of Arab power, we also without difficulty recognise
those which led to its check and eventual dissolution. Arab conquest
implied, from the scale on which it was pursued, the forthgoing of the
whole nation. It could only be accomplished, and in a temporary manner
sustained, by an excessive and incessant drain of the native Arab
population. That immobility, or, at best, that slow progress the nation
had for so many ages displayed, was at an end, society was moved to its
foundations, a fanatical delirium possessed it, the greatest and boldest
enterprises were entered upon without hesitation, the wildest hopes or
passions of men might be speedily gratified, wealth and beauty were the
tangible rewards of valour in this life, to say nothing of Paradise in
the next. But such an outrush of a nation in all directions implied the
quick growth of diverse interests and opposing policies. The necessary
consequence of the Arab system was subdivision and breaking up. The
circumstances of its growth rendered it certain that a decomposition
would take place in the political, and not, as was the case of the
ecclesiastical Roman system, in the theological direction. All this is
illustrated both in the earlier and later Saracenic history.

[Sidenote: Effect on the low Arab class.]

War makes a people run through its phases of existence fast. It would
have taken the Arabs many thousand years to have advanced intellectually
as far as they did in a single century, had they, as a nation, remained
in profound peace. They did not merely shake off that dead weight which
clogs the movement of a nation--its inert mass of common people; they
converted that mass into a living force. National progress is the sum of
individual progress; national immobility the result of individual
quiescence. Arabian life was run through with rapidity, because an
unrestrained career was opened to every man; and yet, quick as the
movement was, it manifested all those unavoidable phases through which,
whether its motion be swift or slow, humanity must unavoidably pass.

[Sidenote: Review of the Koran.]

[Sidenote: Its asserted homogeneousness and completeness.]

[Sidenote: The characters it ought, therefore, to have presented.]

Arabian influence, thus imposing itself on Africa and Asia by military
successes, and threatening even Constantinople, rested essentially on an
intellectual basis, the value of which it is needful for us to consider.
The Koran, which is tha