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 vapour 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 Splendour, 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,--saleable, curious, good for propelling steamships!
With our Sciences and Cyclopaedias, we are apt to forget the
_divineness_, in these 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 practised,
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 the meanest mortal there lies something nobler. The
po