ece of gossip--Was such a man's son-in-law his legitimate successor?
Upon a point so puerile as this revolves the entire difference between
the heterodoxy of Persia and the orthodoxy of Turkey. Or, if their
differences go deeper, in that case they tend to the utter extinction
of Islamism; they maintain no characteristic or exclusive dogma; as
amongst the modern Sikhs of Hindostan, who have blended the Brahminical
and Mahometan creeds by an incoherent _syncretismus_; or, as amongst
many heretics of Persia and Arabia, who are mere crazy freethinkers,
without any religious determination, without any principle of libration
for the oscillating mind. Whereas _our_ differences, leaving generally
all central truths untouched, arise like our political parties, and
operate like them; they grow out of our sincerity, and they sustain our
sincerity. That interest _must_ be unaffected which leads men into
disputes and permanent factions, and that truth _must_ be diffusive as
life itself, which is found to underlay a vast body of philosophy. It is
the cold petrific annihilation of a moral interest in the subject, by
substituting a meagre interest of historical facts, which stifles all
differences; stifles political differences under a despotism, from utter
despair of winning practical value to men's opinions; stifles religious
differences under a childish creed of facts or anecdotes, from the
impossibility of bringing to bear upon the [Greek: to] positive of an
arbitrary legend, or the mere conventional of a clan history--dead,
inert letters--any moral views this way or that, and any life of
philosophical speculation. Thence comes the soul-killing monotony (unity
one cannot call it) of all false religions. Attached to mere formal
facts, they provoke no hostility in the inner nature. Affirming nothing
as regards the life of truth, why should they tempt any man to
contradict? Lying, indeed, but lying only as a false pedigree lies, or
an old mythological legend, they interest no principle in man's moral
heart; they make no oracular answers, put forth no secret agitation,
they provoke no question. But Christianity, merely by her settlements
and fixing of truths, has disengaged and unfixed a world of other
truths, for sustaining or for tempting an endless activity of the
intellect. And the astonishing result has thus been accomplished--that
round a centre, fixed and motionless as a polar tablet of ice, there has
been in the remote offing a t