o well remembered
elsewhere. That gross sensual Paradise of his; that horrible flaming
Hell; the great enormous Day of Judgment he perpetually insists on:
what is all this but a rude shadow, in the rude Bedouin imagination,
of that grand spiritual Fact, and Beginning of Facts, which it is ill
for us too if we do not all know and feel: the Infinite Nature of
Duty? That man's actions here are of _infinite_ moment to him, and
never die or end at all; that man, with his little life, reaches
upwards high as Heaven, downwards low as Hell, and in his threescore
years of Time holds an Eternity fearfully and wonderfully hidden: all
this had burnt itself, as in flame-characters, into the wild Arab
soul. As in flame and lightning, it stands written there; awful,
unspeakable, ever present to him. With bursting earnestness, with a
fierce savage sincerity, halt, articulating, not able to articulate,
he strives to speak it, bodies it forth in that Heaven and that Hell.
Bodied forth in what way you will, it is the first of all truths. It
is venerable under all embodiments. What is the chief end of man here
below? Mahomet has answered this question, in a way that might put
some of _us_ to shame! He does not, like a Bentham, a Paley, take
Right and Wrong, and calculate the profit and loss, ultimate pleasure
of the one and of the other; and summing all up by addition and
subtraction into a net result, ask you, Whether on the whole the Right
does not preponderate considerably? No, it is not _better_ to do the
one than the other; the one is to the other as life is to death,--as
Heaven is to Hell. The one must in nowise be done, the other in nowise
left undone. You shall not measure them; they are incommensurable: the
one is death eternal to a man, the other is life eternal. Benthamee
Utility, virtue by Profit and Loss; reducing this God's-world to a
dead brute Steam-engine, the infinite celestial Soul of Man to a kind
of Hay-balance for weighing hay and thistles on, pleasures and pains
on:--If you ask me which gives, Mahomet or they, the beggarlier and
falser view of Man and his Destinies in this Universe, I will answer,
It is not Mahomet!----

On the whole, we will repeat that this Religion of Mahomet's is a kind
of Christianity; has a genuine element of what is spiritually highest
looking through it, not to be hidden by all its imperfections. The
Scandinavian God _Wish_, the god of all rude men,--this has been
enlarged into a Heaven by M