall disappear "like
clouds;" the whole Earth shall go spinning, whirl itself off into wreck,
and as dust and vapor vanish in the Inane. Allah withdraws his hand
from it, and it ceases to be. The universal empire of Allah, presence
everywhere of an unspeakable Power, a Splendor, and a Terror not to be
named, as the true force, essence and reality, in all things whatsoever,
was continually clear to this man. What a modern talks of by the name,
Forces of Nature, Laws of Nature; and does not figure as a divine
thing; not even as one thing at all, but as a set of things, undivine
enough,--salable, curious, good for propelling steamships! With our
Sciences and Cyclopaedias, we are apt to forget the _divineness_, in
those laboratories of ours. We ought not to forget it! That once well
forgotten, I know not what else were worth remembering. Most sciences,
I think were then a very dead thing; withered, contentious, empty;--a
thistle in late autumn. The best science, without this, is but as the
dead _timber_; it is not the growing tree and forest,--which gives
ever-new timber, among other things! Man cannot _know_ either, unless
he can _worship_ in some way. His knowledge is a pedantry, and dead
thistle, otherwise.

Much has been said and written about the sensuality of Mahomet's
Religion; more than was just. The indulgences, criminal to us, which
he permitted, were not of his appointment; he found them practiced,
unquestioned from immemorial time in Arabia; what he did was to curtail
them, restrict them, not on one but on many sides. His Religion is not
an easy one: with rigorous fasts, lavations, strict complex formulas,
prayers five times a day, and abstinence from wine, it did not "succeed
by being an easy religion." As if indeed any religion, or cause holding
of religion, could succeed by that! It is a calumny on men to say
that they are roused to heroic action by ease, hope of pleasure,
recompense,--sugar-plums of any kind, in this world or the next! In t